I Spent $900 on Travel Data Last Year Without Realising It — Then I Found a Better Way
Posted to Indie Hackers · April 2026
I want to start with a number that genuinely embarrassed me when I worked it out.
$912.
That is roughly what I spent on mobile data across my international trips last year. Roaming add-ons, airport SIM cards, one desperate hotel WiFi purchase at $18 for 24 hours because my roaming had throttled to unusable. All of it quietly accumulating in my business expenses without me ever stopping to question whether it was the right amount to be paying.
I run a small product studio. I travel internationally about seven or eight times a year — client meetings, a couple of conferences, the occasional working trip somewhere I actually want to be. Data is not optional for any of it. I had mentally filed it under "unavoidable overhead" and moved on.
Then I actually looked at the market properly for the first time and realised I had been wrong about that assumption for years.
The thing I had been getting wrong
The travel eSIM market has matured significantly over the past three years. There are now five serious providers — Airalo, Saily, eSIMo, aloSIM, Airhub — covering 150+ countries between them, with thousands of individual plans at genuinely competitive prices.
The problem is that the price differences between providers for the same destination are enormous. For Japan, for example, a 5GB plan ranges from $12.90 with one provider to $23.28 with another. Same country. Similar data. More than $10 difference on a single purchase.
Most people — myself included until recently — never see this gap because comparing properly means opening five separate apps or websites, cross-referencing plans with different naming conventions and data amounts, and doing mental maths that nobody actually does standing in a departure lounge.
So the default behaviour is: buy from whoever you used last time, or whoever came up first in a search, and accept that international data plans are just expensive.
They are not. They are expensive if you do not compare. There is a difference.
What I actually use now
esim.coupons is a free comparison platform that pulls every major provider's plans onto one page for any destination you search. No account, no app, no friction. Just search, filter, compare, buy.
The feature that made the biggest difference for me was the price-per-gigabyte column shown on every plan listing. I had been comparing $18 against $12.90 as headline numbers without properly accounting for the fact that one was 10GB and the other was 5GB. The per-GB figure makes the comparison instantaneous. You stop looking at what the plan costs and start looking at what the data actually costs.
The platform also shows connection speeds for each plan. This is the detail I had never thought to check before and the one that probably mattered most for my use case. A cheap plan that throttles to 900kbps after the high-speed data runs out is technically affordable but practically useless for video calls or uploading anything larger than an email attachment. Seeing the speed alongside the price on the same row is the kind of information that providers have zero incentive to make easy to find on their own platforms.
There is also a dedicated eSIM coupons page with verified, active discount codes for every provider. Working codes right now include AIRALOESIM10 for 10% off Airalo and ESIMCP for discounts across eSIMo and aloSIM. I check this page before every purchase. The individual savings are modest — $1.50 to $3 per transaction — but they have applied consistently every time I have tried them, and across eight trips that is real money returned for essentially zero effort.
What the numbers look like now
Before using the comparison: averaging around $114 per trip across roaming, airport SIMs, and occasional backup purchases.
After: averaging around $19 per trip using plans found through esim.coupons with a discount code applied.
Seven trips last year. Rough saving: just over $650.
I want to be careful not to oversell this. $650 is not going to change the trajectory of a business. But it is a software subscription, or a conference ticket, or just cash that stays in the account rather than disappearing into carrier margins. And the comparative effort required to achieve it is five minutes before each trip, not five hours.
The habit I built around it
The process is now part of my standard pre-trip checklist alongside checking in online and downloading offline maps:
Open esim.coupons the evening before flying. Search the destination. Filter to the trip length. Sort by value per GB. Check the speed column. Open the coupons page in a second tab. Copy the relevant code. Buy through the provider's checkout with the code applied. Scan the QR code when it arrives. Install the eSIM on my phone before I leave home.
Land at destination. Come off airplane mode. Already connected.
No roaming notification. No SIM card kiosk in arrivals. No queuing at a phone shop while jetlagged. Just data, working, immediately.
The first time this happened — landing at Tokyo Narita with Google Maps already live before I'd stood up from my seat — it felt almost absurdly simple for something I had been overcomplicating for years.
Why I think this is relevant here specifically
The IH community has a lot of people who travel internationally with some regularity. Founders visiting clients, attending events, doing research trips, or just working from somewhere that is not their default city.
A large proportion of those people are almost certainly doing what I was doing — treating travel data as a fixed cost rather than a market worth five minutes of comparison. The tooling now exists to close that information gap. The prices are genuinely different between providers. The coupon codes are real and current. The eSIM activation process is simple enough that it takes less than two minutes once you have done it once.
There is also a slightly larger principle here that I think is worth naming. A lot of the value we capture as indie builders comes from information asymmetry — knowing something the market does not yet price in, or making a process easier that was previously complicated enough that people just accepted the default.
esim.coupons is doing exactly that for the travel data market. It takes a category where providers have historically benefited from comparison friction, adds price transparency through the per-GB column, surfaces working discount codes in one place, and makes the whole thing accessible in a few minutes rather than a research project.
That is a genuinely useful thing. It is also a good reminder that "unavoidable overhead" is sometimes just a category nobody has gotten around to optimising yet.
One honest caveat
The site currently lists five providers. That is the main players covered comprehensively, but it is not every eSIM option in existence. For very niche destinations you may still find options elsewhere. For the vast majority of popular travel destinations — Japan, Thailand, Europe, the US, Australia, Southeast Asia — the coverage is thorough and the comparison is the most useful one I have found.
Happy to answer questions if anyone has them — particularly around specific destinations or device compatibility for first-time eSIM users.
Link: esim.coupons — free travel eSIM comparison, no account required
Discount codes: esim.coupons/coupons
How eSIM setup works: esim.coupons/how-it-works
Tags: travel, tools, cost optimisation, remote work, founder lifestyle, digital nomad, eSIM, international travel, indie hacker tools
