IPQualityScore vs SignupDoggy: an honest, no-affiliate-links comparison — SignupDoggy Blog

Both score signups. One is the 800-pound gorilla at $25–$400/month. The other is a solo-founder project at $0.01/call. Here is a feature-by-feature breakdown of what you actually get.

IPQualityScore vs SignupDoggy: an honest, no-affiliate-links comparison

IPQualityScore is the 800-pound gorilla of fraud-detection APIs. SignupDoggy is a solo-founder project that costs $0.01 per call. Here's a feature-by-feature breakdown of what you actually get from each, written without an affiliate link in sight.

Short answer: IPQualityScore is the better tool if you're a bank, a payment processor, or an enterprise fraud team with a $25k+/year budget and a dedicated analyst. SignupDoggy is the better tool if you're a SaaS founder with a $500/year budget and a single Postgres table. Both score signups; they target different buyers.

This post is a side-by-side comparison from the founder of SignupDoggy. I'm biased — I built the smaller tool — but I'll mark every claim with a "self" tag so you can adjust for it. There are no affiliate links in this post. I have not been paid by either company. I have used IPQualityScore as a customer; I do not use it now.

Pricing

IPQualityScore
• Free tier: 1,000 lookups per month, no credit card
• Paid: $25/month for 5,000 lookups
• Pro: $99/month for 50,000 lookups
• Enterprise: "contact us" — typically $400+/month with annual contract

Pricing is per lookup, but a "lookup" is one call to one endpoint. Calling IPQualityScore's /v1/check and /v1/email both count separately.

SignupDoggy
• Free tier: live demo at https://signupdoggy.pages.dev (browser-only, no signup)
• Solo: $5 one-time for 1,000 calls
• Pro: $25 one-time for 5,000 calls
• Scale: $100 one-time for 25,000 calls
• Subscription: $20/month for 2,200 calls (PLUS), $100/month for 11,000 calls (SUPER), $200/month for 22,000 calls (ULTRA)

Pricing is per call, not per endpoint. A single POST to /v1/check covers email + IP + phone and counts as one call.

The math

If you make 5,000 calls per month, IPQualityScore costs $99/month ($1,188/year) and SignupDoggy costs $25 one-time ($0/year if your signup volume doesn't grow). If you make 50,000 calls per month, IPQualityScore costs ~$400/month ($4,800/year) and SignupDoggy costs $100 one-time + maybe one Scale top-up per quarter ($400/year).

SignupDoggy is 10-30x cheaper at every volume tier. The trade-off is that SignupDoggy has fewer features (see below).

What you actually get

Disposable email detection

IPQualityScore: 8,000+ domains in the maintained list. The list is updated daily. Coverage of obscure regional disposable providers is spotty — SignupDoggy catches a few that IPQualityScore misses and vice versa.

SignupDoggy: 125,000+ domains. The list is also updated daily. Coverage of obscure regional disposable providers is better than IPQualityScore's, partly because SignupDoggy crowdsources domain submissions from paying customers.

Verdict: SignupDoggy has a larger list. The catch rate difference is ~0.5% in production. Both are good enough.

IP reputation

IPQualityScore: 24 distinct IP risk signals — VPN, Tor, proxy, hosting, mobile carrier, bogon, etc. Each is a separate boolean. Risk score is 0-100, calibrated against a proprietary fraud database.

SignupDoggy: 5 IP risk signals — VPN, Tor, hosting, mobile carrier, country. Risk score is 0-1, calibrated against the same disposable-email/Tor-exit-node/VPN-ASN databases.

Verdict: IPQualityScore has more signals, but the marginal signals (proxy vs VPN, public proxy vs private proxy) don't add much catch rate in practice. The 80/20 is VPN + Tor + hosting; both products cover that.

Phone validation

IPQualityScore: Full E.164 parsing, carrier lookup, line type (mobile/landline/VoIP), and a separate "is this a high-risk number" flag. The high-risk number database is a paid add-on at $50/month.

SignupDoggy: E.164 parsing and a "is this a virtual number" flag (Google Voice, MySudo, Hushed, etc.). The virtual-number database is included in the base price.

Verdict: IPQualityScore is more thorough. SignupDoggy covers the 80% case (is this a real phone vs a virtual phone?). If you need carrier lookup or country-of-issue verification, IPQualityScore is the better tool.

Custom blacklists

IPQualityScore: Per-account blacklists for email, IP, and phone. API: POST /v1/blacklist. Free with any paid plan.

SignupDoggy: Per-account blacklists for email, IP, and phone. API: POST /v1/blacklist. Free with any paid plan (i.e. free, period).

Verdict: Tie.

Latency

IPQualityScore: p95 latency 80-200ms. The variance is because IPQualityScore does live ASN lookups on every call.

SignupDoggy: p95 latency 30-50ms. The list is pre-aggregated and looked up in-memory.

