How Datadopt measures eSIM prices

What the catalogue covers

Datadopt tracks 131 active eSIM providers, of which 124 currently publish at least one live plan. Together they amount to 0 active plans, mapped onto 228 countries and territories.

A plan enters the catalogue only when we can read four things from the provider : a data volume, a validity period, a price in a named currency, and the list of countries it works in. A plan we cannot attach to any country is dropped rather than published with an empty coverage list, because a plan nobody can use in a specific place would distort every country ranking it appears in.

The catalogue is not exhaustive and does not claim to be. It covers the providers we have integrated, which are the ones that publish a machine-readable catalogue or an affiliate feed we can read reliably. A provider missing from Datadopt is not a judgement on that provider.

How often the data is refreshed

Collection runs in two waves. Providers whose catalogue actually moves are re-collected every 7 days, on Mondays. The stable remainder is re-collected every 15 days, on the 1st and the 16th of each month. Which provider sits in which wave is decided from the number of plans their last runs added, not from how large they are.

There is no real-time pricing on Datadopt, and we never describe the data as live or daily. A price you see here is the price we read at the last collection for that provider, which can be up to 15 days old. Every page that shows a catalogue figure also shows the date of the last successful collection, and the provider site remains the authority at the moment you buy.

Prices that move inside a collection window, flash sales in particular, are the known weak point of this method. We would rather publish a dated figure you can check than an undated figure you have to trust.

How we compute the price per gigabyte

The price per gigabyte is the plan price in euros divided by its volume in gigabytes, where one gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. Nothing else enters the formula : no weighting, no editorial adjustment, no partner bonus.

For country rankings, a plan is eligible only if it is active, carries a fixed volume, holds between 1 and 200 GB, has a price above zero and a validity of 90 days or less. The bounds exist to keep the metric comparable : a 500 GB corporate bundle and a 500 MB taster answer different needs and would both pull a country average away from what a traveller actually buys.

Country rankings are published only for countries with at least 20 eligible offers. Below that depth a single aggressive plan decides the whole ranking, so we show the figures but not the rank.

How we convert currencies

Providers quote in their own currency. We store two values for every plan : the native amount with its ISO currency code, and a price in euros used for all comparisons.

The conversion uses a fixed reference table that we update by hand, not a live exchange feed. That table was last reviewed in July 2026. A stable table means a ranking does not reshuffle because of a daily exchange move, and it means a euro figure here can sit a few percent away from the rate of the day. When a provider quotes in your own currency, the interface shows that native amount rather than a converted one.

The stored native amount is the price actually asked by the provider. It is never a struck-through reference price or a pre-discount figure.

How we define tiers

Durations are grouped into four tiers : 1 to 3 days, 4 to 7 days, 8 to 30 days, and 31 days or more. These are the brackets behind every duration filter on the site, and they follow how trips are actually bought rather than a round division of the calendar.

Volumes are normalised before anything is compared. Many providers market a gigabyte as 1000 megabytes, so we convert those to binary megabytes : one gigabyte is always 1024 MB across the catalogue. Without that step a filter for "at least 1 GB" would silently drop plans, and every price per gigabyte would be off by about 2.4 percent.

How we treat unlimited plans

An unlimited plan carries no volume, so it has no price per gigabyte. It is stored with an explicit unlimited flag, excluded from every per-gigabyte metric and from every country price ranking, and compared on price per day instead.

We separate three families : a fixed volume, a daily quota that resets each day, and genuinely unlimited data. The daily-quota family matters because it is routinely marketed as unlimited while it is not : once the daily allowance is used, the speed drops. Where a provider publishes that allowance or the reduced speed, we record it and show it on the plan.

The sources we use

The catalogue comes from the providers themselves : their public product APIs, their storefront feeds, their sitemaps, and the affiliate catalogues they publish. We read what they publish, and we do not estimate a price they have not published.

Provider ratings are aggregated from public review platforms, currently Trustpilot, the App Store and the Play Store, with the review count kept alongside each score so a 5.0 out of 3 reviews cannot pass for a 5.0 out of 3000.

