Uruguay's cheapest verified eSIM rate is $2.43 a gigabyte, and unlimited undercuts 10 GB for a week

One seller, seventeen prices, one date

We hold eSIM prices for exactly one provider in Uruguay: Airalo. Seventeen plans, all seventeen verified — read off airalo.com on 17 August 2026. That is our whole Uruguayan coverage and it is not a survey of the market. Saily, Holafly, Nomad, eSIMCard and eSIM Go all sell travel eSIMs; none has been priced here yet, so none appears below with a number beside it.

Airalo sells its Uruguayan plans under the name Ballena. That is Airalo's own retail label for this country — its own-brand product, the way a supermarket brands its own tea — and it is not a mobile operator. Airalo publishes no host network for Uruguay and publishes none for any other country, so which Uruguayan network your phone attaches to is not something we can tell you, and not something any page can tell you without having asked Airalo.

The whole metered ladder

It starts at 1 GB and stops at 20 GB. There is no 50 GB plan in Uruguay, and that ceiling is what sets the rate.

Where the ladder stops sets the rate

Over the 94 countries we now cover, the top of the ladder is the best single predictor of price. Markets selling a 50 GB plan over 30 days land near $0.98 a gigabyte, and the cheapest of them all, Thailand, is $0.55 — $27.50 for 50 GB. Markets that stop at 20 GB sit between $2 and $3. Markets that stop at 10 GB are the dearest on the site: Kenya at $4.60, Nigeria and Fiji at $4.70.

Uruguay stops at 20 GB and comes out at $2.43, the dearest of five markets priced that day that share the same ceiling — Jamaica at $2.15, the Bahamas at $2.25, Ecuador and Bolivia at $2.40. Uruguay is a high-income Southern Cone economy, Bolivia a landlocked Andean one, Jamaica and the Bahamas Caribbean island states. Five economies with nothing much in common, priced within 28 cents of each other. What they actually share is a ladder that ends at 20 GB.

The 5 GB rung is where the value goes wrong

The spread runs from $2.43 a gigabyte at 20 GB up to $7.00 at 1 GB. But the interesting distortion is not at the ends, it is at 5 GB, where paying for a longer window costs far more than usual: $24.50 over 7 days, $27.50 over 15, $30.00 over 30. That last one works out at $6.00 a gigabyte — a worse rate than the 3 GB plan over 3 days at $5.50, despite being nearly twice the size. Elsewhere on this ladder a longer window costs a dollar; on the 5 GB rung it costs five and a half.

The steps between rungs are more useful than the rates:

• 5 GB to 10 GB, both over 7 days: $24.50 becomes $36.00. Five more gigabytes for $11.50.
• 10 GB over 7 days to 20 GB over 15: $36.00 becomes $48.50. Ten more gigabytes for $12.50, and double the window — $1.25 each, the best step on the page.

Unlimited for a week is cheaper than 10 GB for a week

Airalo lists six unlimited plans in Uruguay: $19.50 for 3 days, $28.50 for 5, $35.00 for 7, $39 for 10, $53 for 15 and $87 for 30. One of them is priced below a metered plan of the same length.

Unlimited for 7 days is $35.00. The 10 GB plan over 7 days is $36.00. The uncapped plan is a dollar cheaper in absolute terms, not merely better value — there is no reason to buy 10 GB for a week in Uruguay, and none published that explains why the pricing lands that way.

At 10 days the two products cross again: unlimited for 10 days is $39, and 10 GB stretched over 30 days is $38.00. A dollar buys you either a cap you cannot exceed or a month you cannot exceed, which is a genuine choice rather than an obvious one.

The 30-day unlimited plan at $87 is the outlier in the other direction, against $49.50 for 20 GB over 30 days. That is $37.50 for whatever you use past 20 GB.

Which plan to buy

• A long weekend. Unlimited for 3 days at $19.50, which is $3 above the 3 GB plan over the same days and worth it.
• A week. Unlimited at $35.00. It costs a dollar less than 10 GB over the same period.
• Two weeks, or a phone tethering a laptop. 20 GB over 15 days at $48.50 — the cheapest gigabyte sold in Uruguay.
• A month. 20 GB over 30 days at $49.50, a dollar over the fortnight version. Avoid the 5 GB plan over 30 days at $30.00; $6 more buys 10 GB for the same month.

What this page does not tell you

We hold no local SIM data for Uruguay: no counter prices, no shop advice, no registration rules, no operator names. Other pages will tell you all four confidently. Nobody here has researched it, so this page says nothing until somebody has.

We hold nothing for the other five sellers either. If one of them beats $2.43 a gigabyte in Uruguay we would not know, and neither would a page listing all six with figures nobody read — which is the point of how we test. The cheapest eSIM plans puts Uruguay's rate beside every other country on the site, and our Latin America page covers the fifteen regional markets priced so far. Eight of them come in below Uruguay — Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia — and the Dominican Republic, at $3.43, is the dearest floor in the region. It is no longer the dearest on the site: Lebanon reads $27.00 a gigabyte, though that is one 1 GB plan rather than a market; the dearest real ladders are Nigeria and Fiji at $4.70 and Kenya at $4.60, all three capped at 10 GB.