The 119 countries with no eSIM of their own
Ask which eSIM to buy for Italy and nobody sells one. This is how much of the world is in that position, what covers it instead, and what it costs.
Under re-verification, 2026-09-08. Our Airalo figures are incomplete for many countries: Airalo shows fixed-gigabyte plans on a separate tab from unlimited ones, and our crawler only read whichever tab loaded first. Where we recorded only Airalo unlimited plans, a cheaper qualifying plan may exist — so the numbers below may overstate what a competitor charges, which flatters us. We are re-crawling and will republish with a dated correction. Found by a colleague testing our data against the live pages, not by our own checks.
Most of the world has no eSIM of its own
Ask which eSIM to buy for Italy, Germany or Spain and the honest answer is that nobody sells one. Of the 197 destinations we can price, only 78 have a single-country plan on sale from any of Airalo, Saily, Holafly or EasyTravelData. The other 119 are reachable only through a regional pack — one eSIM good across a continent, or in some cases most of the planet.
That is not a gap in our data. It is how the market is built: carriers wholesale by region, and a single-country SKU only exists where the volume justifies one.
What it costs you
A week of data costs a median of $12.99 in countries that have their own plan and $18.99 in countries that do not — a difference of $6.00. Buying coverage you will not use is the normal case, not the exception.
Which packs are doing the work
For the 119 countries without a local plan, these are the products that turn out cheapest most often:
| Pack | Cheapest for N countries |
|---|---|
| Europe Special 5 GB | 31 |
| Americas 5 GB | 16 |
| Best World 10 GB | 12 |
| Global Special 5 GB | 9 |
| Africa 5 GB | 7 |
| Caribbean 5 GB | 5 |
| World 10 GB | 5 |
| LATAM 5 GB | 4 |
One regional product is the cheapest option for 31 separate destinations. If you are going to any of them, you are buying the same eSIM.
Where it gets expensive
When the only thing covering a country is a near-global pack, the price reflects the pack, not the country:
| Country | Cheapest week | What covers it |
|---|---|---|
| Belize | $73.99 | World 10 GB (184 countries) |
| Cape Verde | $73.99 | World 10 GB (184 countries) |
| Lesotho | $73.99 | World 10 GB (184 countries) |
| Mozambique | $73.99 | World 10 GB (184 countries) |
| New Caledonia | $73.99 | World 10 GB (184 countries) |
| Aruba | $43.99 | Best World 10 GB (173 countries) |
| Botswana | $43.99 | Best World 10 GB (173 countries) |
| Guinea | $43.99 | Best World 10 GB (173 countries) |
| Guinea-Bissau | $43.99 | Best World 10 GB (173 countries) |
| Liberia | $43.99 | Best World 10 GB (173 countries) |
How to read this
Prices are the cheapest plan of at least seven days and at least 5 GB, or unlimited — the same rule used everywhere on this site, set out in How we compare. Every figure links to the provider page it was read from; open any country on the map and check.
Disclosure: this site is operated by EasyTravelData, one of the four providers compared. Nothing in this report depends on which of them is cheapest — it is about what exists at all.
The data
Everything above is computed from one CSV file, one row per country, with the source URL for each price. The filename carries a hash of its contents, so it can never come to point at different numbers. Reuse it with attribution.