Wheels down, airplane mode off, and your phone becomes a choice: pay $12.99 a day to roam, or go dark and find your hotel from memory. Neither. Land already connected, for less than the taxi from the airport.
Build the itinerary →No account. No email. Your trip stays in your browser.
The same handset, landing again and again. Every network and every fare below is real, read from the same dataset the planner prices with.
Every fare below was read off a provider's own store by hand, and every row names the local network your phone will actually roam on.
Add every stop. Multi-country trips are exactly where the usual advice falls apart, so that's what this is built around.
These are the things that turn a good deal into a bad trip. The planner above checks for all of them.
Airalo's unlimited plans are widely reported to throttle somewhere around 3GB a day. Holafly's carrier fair-use sits around 3–5GB. Neither publishes a hard number on the buy page. Unlimited means unlimited gigabytes, not unlimited speed. If you're tethering, you will find the ceiling.
Holafly's unlimited plans cap hotspot sharing at 1GB per day. If your plan for the trip is "work off my laptop through my phone", an unlimited plan with a 1GB tether cap is the wrong purchase at any price. This is the most expensive mistake in the category.
A 7-day plan dies on day 7 whether you used 200MB or 20GB. On a 10-day trip that's two plans, two activations, and a gap in the middle if you're not paying attention. Plenty of "cheapest per GB" winners are only cheapest because their validity window doesn't fit your trip.
Sort any eSIM database by price and the top fills with 100MB novelty plans for thirty cents from brands you've never heard of. Sort by price-per-GB and you get 50GB packs you'll never exhaust. The only number that matters is what it costs to keep this phone online for this trip.
Per hour, at the quality you're most likely to be on. Sorted by how much damage they do.
| App | Quality | Per hour | 1GB lasts | Source |
|---|
Published means the service states the figure itself. Bitrate means it's arithmetic from a documented stream rate. Measured means it's corroborated across independent tests. Real usage moves with signal strength and how aggressively the app pre-buffers. These are planning numbers, not a meter.
There are a lot of these now. They fall into four groups, and they share a blind spot.
eSIMDB and friends list hundreds of thousands of plans across 200-odd providers. Genuinely comprehensive. But they're country-first and price-sorted, so the top of every list is a 100MB plan from a brand with no track record. And they assume you already know your number.
Hundreds of "Best eSIM for [country] 2026" pages. Ranking tends to track commission rather than fit. One "11 providers compared" page we checked turned out to be a table of discount codes with no prices in it at all.
A handful of tools ask three questions and name a provider. Closest to the right idea. They map a travel-style label onto a gigabytes-per-day number and stop there: no itinerary, no validity maths, no warning about the tether cap.
Every big provider publishes "X vs Y" comparisons. They are, without exception, comparisons that X wins. Useful for spec sheets, useless for deciding.
The gap in all four: nobody starts from the trip. Real itineraries have three stops in two regions and an awkward eleven nights, and that's exactly the case where the answer stops being obvious. So that's where this one starts.