Free · OpenStreetMap · Cambodia
Address lookup for Cambodia, built in Phnom Penh.
Forward and reverse geocoding on open data, with official commune and district codes attached. Khmer and Latin. Five thousand requests a day, free, and no card — ever.
Registration opens shortly. Sign-in will be Google — no Cloud project, no billing account, no card.
Three reasons to use this one
~110ms
Close to you
Median reverse lookup measured from Phnom Penh. The service runs in Singapore, the nearest major region — not on the other side of the world. Two to five times quicker than what we were using before.
5,000/day
A free tier you can build on
Every day, not once. Most free geocoding gives you a fixed pot of requests and then throttles you to a crawl for good. No card, at any point.
91%
Official codes, not just names
Results carry the government province, district and commune codes, resolved for 91% of coordinates we tested. If you have to reconcile addresses against a ministry’s records or a bank’s, that is the difference between usable and not.
The third one is the point. The first two any provider could copy by renting a server nearby; the Cambodian administrative hierarchy, Khmer name matching and the local coverage work cannot be copied without doing it here.
Built for Khmer, specifically
Names match the way Khmer actually works
ខេត្ត, ក្រុង, ស្រុក, ខណ្ឌ, សង្កាត់, ឃុំ, ភូមិ — the administrative word in front of a place name is not part of the name. We strip it before matching, so សៀមរាប and ក្រុងសៀមរាប resolve to the same district instead of looking like two places.
Romanisation is a guess, so we do not rely on it
One source writes Daun Penh, another Doun Penh, and both are reasonable. Matching runs on Khmer script first, where both sides agree exactly, and falls back to a tolerant Latin match only inside a district already established.
Why this exists
Cambodia has no free, locally-run geocoding API. The usual answer is a global provider that wants a Cloud project and an international card before the first request — a barrier that has nothing to do with price, and that a student in Phnom Penh simply cannot clear.
We built this for our own product first. Opening it costs us little and gives Khmer developers something that did not exist.
What you get
- Reverse geocoding: coordinates to a structured address.
- Forward search: place names in Khmer or Latin script.
- Commune, district and province from the official hierarchy.
- A refusal with a reset time when you hit a limit — never a silently truncated answer.
One request
curl "https://geo.checkinme.app/reverse?\ lat=11.5691&lon=104.9212&format=jsonv2" \ -H "X-Api-Key: geo_..."
{
"display_name": "Street 136, Sangkat Phsar Thmey Ti Pir,
Khan Daun Penh, Phnom Penh, 120202, Cambodia",
"address": {
"road": "Street 136",
"quarter": "Sangkat Phsar Thmey Ti Pir",
"city_district": "Khan Daun Penh",
"city": "Phnom Penh",
"postcode": "120202",
"country_code": "kh"
},
"licence": "Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0"
}What it does not know yet
Worth knowing before you build on it. Administrative boundaries in Cambodia are mapped well. Streets and villages — the part a person recognises as their address — often are not. Measured across 200,000 real lookups:
This is a gap in OpenStreetMap, not a bug in the service, and the honest fix is mapping. If an address comes back wrong, correct it in OSM and everyone’s answer improves, ours included.
Free tier, in full
- 5,000 requests per day
- 5 requests per second sustained, burst 20
- Up to 5 keys, one per project
- Attribution required — it is the licence