Guatemala starts cheap and gets expensive fast

What we hold for Guatemala, and what we do not

One provider: Airalo. Seventeen plans, all seventeen read off Airalo's own checkout on 17 August 2026. There is no second column on this page because there is no second seller in our Guatemalan data.

Saily, Holafly, Nomad, eSIMCard and eSIM Go are not priced here yet. We are not going to rank sellers we have not opened, so treat this as a full account of one company's Guatemalan pricing rather than a verdict on the market.

All seventeen plans carry the same product name, Tikal Mobile. That is what Airalo calls its Guatemalan eSIM at checkout — a retail brand, not a mobile operator. Nobody should read it as the name of the network your phone would attach to.

The floor is $3.20 a gigabyte, and it is only reachable at the top

The cheapest gigabyte in Guatemala comes off the largest metered plan we hold: 20 GB over 15 days for $64, which is $3.20 a gigabyte. Nothing else in the country gets close.

For scale: the cheapest verified rate we hold anywhere is Thailand at $0.55 a gigabyte, with Austria at $0.58. Both are the same seller in the same week. A Guatemalan gigabyte costs close to six times a Thai one.

There is no 50 GB plan, which is why the floor is where it is

We checked every row. The metered ladder stops at 20 GB. In most countries we price, the useful move is to buy far more data than you need, because a 50 GB plan usually undercuts everything above it per gigabyte — that is how Thailand reaches $0.55. Guatemala offers no such escape, and neither do Costa Rica or the Dominican Republic, whose ladders stop at 20 GB too.

There is also a gap in the middle of the ladder. Nothing is sold between 10 GB and 20 GB, and those two tiers are where the whole decision lives. Ten gigabytes for a week is $47; twenty gigabytes for a fortnight is $64. Stepping between them buys ten more gigabytes and another week for $17, which is better value than anything else on the list and inverts the usual advice about not over-buying.

At the small end the arithmetic is punishing but the cash outlay is low. One gigabyte over three days is $7.50, the cheapest single plan in our Guatemalan data and less than the same plan costs in Costa Rica ($11) or the Dominican Republic ($9). It is still $7.50 a gigabyte. Three gigabytes over three days is $18.50, and five over a week is $28.50.

The uncapped plans, and where they stop making sense

Six of the seventeen rows sell uncapped data by the day rather than by the gigabyte.

The three-day plan is the interesting one. At $28.50 it costs exactly the same as 5 GB over seven days, so for a short stay with heavy use — maps all day, a hotspot for a laptop, video calls home — it is the same money with the meter switched off. Above that the case weakens quickly. Fifteen days uncapped is $89.50 against $64 for 20 GB over the same fortnight, and the 30-day uncapped plan at $140.50 is more than twice the $65.50 that buys 20 GB across a month.

We hold no fair-use policy for any of these. Airalo's listing did not state one and nobody here has tested what happens after sustained heavy use, so do not read uncapped as a promise of full speed throughout.

What to buy for a given trip

• Two or three days. Uncapped at $28.50 if you lean on your phone, 1 GB at $7.50 if you mostly want messaging and a map at the hotel.
• A week. 5 GB over seven days at $28.50 covers ordinary use. If you expect to tether, 10 GB for the same week is $47.
• A fortnight, or anything with real usage. 20 GB over 15 days at $64. It is the cheapest gigabyte in the country by a distance and the plan most Guatemala trips should default to.
• A month. 20 GB over 30 days at $65.50, which costs $1.50 more than the fortnight version for double the window.

The two questions we cannot answer

Which Guatemalan network do these plans use? We do not know, and neither does any other honest page. Airalo does not publish a host network for Guatemala or for anywhere else, so every network field in our data for it is empty. If coverage on one specific operator is what matters for your trip, no eSIM here can give you that guarantee.

What about a local SIM? We have not researched it. No airport counter prices, no shop prices, no registration rules. Other sites will tell you; we have not checked, so we will not.

Guatemala against the rest of the world we have priced is on the cheapest eSIM plans page, and best eSIM for Latin America sets it against the other nine markets we price in the region. How we test sets out what verified means: a person opened the checkout and read the number.