Developing Integrations for the Affiliate Program

We maintain extensive resources to help you develop plugins and integrations for MaxMind data. While it's always good practice to use these resources for integration with MaxMind data, it can be especially important if you hope to use your tools and integrations as a source of revenue through our affiliate program. A well-designed integration will keep your users happy, and encourage them to make use of the products and services which will drive your revenue as an affiliate.

The most important resources at your disposal for developing integrations for MaxMind data are our:

1. developer portal, for learning how to integrate,
2. our knowledge base (this site), for learning how to interpret our data,
3. and our GeoLite free geolocation databases and web services, for testing and offering your users a free solution.

Using our developer portal

Our developer portal maintains detailed technical documentation for all of our databases and web services. Some resources that might be helpful to begin with are:

1. our guide on how to contribute to the MaxMind developer community,
2. our tutorials explaining how to import MaxMind data into popular database formats,
3. our guide to automating database updates,
4. and our quick start guide for how to geolocate an IP, or evaluate a transaction for the risk for fraud.

Using our knowledge base

Our knowledge base can be used to answer all kinds of questions about our data. Search the knowledge base when you want additional context about how to interpret various data points, and to learn about which products and services contain which data.

It can be helpful to understand the data more deeply when you build an integration. For example, our article on geolocation accuracy has important information about the kinds of things that geolocation cannot identify, which may be important when you decide how your integration will display that data to the end user.

It can also be helpful to understand what data is included in specific products and services so that you can build an integration that is effective for your users. For example, if you are building an integration to screen proxies and anonymizers, it would be good to know that your users would either have to buy the GeoIP Anonymous IP database, which isn’t sold through our shopping cart and is thus not eligible for the referral program, or use the GeoIP Insight web service or minFraud Insights/Factors web services, which have a pay-per-query model. You can ensure that you're developing plugins appropriate to your prospective user base by understanding the different options that MaxMind customers have to access the data.

Some resources that might be helpful to begin with are:

1. a breakdown of our IP geolocation products and services,
2. a breakdown of our IP intelligence products and services,
3. a breakdown of our fraud detection services,
4. detailed documentation about our IP geolocation data,
5. detailed documentation about our IP intelligence data,
6. and detailed documentation about our risk scores and risk data.

Using GeoLite free geolocation data

GeoLite is our free IP geolocation data. It is less accurate than our GeoIP data, but uses the same format(s) and integration methods as our paid IP geolocation and IP intelligence data. You can use GeoLite data to develop your applications free of charge, and it's easy to upgrade from GeoLite to paid data if your application needs higher accuracy or more features. Learn more about upgrading from GeoLite.

You can also bundle GeoLite data in your platform by attributing the data to MaxMind. This will allow your integration to work right out of the box, without your users and customers having to immediately create a MaxMind account. If you bundle GeoLite data, you should be aware that it is less accurate than our GeoIP data, but it may be appropriate for some use cases when your customers don't need a high level of accuracy. We offer a GeoLite web service as well as GeoLite databases, but the GeoLite web service has a limited number of queries per day. For this reason, the GeoLite web service isn't appropriate for higher-volume use cases, and you would likely need to work with the GeoLite databases.

Learn more about GeoLite databases and web services on our developer portal, or learn more about the standard GeoLite End User License Agreement, which explains how GeoLite data may be used and distributed either with or without attribution.