Local SIM or travel eSIM in Singapore?

Six providers, and about three dollars between them

Singapore is the most crowded eSIM market in our data. Five sellers cover it — Airalo, Saily, Nomad, Holafly and eSIMCard — and at the sizes most visitors buy, four of them have converged on almost exactly the same number. Our data also carries eSIM Go rows for Singapore, but they are not offers: 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.

10GB / 30 days	Price	Source
Nomad	$14	Verified 18 Aug 2026
Saily	$15.99	Verified
eSIM Go	$16	Not on sale
Airalo	$16	Verified 13 Aug 2026

The Nomad row is the one that moved. This page previously carried it at $16, level with the pack, on a figure nobody had read; its checkout price is $14, and Nomad was showing that against a list price of $16, so it is a promotion rather than a standing rate. Take the sale away and the whole column sits inside a dollar and one cent.

The 5GB tier is tighter still: Nomad $9 verified, Saily $9.99 verified, Airalo $10 verified. When a market looks like this, shopping around at the middle sizes is not where your effort should go. Pick on the things that still differ — app quality, top-up behaviour, whether hotspot is allowed — and stop optimising the price.

Airalo's Singapore packages are branded Connect Lah! in the app.

Where the money is actually made or lost

The spread that matters is not between providers, it is between plan sizes.

The floor is Nomad's 50GB month at 62 cents a gigabyte, which is one of the lowest verified rates anywhere in our data and $17 below the only other 50GB plan on the island. Buying 1GB costs six times as much per gigabyte as buying fifty, and four times as much as buying twenty. That is the decision worth thinking about, and in a city where 5G routinely runs above 300 Mbps it is easy to consume more than you planned simply because nothing ever buffers.

Watch validity too. Airalo's 5GB is $9 for 7 days, $9.50 for 15 and $10 for 30 — a month of headroom for a dollar over the week.

The local SIM is a genuine option here

Unlike much of Europe, Singapore does not make you register anything. Tourist prepaid SIMs need no ID and are sold instantly. Singtel tourist SIMs are available at Changi Airport in all terminals from SGD15, roughly $11, with StarHub and M1 also present, and prepaid SIMs turn up in 7-Eleven and other convenience stores around the island. Our own figure for a typical airport SIM here is about $12.

So the friction argument that usually decides this comparison mostly disappears. What we do not hold is what those tourist SIMs include — allowance, validity, top-up rates — so we cannot tell you whether SGD15 beats a $10 Airalo 5GB plan on value. It is close enough on price that it comes down to whether you want a Singapore number and are happy to spend five minutes at a counter.

TPG is the fourth network and is positioned as the budget carrier. No travel eSIM in our data uses it.

Unlimited, including one day of it

Holafly sells only unlimited plans, and in Singapore it has something nobody else does: one day of unlimited data for $5.90. For a long Changi layover where you want to leave the terminal and not think about it, that is a sensible product.

Beyond a day, the comparison tightens. Airalo's verified unlimited plans are $18.50 for 5 days against Holafly's $22.90, and $27 for 7 days against $27.90. At the top end Holafly finally wins on price — $67.90 for 30 days against Airalo's $69 — but Holafly does not support hotspot, so if you tether a laptop the dollar is irrelevant. All Holafly prices here are indicative rather than read from their site.

Coverage is not a variable

Singapore is a 725 km² city-state with effectively 100% urban coverage and no gaps worth naming. The national average is 95 Mbps, 5G is near-universal, and average 5G downloads run above 300 Mbps. Singtel has the widest 5G footprint at 99%-plus and the fastest speeds. Which network a travel eSIM sits on is not something you can find out — no seller here names one, Holafly included — but all four networks are competitive, so it costs you nothing.

Choosing a provider for coverage reasons in Singapore is wasted effort. The Singapore hub has the full plan list.