How eSIMAdvice Checks eSIM Plans, Prices and Coupons
We don't test every eSIM. Here's what we check instead, how a plan reaches a country page, what gets held back, and which checks are still up to you.
Quick answer
We check data, not phones. eSIMAdvice doesn't test every plan: we've tried some providers ourselves, but no ranking, badge or price on the site comes from a test. We read provider catalogs, re-check most of them on a weekly schedule, clean and standardize what comes in, hold back rows that don't add up, and list the coupon codes providers give us, with any conditions we know about. Network quality, support and refunds sit outside what we check, so those are yours to look into before you buy. This page explains each step, what it catches, and where it stops.
Why we don't test every eSIM
We compare 279,741 plans from 85 providers across 215 destinations. Nobody could buy and try all of those, and a test of one plan in one city on one day says little about the same plan elsewhere next month. A site that says it has tested everything, at that scale, is telling you something it can't back up.
So we've kept our promise narrower. We can tell you what a provider's catalog says about a plan, whether its price holds up against the rest of the market, and how fresh that information is. We can't tell you how fast it'll be on your street. We have bought and tried some providers ourselves, but those checks aren't systematic, so we don't publish them as results.
Our methodology page is the formal reference, including a live table of how current each catalog is. This post is the plain-language tour, with examples of what the checks catch.
What happens to a plan before you see it
Almost every plan goes through these steps on its way to a country page. Catalogs we refresh by hand run through the same checks in an import script, and we sometimes correct a row by hand.
- We fetch the catalog. Most catalogs come straight from the provider's feed or API on an automatic schedule. A few don't: some are too slow to fetch on the nightly run, so we refresh them by hand when we can, and a couple have stopped updating altogether.
- We put it in one shape. Feeds describe plans in different ways, so we standardize data, validity, price, network, hotspot and coverage. Prices are held in US dollars and shown in your currency, using exchange rates refreshed nightly. Feeds priced in other currencies are converted to dollars when we sync them.
- We hold what can't be right. A row with no price, no data allowance or no well-formed link doesn't go live.
- We hold back the unclear. A multi-country pack that we can't match to a region isn't filed under a guessed one, and a plan for a destination without a published page waits. Rows flagged this way stay off the site unless a person approves them. That rarely happens, so in practice they simply wait.
- We collapse duplicates. Some feeds list what is, for a buyer, the same plan more than once. When everything a buyer can see matches, including data, validity, speed, network, hotspot, coverage and any named carrier or tier, we keep the cheapest.
- We map the coverage. A regional plan is attached to the page of every country it lists, which is how one plan can appear on dozens of pages.
- We publish it. A changed price normally updates the existing plan instead of creating a new one. The exception is a provider that re-issues its plan IDs, which makes its plans look new to us. That happened with two catalogs in October 2026.
How often it's re-checked, and what happens when a feed breaks
Most providers have an assigned night of the week. A scheduler wakes at 03:17 UTC and refreshes that night's share, so a typical catalog is re-checked once a week. eSIModo is on a 10-day interval, and five catalogs aren't on the schedule at all. A price on our site can therefore be up to a week old for most providers, and older for those catalogs or when something has gone wrong.
Things do go wrong. Feeds change address, block automated requests or fail partway through. When that happens:
- A feed that's temporarily refused gets a second try the same night.
- A catalog with no successful sync for more than eight days is pulled into that night's run, which is usually two nights after a missed slot. After 30 days without a success, it goes back to one try a week.
- The last good prices stay up rather than vanishing. An old price can still be useful, but it can also be wrong, so treat it as a lead.
- The warning isn't on every page. A provider's page names the last sync date when its catalog has fallen behind, and its plan table for each country shows when it was last updated. A country page's byline only warns when the newest of its first 30 plans is more than eight days old, which rarely happens, so an old plan in a country table has no label of its own.
Some catalogs do fall behind for weeks, and a few have for months, usually because a feed died, we lost access, or a manual refresh is overdue. The live freshness table lists every catalog with its date, including the ones that are behind, so it's the place to check. We'd rather publish that than claim everything is current.
The one price figure we record daily is the Price Index, which saves a snapshot of each country's cheapest list prices, before coupons, each night, from whatever catalog data we hold at the time. It has missed a few nights since it started in July 2026, and the page shows the count.
