The cheapest eSIM, ranked properly

Why headline price is the wrong number

Every travel eSIM provider leads with its cheapest plan. It is almost always 1 GB over a short window, and it is almost always the worst value they sell.

The arithmetic is not complicated, which is why it is worth doing. A 1 GB plan at $4 costs $4.00 per gigabyte. A 20 GB plan at $28 costs $1.40. The second plan is seven times better value and costs seven times more, and the provider will show you the first one.

So the table above sorts on cost per gigabyte, computed from the price data rather than chosen by us.

The row at the top changed on 17 August 2026

Thailand still leads it, but not with the plan or the seller it used to. Nomad's 50 GB for $12 works out at $0.24 a gigabyte — less than half Airalo's $27.50 for the same 50 GB, and the cheapest verified rate in the whole table.

That row sat out of this ranking for weeks because we had it recorded as a 30-day plan, which made it look impossible, and three pages called it suspect. Reading Nomad's own site found the price was right and our duration was wrong: it runs 10 days. So it is genuinely the best rate here and it is only available to someone who can use 50 gigabytes inside ten days. Anyone staying longer wants the row below it, and the Thailand guide sets both out.

Where unlimited fits

It doesn't, arithmetically — an unlimited plan has no per-gigabyte figure, so it can't be ranked alongside metered ones without inventing an allowance. They are excluded from the ranking rather than assigned a made-up number.

That isn't the same as saying avoid them. Unlimited plans make sense for short, heavy trips: a few days of hotspotting a laptop, or a week where you genuinely cannot predict usage. Most of them also carry a daily fair-use cap that isn't in the headline, and the country guides say what it is where we know.

The option that pays us nothing

The last column is the typical price of a local prepaid SIM at the airport. In a good number of countries it beats every eSIM in the table, and there is no affiliate programme for walking into a supermarket.

Where it wins, the country guide says so. How this site makes money explains why we'd rather tell you.

What this table can't tell you

The price is not the whole decision. A cheap plan on a weak network is worse than a slightly dearer plan on the carrier with actual rural coverage, and that difference doesn't show up in a per-gigabyte column. Nor does it show up anywhere else: Airalo, Nomad and Saily publish no host network in any of the 94 countries here, and the carrier names the other three sellers attach to their listings are their own unconfirmed claims. Where a country guide can name an operator from a public source, it does; where it can't, it says so.

Most prices here have been read off a seller's own checkout — 2,475 of the 2,699 rows we hold: all 1,686 of Airalo's, all 436 of Nomad's, 185 of Saily's and 168 of Holafly's. The rest are indicative, extracted from older article text and labelled as such. How we check things is explicit about the difference.

One pattern is worth carrying into the table. Fifty-six countries price Airalo's 1 GB over 3 days at exactly $4.00, and 18 of the 56 that sell 50 GB over 30 days price it at exactly $49. Nomad does the same thing: 19 of its countries price 50 GB over 30 days at exactly $45. Figures repeating to the cent across unrelated countries look like a seller's tiering rather than a local cost, which is why the rung you pick often moves the rate more than the country does — and why the countries that break the pattern, Thailand above all, are worth checking individually.