Two travellers land in the same airport, on the same day, and buy an eSIM for the same trip. One pays 13 cents a gigabyte. The other pays seven dollars. Neither has done anything wrong — both bought from a well-known provider, at the advertised price, on the first page they found.
That is not a hypothetical. It is the spread we measure in the United States today, across 107 capped plans from 15 providers.
The spread, in the destinations with the most competition
Every figure below is cost per gigabyte for a capped plan, taken from the same nightly collection that fills the rest of this site. The median is used deliberately rather than the average: one unusually cheap listing should not be allowed to make a whole country look inexpensive.
| Destination | Plans compared | Cheapest | Median | Dearest | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 107 | $0.13 | $1.86 | $7.00 | 55× |
| United Kingdom | 102 | $0.15 | $1.50 | $5.95 | 40× |
| Germany | 90 | $0.39 | $1.43 | $7.95 | 21× |
| France | 88 | $0.31 | $1.20 | $5.23 | 17× |
| Italy | 93 | $0.39 | $1.35 | $5.95 | 15× |
| Turkey | 85 | $0.40 | $1.43 | $5.95 | 15× |
| Switzerland | 84 | $0.07 | $1.70 | $5.23 | 75× |
Across the 198 destinations where we hold at least twenty capped plans, the median price is $3.25 a gigabyte — and in every one of them, plans exist well below it.
Why the gap is so wide
Three things, none of them sinister.
Big plans are cheaper per gigabyte than small ones. This is the single largest effect. A 1 GB plan carries the same overhead as a 50 GB plan, so its per-gigabyte price is several times higher. The cheapest entries in the table above are large plans; the dearest are small ones. If you genuinely need 1 GB, you will pay a high per-gigabyte rate and that is rational.
Brand pricing varies more than network quality does. Many providers resell capacity from the same wholesale carriers. Two plans on the identical network can differ severalfold in price.
The first result is rarely the cheapest. Search results and app-store rankings are bought. Our order is not: no provider pays for placement here, and the ranking is computed from price alone.
How to not be the traveller paying $7
- Work in price per gigabyte, not price. A $9 plan is not cheaper than a $12 plan if it carries a third of the data. Every capped plan on this site shows both.
- Buy for the trip you are taking, not the trip you might take. The per-gigabyte discount on a 50 GB plan is meaningless if you use 4 GB and the rest expires.
- Do not compare an unlimited plan on price per gigabyte. It has no gigabyte count to divide by. Compare those on price per day, and check the full-speed allowance — 79% of unlimited plans never state one.
- Check the validity window. A 30-day plan at a lower per-gigabyte rate is worse value than a 7-day plan if your trip is a week.
What we are not claiming
A cheaper plan is not automatically a better one. Coverage, the network a provider resells, whether you can top up, and whether the plan needs an ID check all matter, and none of them appears in a per-gigabyte figure. What the spread shows is narrower than “buy the cheapest”: it shows that the range is wide enough that five minutes of comparison is worth real money, which is not true of most purchases this size.
Prices move daily. The figures in this article were taken on 9 September 2026; the live numbers for any destination are on its own page, with the time each one was fetched shown on every row.