Nomad in India: not the cheapest entry, but the longest window

What Nomad sells in India

Eight plans, six metered and two unlimited, read off Nomad's own site on 17 August 2026:

The two unlimited plans are $18 for five days and $33 for ten.

This page needs a correction before it goes any further. An earlier version said Nomad's India range was two plans deep — $4 for a gigabyte over a week and $9 for three over a month — and that it stopped at 3 GB. None of that was read from Nomad. The range is eight plans, the 3 GB month is $8.50 rather than $9, and the top of it is a 50 GB plan that we told readers did not exist.

The 50 GB month is the whole story

At $43 for 50 GB over 30 days, Nomad charges 86 cents a gigabyte in India. Nothing else verified in the country comes close: Airalo's best rate is $1.82, on a 20 GB plan over 15 days at $36.50, and Saily's is $1.95.

It is also the only plan above 20 GB anyone in our India data sells. Airalo stops at 20 GB and so does Saily, and several pages on this site — including this one — used to say that India as a market genuinely stopped there. It does not. Nomad has a 50 GB month and it is the cheapest data in the country by a factor of two.

If you are in India for a month, working, tethering, or simply not rationing, that is the plan and nothing else is an argument.

Below the top it also wins, by less

The middle of Nomad's ladder is cheapest at every 30-day size:

The margins are a dollar at the small sizes and five dollars at 20 GB. Airalo's short-window plans undercut on absolute price in places — 5 GB over seven days is $13, the same money for a quarter of the calendar — so if your trip is a week, check the window as well as the allowance.

Only at 1 GB is Nomad beaten, and barely: its $4 for seven days sits a cent above Saily's verified $3.99 for the same shape.

Unlimited, where the gap is widest

Nomad's five-day unlimited is $18 and its ten-day is $33. Airalo's verified equivalents are $31.50 and $46. Holafly's verified ones are $22.90 and $36.90.

That is not a close comparison. If you want unlimited data in India, Nomad is the cheapest we hold at both lengths it sells, by margins of five to thirteen dollars. Whether you want unlimited at all is a separate question — India's 4G averages 14 to 17 Mbps, and at that speed exhausting even 20 GB in ten days takes deliberate effort.

Hotspot, and no pre-arrival trap

Nomad supports hotspot tethering in India. Holafly, the main unlimited alternative, does not — so if a laptop is coming with you, that alone narrows the field.

There is also a specifically Indian advantage. The Holafly app is blocked on India's App Store and must be installed and activated before arrival. Nomad carries no such restriction, which makes it a safer choice for anyone who tends to sort connectivity out at the gate.

The network: nothing published

An earlier version of this page said Nomad runs on Airtel and Jio, and built a recommendation on it. That was wrong. Nomad publishes no host network for India, and none for any of the 47 countries it sells in.

Nor does anyone else worth buying from. Airalo publishes none — its Indian product is sold as Indicomm, a package name rather than a carrier — and Saily's India page promises a connection from the country's best networks without naming one. Holafly publishes none either. eSIMCard is the only one of the six sellers that publishes a host network at all — we read that directly on its Japan page — but the Airtel and Jio pair our own data carried for it here came from this site's generated text rather than from eSIMCard, so we no longer repeat it.

So the network question cannot be answered by choosing a travel eSIM. If it matters to you, the answer is a local Indian SIM, with the KYC registration that comes with it. Airtel is the easier of the two for a foreigner to get set up on and has the best 5G speeds at 187 to 212 Mbps; Jio leads national 5G availability at 69.2% and reaches further into rural India.

What no provider fixes: rural Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh above roughly 3,000 m, the higher passes on the Leh–Manali highway, the remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, and parts of the Northeast including Nagaland and Mizoram. India's 4G averages 14 to 17 Mbps nationally, below regional peers, regardless of who sold you the plan.

The local SIM still undercuts everything

An Indian tourist bundle costs around $7 at the airport for 28 days with a gigabyte a day — about 25 cents a gigabyte, roughly a third of Nomad's best rate and a tenth of what the small plans charge. What Nomad sells you is the absence of a passport check, a photograph and a 24-hour activation wait.

That trade is worth it for a short trip and gets harder to defend the longer you stay.

Verdict

Nomad is the cheapest verified eSIM in India at every 30-day size it sells except 1 GB, the only seller with a plan above 20 GB, and the cheapest unlimited by a wide margin. That is close to the opposite of what this page said before its prices were checked.

Buy the 50 GB month at $43 for a long or heavy stay. For a light three-week trip the 3 GB month at $8.50 does the job the old version of this page recommended, a dollar and a half cheaper than we said. The full comparison across every provider is on the India hub.