How prices are shown
The default price on a plan row is the provider's list price, minus one coupon if we hold one set to apply to all of that provider's plans. Some of our links carry the code to checkout, but many don't, so you may need to enter it yourself. The code is on the provider's page and on our coupon page. If checkout shows a higher price, check that the code went in. You can turn this off with the Apply promo codes switch on country pages to see list prices instead.
Three things about that number are worth knowing:
- It's an expectation, not a quote. The provider's checkout has the final word on price, currency and tax, and providers control their own checkouts.
- It can be out of date, as above.
- It's converted. If you're viewing in euros or rupees, the figure is a conversion, and your bank's rate may differ. Even a dollar price can be one, if the provider's catalog is in another currency.
How coupons are handled
Codes come from the providers and from our partner agreements with them, and we add them by hand. We confirm some at checkout ourselves, but not every one, and we don't have an automatic check that a code still works, so one can stop working before we notice. If that happens, tell us and we'll take it down. Then there's a second question: does the code change the price we display?
| Type of coupon | What we show | Does the shown price change? |
|---|---|---|
| Applies to any plan, no condition | The code and the reduced price, one code per provider | Yes |
| A provider's second code | The code on our coupon page | No |
| Has a condition, such as buying two plans | The code, with its requirement spelled out | No |
| Size unknown to us | The code, with "discount shown at checkout" | No |
That split exists because a conditional discount isn't a price most buyers will pay, so we try not to let it set a lower number in a table. One exception today: Ubigi's 10% code is for new customers, and it is in Ubigi's shown prices. All the current codes are on our eSIM coupon codes page. Confirm the total at checkout either way.
How sorting works, and what it won't do
Country tables open cheapest first, using the coupon-adjusted price. You can re-sort by price per GB or by most data. Commission isn't an input: it isn't a weight or a tiebreaker, and a provider can't pay to move up the table.
There is advertising space around the table, though. Some pages show a card marked Featured above it, and rows marked AD sit between the plans. Those don't change the order of the plans or remove any of them, and a featured plan still appears in the table at its normal place. We're funded by affiliate commissions and advertising, and every buy button goes through a visible /go/ link, but neither changes a table's order.
Picking the cheapest number isn't enough on its own, because raw feed data can produce absurd winners. So a few rules decide which plans can claim a headline spot. Each of them came from a specific problem on our own pages:
| Rule | What went wrong without it | What happens now |
|---|---|---|
| Whole-plan speed caps can't be "cheapest 1 GB+" | In October 2026 we found that plans limited to 1 Mbps or less for their entire life held the cheapest 1 GB+ spot in 46 countries | They stay listed with the limit shown and still sort by price in the table. They never set a "cheapest 1 GB+" price, a best-value badge or a per-GB rank, though one can still be the lowest "from" price on a page, which counts plans of any size |
| Placeholder allowances have no price per GB | One feed stored an unlimited plan as 3,000 GB, which read as $0.01 per GB and took a country's best-value badge | A capped allowance of 999 GB or more stays listed, but has no per-GB figure |
| Plans a provider beats itself are folded away | A country's list filled up with multi-country packs that the same provider's own local plan beat on price, data, validity, hotspot, network and speed | They stay under the Regional and Global tabs but leave the main list |
That last rule is why a page's headline plan count can be larger than the number in its main table. The hidden packs are still there, one tab away.
What gets checked, and by whom
Here's where each responsibility sits. The last column is the one to read before you buy, because the bottom rows are all yours.
| Check | What it covers | Who checks it |
|---|---|---|
| Price | List price, currency conversion, a coupon set to apply to all plans | Our sync, then the provider's checkout has the final word |
| Data and validity | Allowance, days, whether it's unlimited | Our sync standardizes the feed; a daily limit may need the provider's terms |
| Coverage | Which countries a plan lists | Our sync maps them; network quality on the ground is yours to judge |
| Coupons | Whether a code still works | We confirm some at checkout; the provider's checkout has the final word, so confirm the code and the total |
| Freshness | When each catalog last updated | Our weekly re-check, published in full |
| Hotspot and 5G | What the feed or the provider's site says, or one setting for the whole catalog when a feed is silent | Our sync shows it; confirm in the provider's terms if you depend on it |
| When validity starts | First connection, install or purchase | You, in the provider's terms |
| Fair-use limits | Speed after a set amount of data | You, in the provider's terms |
| Device support | Whether your phone can use it | You, with our compatibility list as a starting point |
| Support and refunds | How problems get handled | You, before you pay |
| Company and privacy | Who's behind it and what they do with data | You, before you pay |
Our guide to checking whether an eSIM provider is legit covers the checks in the bottom half of that table, step by step.
