timeapi.world

What Is It

timeapi.world is a World Time API for developers, providing global time zone information, current time, IP-to-time-zone conversion, and IP geolocation capabilities. It positions itself explicitly as an alternative to worldtimeapi.org, highlighting endpoint compatibility, p99 latency under 40ms, and partial migration by simply changing the URL.

Core Features and Ecosystem

The API uses a simple HTTP GET/JSON format. Its main endpoints include /timezone for listing 537 time zones, /timezone/{tz} for retrieving the current time in a specified IANA time zone, /ip and /ip/{ip} for inferring time/time zone from an IP address, and /geo and /geo/{ip} for geolocation. Response fields cover datetime, utc_datetime, utc_offset, abbreviation, dst, unixtime, and more, with automatic DST handling. The documentation does not mention official SDKs, so it is better suited for direct integration via HTTP clients in any language.

The project claims to be source-available and provides a GitHub repository where users can submit issues or contribute. However, its license is BSL 1.1, which restricts production use and should not be treated as equivalent to permissive open source. The collected materials do not provide self-hosting deployment instructions.

Pricing and Support

The free tier includes 20,000 requests/month, full API access, and community support. Paid plans start at $5/month, with Starter, Standard, and Pro corresponding to 50k, 100k, and 200k requests respectively, plus overage billing. The Enterprise plan supports 1M+ requests and dedicated support. Exceeding the free plan limit returns an error, while paid plans are billed for overages. There is no setup fee, but refunds are currently not offered. Support levels are divided into Tier B/A/S, though the details are relatively limited.

Pros, Cons, and Who It’s For

Its strengths are clear endpoints, low integration overhead, a free quota sufficient for personal projects, and a migration-friendly path for worldtimeapi.org users. The statement that IP addresses are not stored is also helpful for privacy evaluation. The downsides are that it only supports current time and does not provide historical queries; there are no SDK, self-hosting, SLA, or status page details; and BSL 1.1 imposes restrictions on production use.

It is suitable for scenarios such as cross-time-zone scheduling, crawler jobs, displaying local time in web backends, and unified time synchronization for IoT devices. There is no evidence in the source material about accessibility from China, so this remains unknown. If network access or payment is restricted, alternatives include NTP, a self-hosted time zone database, or other commercial Timezone/IP Geolocation APIs.