Cheap SIM card or eSIM? Work out what it actually costs before you land

Start with the question you actually have

Most people arrive here with one of four questions, and they want different things.

If you want the cheapest workable option, the answer is usually a local prepaid SIM bought in a supermarket — and usually not at the airport, where the same SIM costs two to three times more. If you want the least hassle, it's an eSIM bought before you fly. If you're American, there's a real chance your existing plan already covers you and the right answer is to buy nothing. And if you're going somewhere with patchy coverage, the network matters far more than the price.

Every country guide here is built to answer those four in that order.

Why cost per gigabyte, and not price

A $4 eSIM with 1 GB over seven days is not cheaper than a $13 eSIM with 5 GB over thirty. It's roughly three times more expensive per gigabyte, and it expires while you're still using it. Providers lean on this, because the headline number is what gets compared.

So every plan table on this site carries a per-gigabyte column, and the cheapest row is marked automatically from the data rather than chosen by us. When a provider genuinely wins, it wins on arithmetic you can check.

What this site is, and isn't

It's desk research. Prices are read off each provider's own checkout and recorded with the date. Coverage claims come from carrier network maps and national regulator data. Where something can't be verified from a public source, the page says so rather than repeating the marketing line.

What it isn't: a review site built on field testing. Nobody here has stood in the arrivals hall of every airport described. How we check things sets out exactly where the line falls, and what that means for how much weight to put on any given page.