eSIM Data Prices by Country

Why the gap is this big

None of this comes down to eSIM providers marking some countries up more than others — Siima applies the same markup structure everywhere. The gap sits entirely upstream, in what wholesale carriers charge for data in the first place. Countries with several competing domestic networks and heavy tourist-eSIM volume — most of Western Europe, Turkey, Singapore — have driven wholesale rates down for years. Countries with fewer carriers, thinner tourist-data demand, or providers stitching together coverage through roaming agreements instead of a direct local deal end up paying far more for identical infrastructure: the same physical gigabyte, moved over the same kind of network, priced completely differently depending on which country's carrier deals happen to exist.

Median across all 107 is $1.36/GB, mean is $3.18/GB — the gap between those two numbers is itself telling. A handful of very expensive outliers (Namibia, Mongolia, Fiji, Cambodia, all above $19/GB) pull the mean well above where most countries actually sit. 42 countries price under $1/GB. 23 sit above $3/GB. The distribution isn't a bell curve, it's a cheap cluster with a long, expensive tail.

Cheapest 15 countries

Dominated by Europe, unsurprisingly — 12 of these 15 are EU or EEA countries, all landing within a few cents of each other around $0.67-$0.80/GB. Turkey and Uzbekistan are the real outliers here, both non-European and both cheaper than every EU country on the list.

Most expensive 15 countries

A rougher geographic spread — Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific islands each show up multiple times, but for different reasons in each case. It's also worth noticing the tier column here: several of the priciest countries only sell 10GB or even 5GB as their largest metered plan, versus 20GB almost everywhere on the cheap list, meaning the per-GB gap understates the actual dollar gap for anyone buying a real trip's worth of data.

The regional pattern

This is the cleanest signal in the whole dataset. Line up the median $/GB by region and Europe to Africa reads almost like a staircase — each step roughly doubling to quintupling the last:

Africa's median is 5.4x Europe's, with only 14 countries and 39 respectively — treat North America and Oceania's numbers as anecdotes rather than trends, with n=2 and n=4. Oceania in particular hides a split worth calling out on its own: Australia ($0.72/GB) and New Zealand ($0.94/GB) sit right in the cheap European cluster, while Fiji ($20.22/GB) and Papua New Guinea ($17.34/GB) sit in the most-expensive 15 above. Same region, same ocean, a 28x gap between them — regional averages can hide more than they reveal.

Methodology

• Source: Siima's production catalog (api.siima.online), synced from eSIMGo. This is one wholesale supplier's pricing, not a market-wide survey — a different provider's carrier deals could rank individual countries differently, though the broad pattern (Europe cheap, remote markets expensive) shows up across every public comparison of this kind.
• Rate used: each country's cheapest available metered plan, measured per gigabyte. Comparing at one fixed tier (say, everyone's 20GB price) would throw out every country that doesn't sell that size; comparing best-available answers the question a traveler actually asks — what's the least I can pay per GB here.
• Unlimited plans are excluded from the ranking. They're a different product with a different value proposition (and often fair-use throttling), and including them would make every country compute to roughly $0.00/GB, erasing the entire comparison.
• Prices are retail, in USD, exactly what a buyer sees at Siima checkout — wholesale cost plus markup, not a wholesale number.
• Countries with no plans in the catalog are excluded, not zero-filled. 107 of the roughly 114 requested returned live priced plans.

Full index — all 107 countries

Every country in the catalog, ranked cheapest to most expensive.

Frequently asked questions

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