IPQualityScore competitors and alternatives

The alternatives, briefly

Kaidn compared with IPQualityScore (IPQS)

Breadth of lookup data across IP, email, phone and URLs, sold self-serve on monthly lookup buckets.

IPQS is a data breadth play, and it is good at it. IP reputation, email validation, phone validation and URL scanning all sit behind one self-serve account, and their proxy detection has a strong reputation that we are not going to talk you out of.

The reason people go looking for alternatives is usually one of two things: the volume you get for the money at the low end, or the fact that a lookup gives you data rather than a decision.

Volume at the entry level#

IPQS's free tier is 1,000 lookups a month with a 35 per day cap, and the Startup plan is $99 or more for 5,000 lookups a month.

Ours is 10,000 events a month free with no daily cap, and $39 for 50,000.

That is roughly an order of magnitude at the bottom of the market, and it is worth being precise about why: we are not selling you more data per lookup. We are selling you a decision across several surfaces, and pricing it per decision.

The device fingerprinting gap#

On IPQS, device fingerprinting unlocks on higher tiers. On ours it is in the box. @kaidn/fp is a browser library you drop in that produces a device id plus automation and anti-detect signals, and collection is free because you are billed per scored decision rather than per fingerprint collected.

That matters more than it sounds, because device reuse is usually the strongest duplicate-account signal available. A plan that puts your best signal behind an upgrade is worth noticing.

Three lookups, or one event#

The clearest way to see the difference is to put the two integrations next to each other. On a data API you fetch each surface and combine them yourself:

const [ip, email, phone] = await Promise.all([
  fetch(`https://ipqualityscore.com/api/json/ip/${KEY}/${userIp}`).then((r) => r.json()),
  fetch(`https://ipqualityscore.com/api/json/email/${KEY}/${userEmail}`).then((r) => r.json()),
  fetch(`https://ipqualityscore.com/api/json/phone/${KEY}/${userPhone}`).then((r) => r.json()),
]);

// three lookups billed, and now the actual work: what does this MEAN together?
const risky =
  ip.fraud_score > 85 ||
  email.disposable ||
  (phone.VOIP && ip.proxy) ||
  /* the rule you will add next month, and the one after that */ false;

That last expression is the product you are building. It is also the part that has to be re-tuned every time abuse changes shape.

const { verdict, reasons, checks } = await kaidn.score({
  event: "signup",
  user_id: user.id,
  ip: userIp,
  email: userEmail,
  phone: userPhone,
  device_id: deviceId,
});

if (verdict === "block") return deny(reasons);
if (verdict === "review") await queueForReview(user, checks);

One event billed, and the weighting between the surfaces is the thing being sold rather than the thing you write. Whether that is a good trade depends on whether you want to own the rules. Some teams genuinely do, and for them the left-hand column is the right answer.

Shadow mode before you switch#

The honest way to settle a comparison is to run both against your own traffic and compare against outcomes you already know. Scoring in parallel costs one extra call and no user-facing risk:

const [ours, theirs] = await Promise.allSettled([
  kaidn.score({ event: "signup", user_id: user.id, ip, email, device_id }),
  ipqs.lookup(ip, email),
]);

await db.shadow.insert({ user_id: user.id, ours, theirs, at: new Date() });
// two weeks later, join this table against chargebacks, bans and reversed payouts

Two weeks of that will tell you more than any comparison page, including this one.

Where we would send you elsewhere#

If you need URL and phishing scanning, address verification or reverse identity lookup, IPQS has those and we have none of them. And if IP reputation is genuinely the only thing you need, minFraud or Scamalytics will be cheaper than either of us.