Country reference data, names and coverage mapping come from the ISO 3166 country list. We do not currently run our own network speed measurements, and we do not publish third-party throughput figures as if they were ours.

How provider ratings are aggregated

A provider page shows one score per platform we could read, and an average of those scores weighted by each platform's review count. A provider with 90 000 App Store ratings and 40 Trustpilot reviews therefore gets an average that mostly reflects the App Store, which is what the evidence actually says rather than the flattering reading.

A platform is kept only when it gives both a score and a review count. A score with no count cannot be weighted, and publishing it unweighted would give one small platform the same voice as one with thousands of reviews. Below 20 reviews in total we still show the score, but we never rank on it and never fold it into a destination average : at that volume one unhappy customer moves the whole figure.

The scores carry the date we collected them, because a review average is not a product fact : it moves. We do not publish the composite average as structured data for search engines, because that composite exists on no platform and no reader can check it against a source. Each platform score, with its link, stays visible on the page so you can.

Datadopt collects no reviews of its own and gives no editorial mark to a provider. We have no audience of our own to survey, and inventing a score would be worse than having none.

How the catalogue score is computed

Provider pages carry a catalogue score out of 100. It is not an editorial mark and not a reader rating : it is a weighted sum of four figures taken straight from the catalogue, each printed next to the score so you can check it. The weighting is country coverage 35 %, median price per gigabyte 30 %, catalogue breadth 25 % and plan-format mix 10 %. Country coverage leads because it is the first thing that rules a provider out for a given trip, price per gigabyte comes next because it is what the comparison is for, breadth third as a proxy for finding the right size, and format mix last because it only has four possible values.

Three of the four criteria are normalised as a percentile rank inside the set of providers we list, not on an absolute scale. Catalogue sizes span three orders of magnitude, from a few dozen plans to more than twenty thousand, so an absolute scale would score every provider but the largest at near zero and tell you nothing. A percentile rank answers the comparative question the page actually asks. The fourth, the plan-format mix, is simply how many of the three formats (fixed volume, daily allowance, unlimited) the provider populates, out of three. Price per gigabyte is a median, not a mean, because the catalogues carry a long tail of small plans whose per-gigabyte price is several times the typical one.

When a criterion has no figure, it is dropped and its weight is redistributed over the others rather than counted as a zero. A provider selling only unlimited plans has no price per gigabyte, and scoring that absence as "the most expensive provider listed" would be a penalty we invented.

Deliberately excluded from the score : 5G, hotspot sharing and top-up. These three come from the providers’ own plan listings and are filled very unevenly, so they describe how talkative a feed is rather than what a provider sells. On the active catalogue, most providers flag no 5G plan at all while a handful flag every plan, hotspot support is declared on every plan by the large majority, and top-up is declared by none at all for most of them. We publish them under the score as "declared on X of Y plans", and an absence there means "not declared", not "not available".

The score is recomputed when the catalogue is refreshed, and it is not published as structured data for search engines : it exists only here, so no reader could check it against an outside source.

Affiliate disclosure

Datadopt earns a commission when a visitor subscribes to an offer through one of our links, at no extra cost to the visitor. That revenue funds the collection, the editorial work and the hosting.

Commissions do not enter any ranking. Rankings and comparisons are computed from the catalogue data described above, by formula, and a provider with no affiliate relationship is ranked by the same formula as a partner. What the affiliation does change is coverage : we integrate partner catalogues first, simply because they are the ones that give us a reliable feed. That bias in who gets listed is real and worth stating plainly.

What this method does not tell you

It does not tell you how fast the connection will be. Price per gigabyte says nothing about the host networks a provider roams on, nor about congestion at your destination.

It does not capture fair-use terms we cannot read. Where a provider hides a throttling threshold in its terms rather than publishing it per plan, the plan appears without it.

And it does not replace a check on the provider site before paying. A dated figure is a starting point for a decision, not a quote.