Where the numbers in our guides come from
The same database feeds our guides and charts. When a post quotes a median or draws a chart, we compute it from the live catalog, state how it was measured, and date it, because those figures go out of date while the post stays up. Site-wide counts, such as how many plans we compare, are filled in live, so they can't drift from the rest of the site.
Figures that aren't ours, such as a carrier's day-pass price or a phone maker's setup steps, link to the source we read, and we date prices that are likely to change. If we can't trace a price or market figure to our catalog or to a primary source, we leave it out. That rule cost us several claims when we audited this blog in October 2026: lines that sounded right but had nothing behind them.
The Price Index follows the same approach. Its headline figure for each country is the cheapest list price for a plan with at least 1 GB or unlimited data, leaving out plans sold with a speed limit for their whole validity, so a 100 MB plan or a 1 Mbps route can't set the number. A plan that slows down only after its allowance still counts, and the figure is before coupons, so it can differ from the cheapest price on a country page.
What we don't do
- We don't score providers. No lab, no systematic tests, no speed tests of our own and no scores out of ten. We've tried some providers ourselves, but no ranking, badge or price comes from that, and the speed test tool on this site measures your own connection.
- We don't publish star ratings. We only publish reviews from real users, and we haven't collected any yet. We'd rather show nothing than invent social proof.
- We don't sell table positions. Order comes from price, price per GB or data. Advertising is marked, as Featured cards and AD rows, and it sits outside that order.
- We don't use fake urgency. No countdown timers, no invented scarcity.
- We don't sell eSIMs. We're a comparison site, and your purchase and any support happen with the provider.
A listing here isn't an endorsement. It means we can read a provider's catalog and compare its plans fairly. Treat it as a shortlist to check, not a stamp of approval.
What this means for you
Use our pages for what they're good at: seeing the market for your destination quickly, spotting a price that's out of line, and finding plans that cover your whole route.
Then do the part only you can do. Open the provider's page, check that the price and country list still match, read when validity starts and what the fair-use limit is, and make sure you can reach support. It takes a few minutes, and it catches the things that a catalog can't tell you.
When we get it wrong
With this much data, we will get things wrong sometimes. If you spot a wrong price, a dead coupon or incorrect coverage, tell us through the contact page. A price mismatch often corrects itself at the provider's next weekly sync, and the rest we investigate and fix. Providers can dispute a listing the same way, with the same standard of evidence: their own feed and checkout.
FAQ
Does eSIMAdvice test eSIMs?
Not as a rule. We've bought and tried some providers ourselves, but we don't test every plan or measure providers' network speeds, and nothing on a comparison page is a test result. We compare what providers' catalogs say, and we check that data for errors and freshness.
How old can the prices be?
Usually up to a week, since most catalogs are re-checked weekly. A catalog can fall further behind when its feed fails. When it does, the provider's page says so and our methodology page lists every catalog's last update, but a plan row on a country page won't carry a warning.
Do affiliate commissions affect the order of plans?
No. Tables sort by price, price per GB or data, and commission isn't an input. Featured cards and AD rows are advertising, and they're marked and sit outside that order. We don't add anything to your price when you buy through our links, and a coupon lowers it only if the code is applied at checkout.
Why is the price at checkout different from yours?
The coupon in our price may not have been applied yet, so check the promo field first. The plan may also have changed since our last sync, the coupon may have rules we couldn't show, or your bank's currency rate or local tax may differ. The provider's checkout is the final word, and you can report a mismatch through our contact page.
Why does a country page show fewer plans in the table than in its title?
Because the main list folds away multi-country packs that the same provider's own local plan beats. They're still available under the Regional and Global tabs.
Is every provider on the site safe?
We can't promise that. We check plan data, not how a company treats its customers, so a listing isn't an endorsement. Check the company, its refund terms and its support before you buy.