Sri Lanka's 20 GB plan is $18, or $0.90 a gigabyte — the lowest rate in this region, from the fewest rows we hold

One seller, six prices, one date

We hold six eSIM plans for Sri Lanka. All six are Airalo's, all six verified, all six read off airalo.com on 17 August 2026.

Six is not many — a third of what we hold for Cambodia or Bangladesh — and this page is written accordingly: it says what those six rows say and then stops. Saily, Holafly, Nomad, eSIMCard and eSIM Go all sell travel eSIMs and none of them has been priced here yet, so no figure for them appears below.

Airalo's Sri Lankan plans are listed under the name Ella. That is Airalo's own retail product name, not a network. Airalo publishes no host network for Sri Lanka — it publishes none for any country — so we cannot tell you which Sri Lankan operator the eSIM roams onto.

Everything we hold

That is the complete set — one price per size, no duplicates at different durations. From 3 GB upwards every plan runs 30 days, so above the two smallest rungs there is no window to choose. That is unusual: in the four neighbouring markets we priced on the same day, each size comes in two or three lengths.

We also hold no unlimited plan for Sri Lanka, where Cambodia, Bangladesh, Nepal and Laos each have six of them. We do not know whether Airalo sells none here or whether the reading missed them, and we are not going to assume. Treat this page as covering metered plans only.

Six rows is a thinner picture than it looks

Six verified prices from one seller are enough to say what that seller charges, and enough to compare like for like against the same seller elsewhere. They are not enough to describe the Sri Lankan market. Every conclusion below carries that caveat: we hold fewer rows for Sri Lanka than for anywhere else in this group, and a longer ladder we have not seen would change some of it.

Two dollars fifty buys five more gigabytes

What makes the six rows useful is the arithmetic between them:

• 1 GB at $4.50 to 3 GB at $6.50: two dollars for three times the data and four times the window.
• 3 GB at $6.50 to 5 GB at $9.00: $1.25 for each extra gigabyte.
• 5 GB at $9.00 to 10 GB at $11.50: $2.50 for five more gigabytes, or fifty cents each.
• 10 GB at $11.50 to 20 GB at $18.00: $6.50 for ten more, sixty-five cents each.

The bottom of the ladder is close to pointless. The 1 GB plan costs $4.50 for a week; two dollars more buys 3 GB for a month. Unless you need almost no data, skip the first two rungs — the money involved is trivial and the data is not.

The middle is where the value is. Going from 5 GB to 10 GB costs $2.50 and cuts the rate from $1.80 a gigabyte to $1.15 — no other step on this page is that cheap.

Sri Lanka breaks the rule that explains the rest of the region

Across this site, the size of a country's largest plan is a good predictor of its floor. Where Airalo sells a 50 GB plan the rate lands near a dollar — Cambodia and Bangladesh both reach $0.98 that way. Where the ladder stops at 10 GB the market is dreadful: Kenya at $4.60, Fiji and Nigeria at $4.70 are the dearest we hold anywhere. Countries stopping at 20 GB usually land in between, which is where Nepal at $1.75 and Laos at $2.40 sit.

Sri Lanka stops at 20 GB and still reaches $0.90 — below both of the 50 GB countries next to it. That makes it the clearest case we have that the height of the ladder predicts the price without causing it. Something else is at work, and Airalo does not publish what.

The 20 GB plan is the one size every country in this group sells, which makes it the fairest comparison. On 17 August Airalo wanted $18 for it in Sri Lanka and $49 for it in Laos: same seller, same day, same amount of data, nearly three times the price. Put another way: $11.50 buys 10 GB in Sri Lanka, $12.00 buys 3 GB in Laos.

Against the whole site, $0.90 is a good rate. The lowest we hold anywhere is Thailand at $0.55, with Austria at $0.58 and Belgium at $0.65; before this batch the dearest market on the site was the Dominican Republic at $3.43. Sri Lanka sits near the good end of that range.

Which plan to buy

With six rows, the advice is short.

• Almost anyone, for almost any trip. 10 GB over 30 days at $11.50. It is $2.50 more than 5 GB and runs a month either way.
• A long stay, some tethering, or two people sharing. 20 GB over 30 days at $18.00, the best rate we hold here at $0.90 a gigabyte.
• A short trip and a phone you barely touch. 3 GB over 30 days at $6.50. Do not buy the 1 GB plan to save two dollars.
• More than 20 GB. We hold nothing larger and no unlimited plan, so this page cannot help you.

What this page does not cover

Local SIMs: nothing at all. No counter prices, no shop names, no registration rules, no operator list. Nobody here has researched it, so this page stays silent rather than filling the space with plausible-sounding detail.

The other five sellers: also nothing. And, unusually for this site, there is a real gap in the Airalo data itself — six rows, one duration per size, no unlimited tier. If the ladder runs longer than what we hold, the floor could be lower than $0.90 and we would not know it. How we test sets out why we publish the gap rather than paper over it. Our Airalo page covers the seller across every market we hold, and the cheapest eSIM plans shows where $0.90 sits against the other 93 countries.