Nomad in Indonesia: cheapest checked price, by a dollar or two

The prices, read at source

Unlimited sits alongside them at $18 for five days and $33 for ten. Every figure was read from Nomad's own site on 17 August 2026.

An earlier version of this page listed three plans — 5GB, 10GB and 20GB — at prices several dollars below these, and called the 20GB the best metered rate in the country at 95 cents a gigabyte. None of those figures had been read off Nomad's checkout, and each was too low. The range is also wider than we said: six metered sizes and two unlimited windows, not three plans.

Where Nomad actually stands

At every metered size, Nomad is the cheapest verified price in Indonesia — but the margins are a dollar or two, not the halving this page used to claim.

• 5GB / 30 days: Nomad $12, Airalo $13.50, Saily $13.99
• 10GB / 30 days: Nomad $19, Airalo $21, Saily $21.99
• 20GB: Nomad $33 over 45 days, Airalo $35 over 30, Saily $35.99 over 30
• 50GB: Nomad $41 over 45 days, Airalo $49 over 30

Airalo's prices were read from its own site on 13 August 2026 and Saily's on 16 August, so all three columns are checked.

Our data used to carry lower eSIMCard rows at the small and middle sizes. They have been withdrawn — we read eSIMCard's own pages on 18 August 2026 and the figures we held were not the ones it charges — so Nomad is now the cheapest thing here that we can price. Our data also carries lower eSIM Go rows, and they are not in the running: eSIM Go sells wholesale to resellers and publishes no consumer price — checked on esim-go.com on 18 August 2026, where there is no basket, no checkout and no per-country page — so its rows cannot be bought or ever verified. See our eSIM Go page.

The real story is now at the top. Nomad's 50GB at $41 works out at 82 cents a gigabyte, the cheapest rate in Indonesia from anyone, and the 45-day window is longer than anything Airalo sells. That is the plan worth crossing the room for, and this page previously did not mention it at all.

The Bali remote-work case

The realistic monthly usage for someone based in Canggu or Ubud with wifi at the villa: ride-hailing navigation, WhatsApp all day, maps, a few hours of tethering each week when the villa connection drops mid-call. That lands around 10GB to 20GB a month.

At $19 for 10GB the risk is running dry in week three. At $33 for 20GB you have headroom for the tethering, which is where the data actually goes — a video call over a hotspot burns more in an hour than a day of maps and messaging — and 45 days of validity rather than 30. For a stay of a month or more, the 50GB at $41 costs only $8 more than the 20GB and more than doubles the allowance.

For a one-week holiday it reverses: 5GB at $12 is plenty for maps, Grab and photos, and the 30-day validity is wasted either way.

What we can and cannot tell you about coverage

Nomad publishes no host network for Indonesia. An earlier version of this page said our data listed Telkomsel against its 5GB and 10GB plans and treated that as an unconfirmed lead worth knowing. It was not even that: Nomad names no carrier in any country, the entry came from older generated prose, and it has been removed. An earlier version still reasoned from it to say Nusa Penida and the main Lombok areas were covered; that inference went with the field it rested on.

No seller in our Indonesian data names a network. The operator this page once credited to Holafly's own listing came from our older data rather than from Holafly, whose country pages name no carrier.

What holds regardless of provider: Indonesian coverage is strong in the tourist corridors and thin to non-existent beyond them. Most of the 17,000-plus islands have no service. The remote Raja Ampat dive sites, the Flores interior, most of Papua, interior Kalimantan and the remote Sumatra highlands are gaps on every network. If your itinerary includes any of that, verify coverage for the specific island before you rely on a single eSIM, and carry a backup.

Against a $5 local SIM

Indonesia has some of the cheapest mobile data anywhere, and the counters reflect it: a tourist prepaid SIM is around $5 at the airport, from Telkomsel, XL Axiata, Indosat Ooredoo, Smartfren or Three, usually with a generous allowance attached. Nomad's 20GB is more than six times that.

What the eSIM buys you is the avoidance of passport registration, which Indonesian prepaid SIMs require in person, and of a physical SIM swap. At Denpasar with a queue in front of you that is twenty minutes and a form. Some travellers will always pay to skip it; others will always queue. Both are defensible — what is not defensible is paying an eSIM premium and then paying a second premium by picking the dearest eSIM.

Verdict

Nomad is the cheapest verified seller in Indonesia at every size, and at 50GB it holds the country's best rate at 82 cents a gigabyte. The margins at 5GB and 10GB are a dollar or two rather than the gulf this page once described. Do not buy any of these for coverage reasons: the network underneath is unpublished.

See the whole field, verified prices marked, on the Indonesia hub.