eSIMCard: we read it, and pulled all 78 of our prices

What changed, and why it is not the same as "unverified"

We held 78 eSIMCard plans across 31 countries. On 18 August 2026 we opened eSIMCard's own country pages and read them. Every one of those 78 rows has now been withdrawn — removed from the plan tables, and removed from the cheapest-per-gigabyte ranking.

The distinction that matters: these are not rows we never got round to checking. We checked them. Our entry-level plan, the one our data showed at an identical price in fifteen unrelated countries, is sold by eSIMCard in Japan for well under half what we were quoting. Our three Japanese rows match neither of the two tiers eSIMCard actually sells at those sizes. A figure that specific and that wrong cannot be described as "indicative", and this site described it that way for months.

Where an earlier version of a country page told you eSIMCard was the cheapest entry point, or ranked it against a verified rival, that comparison has gone rather than been softened. There is no number left to rank.

Why we did not simply replace the prices with the right ones

Because we cannot store them. This is the honest answer, and it is worth setting out properly, because "we could not represent it" is a very different criticism from "it is expensive" or "it is unreliable".

Our schema records a plan as four things: provider, gigabytes, days, price. eSIMCard's catalogue does not resolve to four things. On its Japan page alone there are more than sixty plans where we held three, and the same size at the same duration appears at two or three different prices depending on:

• Standard or Universal. A toggle at the top of the page switches the whole catalogue between two product lines. Both are real; they are not the same plan.
• A per-plan speed limit. Each plan carries a Speed Limit: Yes/No flag, and it lives behind that plan's View Details modal rather than in the page text — readable for about one plan in sixty without opening every modal by hand.
• Different carriers per plan. Two plans of the same size can name different host networks as each other.

Storing one price per size would flatten a throttled Universal plan and a full-speed Standard plan into a single row asserting they are the same product. That is exactly the class of quiet, confident error this rebuild exists to remove, so we left the gap open instead. A wrong row carrying a verification date is worse than no row.

Closing it needs one of two things: an extra dimension in the schema for plan type, or a reader that opens every plan's details modal — roughly nineteen hundred interactions across 31 countries. Both are on the list. Neither is done.

eSIMCard is a shop, and eSIM Go is not

These two providers are often bracketed together on this site as "the ones without verified prices". They should not be.

eSIM Go sells wholesale to resellers. Its site has no basket, no checkout and no consumer price; the 34 rows we hold for it are prices no traveller can pay, and no amount of reading will ever verify them.

eSIMCard sells to the public. esimcard.com has a working storefront, real prices and a checkout you can complete. Its catalogue is larger than ours ever suggested — by an order of magnitude in Japan, and spanning everything from a one-gigabyte pass to plans costing more than a hundred dollars. Our problem with eSIMCard is a limitation in our own data model. Our problem with eSIM Go is that the product is not on sale.

The one thing eSIMCard does that no rival does

It tells you whose network you will be on.

Its Japan page names KDDI, NTT Docomo and SoftBank against its plans, in a Supported Countries & Networks block. Of the six sellers on this site, it is the only one that publishes this at all. Airalo, Nomad, Saily and Holafly publish none — we read their pages too, and where our own tables once showed a carrier against their rows, that name came from this site's generated text rather than from the seller. eSIM Go has no consumer page on which it could publish one.

So if the question you care about is "which radio am I actually attaching to?", eSIMCard is the only one of the six that answers it before you pay. That is a genuine differentiator, it survived the price check intact, and pages on this site that credit it are right to.

Two cautions. The names it publishes vary plan by plan rather than country by country, which is part of why its catalogue is hard to store. And we have read the Japanese listing directly; the carrier names our own data carries for its other markets came from the same generated corpus as the withdrawn prices, so we do not treat those as published claims.

What we would actually tell you

Go and read eSIMCard's own checkout. It is a real shop, its range is much wider than this site ever showed, and it is the one seller that will tell you which network you land on. We are not steering you away from it — we are telling you we have no price of our own to put beside it.

If you want a recommendation backed by a figure we stand behind, that means a verified plan from a provider whose numbers we have read: the country pages below say which, and what it costs.

This page changes when the schema can hold a plan type, or when someone opens sixty modals. Until then eSIMCard appears on this site with a description and no price, which is the only honest arrangement we could find.

Country pages, all carrying the same withdrawal: Japan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Iceland and Turkey. Everything we can still price is ranked on cost per gigabyte, and how we test explains what verified means.