Dregs vs IPQS

IPQS (IPQualityScore) is a veteran of the fraud-data business: a decade-plus of honeypot networks and reputation data, served as per-lookup APIs for IPs, emails, phones, and URLs. If you want raw fraud signals to wire into your own pipeline, it's a reasonable pick. Dregs answers a different question: not "is this IP risky?" but "is this account fake?" That difference shapes everything about how the two products work and what they cost.

At a glance

What IPQS does well

IPQS has been collecting fraud data since 2011, and the depth shows: a honeypot network, reputation history on billions of artifacts, and a shared blacklist program (Fraud Fusion) fed by other customers' confirmed fraudsters. Reviewers score it well (4.6 stars on G2 and 4.9 on Capterra) and generally praise its detection accuracy and how fast the APIs are to integrate. There's also a genuinely free tier and a library of free lookup tools.

Where Dregs takes a different approach

Accounts are more than the sum of their lookups

An IPQS lookup tells you what the world knows about an artifact: this IP is a known proxy, this email domain is disposable. What it can't tell you is what's happening on your platform: that this "new" signup is on the same device as three previous trial accounts, that its usage pattern is identical to an account you banned last month, that five accounts share one session. Dregs tracks each user as a persistent identity and scores it continuously across four dimensions (Humanity, Authenticity, Uniqueness, and Behavior) using its whole history, not a snapshot. Fake users who pass every artifact check at signup still get caught by what they do next.

Fewer false positives from single signals

Single-artifact scoring has a structural false-positive problem: flag every VPN and you flag your privacy-conscious customers; flag a university's shared IP and you flag a whole campus. G2 reviewers note occasional false positives where legitimate traffic from corporate or university networks gets flagged as high-risk, a hazard IPQS itself mitigates with a lighter_penalties option and a false-positive report form. Dregs sidesteps the structural problem by never deciding on one signal: a suspicious IP only moves a score in combination with device, identity, and behavioral observations, and every observation is visible, so you can see exactly why an account scored the way it did before you act on it.

The full loop, on every plan

With point APIs, the score is where your work starts: you build the storage, the thresholds, the review UI, the alerting. Dregs ships the whole loop (dashboard, badges, escalation rules, Slack and webhook notifications) so suspicious accounts surface themselves. And the pricing reflects different assumptions: IPQS meters every lookup against a credit bundle (G2 reviewers mention wanting more reasonably priced tiers between free and high-volume plans), while Dregs charges per active identity: track as many events per user as you like. Notably, device fingerprinting is an Enterprise-tier feature at IPQS; at Dregs it's included on every plan, starting at $17/month.

IPQS pricing vs Dregs pricing

IPQS pricing facts checked July 23, 2026 against https://www.ipqualityscore.com/plans. Dregs pricing is current at dregs.com/pricing. If you spot something out of date, email dregs@dregs.com and we'll correct it.

The bottom line

IPQS is a data vendor: solid per-lookup signals for teams building their own fraud pipeline. Dregs is a decision system: it watches your accounts, scores them continuously, explains every score, and tells your application what to do about the bad ones. If your abuse problem lives in trial cycling, duplicate accounts, or fake signups, artifact lookups alone won't close the loop. Comparing device-intelligence vendors too? See Dregs vs Fingerprint.

Frequently Asked Questions