Cheap Sim Card

Affiliate disclosure

How this site makes money, and the specific things we do to stop that from bending the advice.

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Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you click one and buy something, the provider pays us a commission. You pay the same price either way — affiliate links don't add a fee and don't unlock a discount unless the page says otherwise.

This is the site's only revenue. We'd rather state that plainly at the top than bury it.

Outbound links to eSIM providers, marked with rel="sponsored" in the page source. Currently that's Airalo, Holafly, Nomad, Saily, eSIM Go and eSIMCard, where we have an affiliate relationship.

Commission rates differ between providers, and one of them pays roughly twice what another does. That's precisely the conflict this page exists to declare.

What doesn't pay us

A lot of what we recommend, as it happens:

  • Local prepaid SIM cards — Telcel, Vodafone, TIM, AIS, Viettel and the rest. There is no affiliate programme for walking into a supermarket, and these are frequently the cheapest option, so we recommend them frequently.
  • Doing nothing. Several guides tell readers on certain US carriers that they already have roaming included and should not buy anything. That earns nothing and is the correct answer.
  • Links to regulators, carrier coverage maps, and airport operators.

The safeguards

A promise to be impartial isn't worth much, so these are structural instead:

  1. The cheapest plan is computed, not chosen. The "Cheapest per GB" badge in every table is derived from the price data at build time. No one picks it, and it can't be nudged toward a better-paying provider without changing the underlying price — which is published and checkable.
  2. Commission rates are not visible during writing. Rates live in a config file separate from the content, so a guide isn't drafted next to a column showing what each recommendation is worth.
  3. Non-paying options rank on merit. Local SIMs are compared on the same table as eSIMs where the comparison is meaningful, not relegated below them.
  4. No paid placement, ever. We don't sell rankings, reviews, or removal of criticism. No provider has been given advance sight of a review.

If you'd rather not

Entirely reasonable. Every provider named on this site can be reached by typing their name into a search engine, and nothing on these pages depends on you using our links. The guides are the same either way.

Questions about any of this: hello@cheapsimcard.com.

Common questions

Does using an affiliate link cost me more?

No. The price at checkout is identical whether you arrive through one of our links or type the provider's address directly. The commission is paid by the provider out of their margin.

Do higher commissions get better reviews?

They shouldn't, and the safeguards above are designed to make it structurally hard. The strongest check is the one you can run yourself: the price data behind every recommendation is published on the page, so you can verify the arithmetic without trusting us.