Features

Reverse geocoding: latitude and longitude to a fully structured postal address in one API call

Forward geocoding with fuzzy matching — partial addresses and misspellings still resolve correctly

Administrative boundary lookup — country, state, district, municipality, and postcode per coordinate

Point-of-interest context — nearest named places, landmarks, and place categories for any location

Batch geocoding endpoint for processing thousands of coordinates in a single request

Custom place database — import and query your own named locations alongside the global dataset

Coverage across 200+ countries with localised address formatting per region

On-premise deployment option for organisations that cannot send location data to a third party

Tech stack

PostgreSQL with PostGIS for spatial queries, polygon containment, and nearest-neighbour lookups

OpenStreetMap planet data as the base dataset with regular automated import cycles

Custom indexing layer optimised for reverse geocoding query patterns beyond standard PostGIS defaults

Nominatim-compatible query interface extended with client-requested features — structured boundary responses, batch endpoints, and custom dataset overlays

REST API with GeoJSON and structured JSON response formats

Redis cache for high-frequency coordinate lookups to keep P99 latency under 50ms at scale

Import pipeline supporting custom shapefiles, GeoJSON, and CSV coordinate datasets

Why developers pick ErthCode

Reverse geocoding sounds simple until you need it at scale, in real time, with structured output your application can act on without parsing free-text strings. A coordinate that comes back as "near the high street" is not useful to a logistics platform that needs to know the postcode, district, and whether the address is residential or commercial.

ErthCode was built for three scenarios that generic geocoding APIs handle poorly. The first is high-frequency real-time use — a GPS tracker emitting a position every second needs a reverse geocode response in under 50ms or the display lags. The Redis cache layer keeps the most-queried coordinates in memory so the PostGIS query only runs on genuinely new positions.

The second is administrative boundary accuracy. Most geocoding APIs return an address. ErthCode returns the full administrative hierarchy — useful for compliance systems that need to know which jurisdiction a transaction occurred in, logistics systems that route by district, or analytics that aggregate data by region.

The third is the on-premise deployment option. Location data is sensitive. Many logistics, healthcare, and government clients cannot route coordinate data through a third-party cloud API. ErthCode ships as a self-contained deployment with an automated OSM import pipeline, which means it can run inside your network with no outbound data transfer.

The custom place database feature lets you import your own named locations — warehouse sites, service zones, customer addresses — and query them with the same API as the global dataset. A field service platform can ask "which of our service zones does this coordinate fall inside" with the same call as "what is the postal address of this coordinate."

Who it is for

ErthCode is used by logistics and fleet platforms needing real-time address resolution, compliance tools that need precise jurisdictional boundaries, analytics platforms aggregating event data by geography, and any team that has hit the rate limits or latency ceiling of a public geocoding API.