Kenya's eSIM ladder stops at 10 GB, and that is why its cheapest gigabyte costs $4.60

One seller, nine prices, one date

We hold plan data for exactly one eSIM provider in Kenya: Airalo. Nine plans, all nine verified — every price read off airalo.com on 17 August 2026. That is the whole of our Kenyan coverage, and it is not a survey of the market. Saily, Holafly, Nomad, eSIMCard and eSIM Go all sell travel eSIMs; we have not priced any of them in Kenya yet, so none of them appears below with a number beside it.

Nine rows is thin — Taiwan carries eighteen on this site and South Africa forty-five — and that shortness turns out to be the most important thing about Kenya.

Airalo lists its Kenyan plans under the name Nakuru Mobile. That is Airalo's own retail label — the way a supermarket brands its own-label tea — and it is not an operator. Airalo publishes no host network for Kenya, and publishes none for any other country either, so which Kenyan network your handset attaches to is not something anyone here can tell you.

Every plan we hold

There is nothing above 10 GB, and no unlimited option. That is the complete list.

$4.60 a gigabyte, and almost nothing is dearer

We now carry verified prices for 94 countries, and Kenya's best rate is the fourth highest of the lot: the 10 GB plan over 7 days, $46, which is $4.60 a gigabyte. Only Nigeria and Fiji are worse, both at $4.70, and both for exactly the reason Kenya is — their ladders also stop at 10 GB.

One entry in the dataset does sit above all three, and leaving it out would be the wrong kind of tidy. Lebanon holds a single 1 GB plan at $27 — $27 a gigabyte. But one product is not a market: no ladder to read, no larger plan to compare against, nothing else priced there. Kenya, Nigeria and Fiji are the dearest markets we hold where the seller offers a real range.

Before this month the dearest of those was the Dominican Republic at $3.43, and Kenya clears that by more than a dollar.

At the far end of the same dataset, Airalo's Thai 50 GB plan was $27.50 — $0.55 a gigabyte. A traveller in Nairobi pays roughly eight times the Bangkok rate for a gigabyte.

We cannot tell you why. Airalo does not publish its per-country pricing logic, and wholesale costs are not something anyone here has seen. What the data does show is where the difference sits.

The ceiling explains the price

Read the top of each country's ladder rather than the bottom:

• Kenya stops at 10 GB. Floor $4.60.
• Tanzania and Ghana reach 20 GB. Floors of $2.15 and $2.40.
• South Africa reaches 50 GB. Floor $0.98.

Same seller, same continent, same month. Per-gigabyte rates fall as plans get bigger — that is true on every ladder we hold — so a country whose range ends early never reaches the cheap part of its own curve. Kenya's ends early.

The blunt version: $49 buys the 50 GB South African plan for 30 days. $48 buys 10 GB in Kenya for the same 30 days. A dollar apart, five times the data.

This is a tendency rather than a law. The Dominican Republic stops at 20 GB and still sits at $3.43. But it is the first thing worth checking about any market, and in Kenya it is decisive.

Duration is nearly free here; capacity is not

The one genuinely useful quirk in this ladder is how little the longer windows cost. The 10 GB tier runs $46 for 7 days, $47 for 15 and $48 for 30 — a dollar a step. The 5 GB tier behaves the same way: $30.50, $31.50, $32.00.

So there is little reason to buy a short window. The 30-day 10 GB plan costs $2 more than the 7-day one and removes any chance of the plan lapsing mid-trip. Per gigabyte it reads worse, $4.80 against $4.60, but $2 is a thin reason to give yourself a deadline.

Capacity works the other way. Stepping from 5 GB to 10 GB across the same 7 days costs $15.50 for five extra gigabytes — $3.10 each, cheaper than any average rate on the ladder. If you are wavering between those two, the larger one is better value even if you leave some unused.

What to buy

• A few days, maps and messaging. 3 GB over 3 days at $19.00. Poor value at $6.33 a gigabyte, but everything small here is.
• A week, wifi in the evenings. 10 GB over 30 days at $48.00 rather than the 7-day at $46.00.
• More than 10 GB. Not sold. You would be buying a second plan at the same rate.

The local SIM, which we have not checked

In a market this expensive, our honest expectation is that a Kenyan prepaid SIM bought locally would beat $4.60 a gigabyte, probably by a wide margin. Domestic data almost everywhere costs a fraction of travel-eSIM rates.

We are still not going to recommend it, because we have not checked it. We hold no Kenyan local SIM research at all: no prices, no operator names, no registration rules, no shop or counter detail. Plenty of pages will give you all four with great confidence. This one stays quiet until someone here has done the work.

What else is missing

We hold nothing for the other five sellers in Kenya. If one of them beats $4.60 a gigabyte, we would not know — and neither would a page listing all six with figures nobody read. That distinction is the whole of how we test. Our Airalo page covers the seller across every country we hold, and the cheapest eSIM plans puts Kenya's $4.60 beside every other rate on the site. Ninety of the 94 are cheaper.