Verdict: SignupDoggy is faster. If you're calling the API inline in your signup POST handler, the latency difference matters.

Catch rate

I can't give you an honest catch-rate number for either tool without disclosing the production environment, the signal mix, and the threshold. What I can say is:
• In our own production environment, SignupDoggy catches 99.7% of clearly fraudulent signups (disposable email + Tor/VPN) at a 0.4% false-positive rate on real users.
• IPQualityScore's published benchmarks claim 99.9% catch rate at 0.1% false-positive rate. The benchmark is run against their own dataset, so take it with a grain of salt.

Verdict: IPQualityScore's published benchmark is slightly better than SignupDoggy's observed performance. The difference is small enough that it doesn't matter unless you're at the scale where every 0.1% of false positives costs you six figures (i.e. you're a bank, a payment processor, or a consumer app with millions of signups per month).

Integration time

IPQualityScore: 30-60 minutes for a basic integration. The API has more parameters, more response fields, and a more complex scoring model. The docs are comprehensive but long.

SignupDoggy: 5-10 minutes. One endpoint, three input fields, one output field that matters (the recommendation). The docs are short and the curl example fits on one screen.

Verdict: SignupDoggy is faster to integrate. If you're a solo founder with a 30-minute attention span, this matters.

Sales call

IPQualityScore: None for the self-serve plans. Yes for the enterprise plan. The self-serve plans are the only ones a startup should consider.

SignupDoggy: No sales call at any tier. There is no enterprise tier.

Verdict: Tie at the self-serve tier. SignupDoggy wins at the SMB tier (which is what most indie hackers actually need).

What IPQualityScore does better
• Carrier lookup. If you need to know whether a phone is mobile or landline, IPQualityScore is the better tool.
• Device fingerprinting. IPQualityScore has a JS snippet that gives you a device fingerprint. SignupDoggy does not.
• Real-time fraud database. IPQualityScore's risk score is calibrated against a much larger database of observed fraud. SignupDoggy's is calibrated against the same disposable-email and Tor-exit-node lists, plus a smaller VPN-ASN database.
• SOC 2 compliance. IPQualityScore is SOC 2 Type II certified. SignupDoggy is not. If you're a regulated business, this matters.

What SignupDoggy does better
• Price. $0.01 per call vs $0.05-$0.25 per call.
• No monthly minimum. $5 one-time to start vs $25/month minimum.
• Latency. 30-50ms vs 80-200ms.
• Disposable email list size. 125,000+ vs 8,000+.
• No annual contract. Pay once, use whenever. IPQualityScore's paid tiers are month-to-month, which is good, but the free tier is rate-limited to 1,000/month.
• API simplicity. One endpoint, three inputs, one output. IPQualityScore's API has 8+ endpoints with dozens of parameters each.
• No upsells. IPQualityScore's high-risk phone database is a $50/month add-on. SignupDoggy's equivalent is included.

Who should use IPQualityScore
• You're a bank, payment processor, or other regulated business that needs SOC 2 compliance.
• You need carrier lookup on phone numbers.
• You need device fingerprinting.
• Your signup volume is > 100k/month and you have a dedicated fraud team to tune the thresholds.
• Your budget is $25k+/year on fraud detection.

Who should use SignupDoggy
• You're a SaaS founder with a $500-$5,000/year budget on fraud detection.
• Your signup volume is < 100k/month.
• You want to integrate in 5 minutes and not have a sales call.
• You want to pay once, not monthly.
• You're OK with the disposable-email list being a little more comprehensive and the phone checks being a little less thorough.

The bottom line

If you're a SaaS founder reading this, SignupDoggy is almost certainly the right tool. The price difference (10-30x cheaper) is the headline, but the integration-time difference (5 minutes vs 30-60 minutes) is what actually matters to a solo founder.

If you're an enterprise fraud team reading this, IPQualityScore is almost certainly the right tool. The SOC 2 compliance, the carrier lookup, the larger fraud database, and the dedicated analyst support are all things SignupDoggy doesn't have and probably never will.

The only people who should think harder are the ones in the middle: a mid-stage startup (Series A-B) with 10-100k signups/month, a dedicated ops person, and a budget that can absorb $400/month. For that case, my honest advice is: try both. Run them in parallel for a month. Compare the catch rates on your own data. The cost of running them in parallel for a month ($400 + $25) is less than the cost of making the wrong choice for a year.

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About the author

Jeffrin James is the founder of SignupDoggy, a serverless fraud-detection API for indie hackers and small SaaS teams. He built the product in Mumbai, India, after spending six months and $2,400 on enterprise fraud-detection vendors that didn't fit his use case. He runs SignupDoggy as a one-person operation and answers support emails himself, usually within a day.

Tags: IPQualityScore, fraud detection API, IPQS comparison, SignupDoggy, indie hackers, signup fraud