09 JAN • 2026 4 minutes

We’ve all heard the saying that AI is eating SaaS. For some simple products, it’s certainly becoming true.

At Screenly, we’ve been using ipgeolocation.io for a while. It’s a solid service, but at its core, it’s just a frontend for a GeoIP database. This morning, I saw yet another monthly invoice from them and decided to run an experiment: how far can Cursor with Claude Opus 4.5 go in terms of recreating their API with feature parity?

Turns out, it can do it in under two hours. In Rust.

The Problem

Many applications need to know where their users are located - for timezone detection, localization, or analytics. Services like ipgeolocation.io provide this, but they come with drawbacks: API rate limits, recurring costs, latency from external calls, and dependency on third-party uptime.

The Solution

I built a drop-in replacement that runs entirely self-hosted. It’s a single binary that bundles all the data it needs - no external API calls, no API keys to manage, and responses in microseconds instead of milliseconds.

Demo: geoip.vpetersson.com (available until it gets too much load) Source: github.com/vpetersson/ipgeolocation

Why It’s Cool (Technically)

Zero External Dependencies at Runtime

The service embeds two datasets directly:

• MaxMind GeoLite2-City (~70MB database) for IP-to-location lookups
• tzf-rs compiles timezone boundary polygons (~15MB) directly into the binary

This means the 17MB binary contains everything needed to resolve any IP address to its location and any coordinates to their timezone - offline, airgapped, whatever.

Rust + Axum = Blazing Fast

Built on Axum and Tokio, the async runtime handles thousands of concurrent requests efficiently. The in-memory LRU cache (via Moka) means repeated lookups are nearly instant.

Aggressive Caching Strategy

IP geolocation data rarely changes. The service returns Cache-Control: public, max-age=1209600 (2 weeks), making it perfect behind a CDN like Cloudflare.

Minimal Attack Surface

The Docker image uses Chainguard images:

• Build stage: cgr.dev/chainguard/rust (with cargo-auditable for SBOM)
• Runtime: cgr.dev/chainguard/glibc-dynamic (minimal, CVE-free base)

The final image contains just the binary, the GeoIP database, and country flag SVGs. No shell, no package manager, minimal attack surface.

API Compatibility

Two API formats are supported:

• Simple format (/ipgeo, /timezone) - backward compatible, minimal response
• Full format (/v1/ipgeo, /v1/timezone) - rich metadata including country info, currency, calling codes, DST details

The Numbers

Metric	Value
Binary size	17MB (includes all timezone boundary data)
Docker image	140MB on disk, 44.5MB content
Response time	Sub-millisecond for cached lookups
Memory	~100MB runtime (GeoIP DB loaded into memory)
Startup	<1 second

Most of the disk image is the GeoIP database and country flag SVGs. The Rust binary itself is about 17MB, which includes everything.

What This Means

For simple, data-lookup SaaS products, the economics are shifting. When an AI coding assistant can recreate your entire product in a couple of hours, the value proposition needs to be more than just “we host it for you.”

The project is MIT licensed and available on GitHub. The only requirement is a free MaxMind account to download the GeoLite2 database during Docker build.

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