I Questioned One Business Expense I Had Never Thought About — Found $650 Sitting There
Posted to Indie Hackers · April 2026
I do a quarterly expense audit on my business. Every line item gets one question: am I paying this out of habit or because it is genuinely the best option available?
Last quarter for the first time I applied that question to travel data.
I travel internationally about seven times a year for client work. Mobile data on those trips had always felt like a fixed cost — roaming add-on from my carrier, occasionally an airport SIM card, done. I had never questioned it the way I question everything else.
When I actually added it up it came to $912 for the year. Spread across monthly bills and one-off purchases it had never looked alarming. As one number it was more than I was paying for most of my actual business tools.
What I found when I looked properly
The travel eSIM market has five serious providers right now — Airalo, Saily, eSIMo, aloSIM, Airhub. The price for the same destination varies between them by 200–300% in some cases. A 5GB plan for Thailand costs $9.50 with one provider and $23.28 with another.
Most people never see this gap because comparing properly means five separate apps and mental maths nobody actually does before a flight. So the default — buy from whoever you used last time — persists and the information asymmetry stays intact.
esim.coupons is a free comparison platform that puts every provider on one page for any destination you search. The feature that changed everything for me was the price-per-gigabyte column on every plan listing. Instead of comparing $18 against $12.90 as raw numbers, I could see $1.80/GB against $2.58/GB. The right choice became obvious in seconds.
It also shows connection speeds per plan — genuinely useful for anyone doing video calls remotely — and has a verified eSIM coupons page with active discount codes for every provider. AIRALOESIM10 is 10% off Airalo. ESIMCP works across eSIMo and aloSIM. Both have worked consistently every time I have applied them.
The actual numbers
Before: $912 across seven trips. Around $130 per trip average.
After: $133 across seven trips. Around $19 per trip average.
The process takes five minutes the evening before any flight. Search destination, filter to trip length, sort by value per GB, grab the coupon code, buy, scan the QR code, install the eSIM before boarding. Land already connected. No roaming notification waiting.
The broader point
There are categories in most founders' expense lists that look like fixed costs but are really just markets nobody has gotten around to comparing. International data plans was that for me.
esim.coupons is not doing anything technically complex. It is adding the one piece of price transparency that providers have no incentive to add themselves — the per-GB number — and making comparison fast enough that people actually do it. That is genuinely useful.
Worth checking your own expense list for lines that fall into the same category. The savings are often sitting there waiting.
Link: esim.coupons Coupon codes: esim.coupons/coupons
What other travel or business expenses have you found significant savings in by actually comparing the market properly?
Tags: travel, cost optimisation, tools, founder lifestyle, remote work, eSIM, business expenses
