I Was Wasting $150+ Per Trip on Travel Data Until I Actually Compared My Options — Here's What I Found
Posted to Indie Hackers · April 2026
Quick context before I get into this: I travel about eight times a year internationally — a mix of client work, remote sprints, and the occasional proper holiday. For the first three years of running my own thing, I treated roaming charges like a tax I just had to pay. A nuisance line item in the monthly expenses I never questioned.
Then I actually ran the numbers.
$12/day roaming add-on from my UK carrier. Average of 12–14 days per trip. Eight trips per year. That's somewhere between $1,100 and $1,350 a year — quietly draining out of my business account every time I went somewhere interesting.
I want to share what I found when I actually looked into alternatives properly, because I think a lot of people in this community — especially remote founders, nomads, and anyone doing client work across borders — are in the same situation I was.
The problem with how most of us buy travel data
Here is the thing about travel eSIM plans that took me too long to figure out: the market is genuinely competitive now, but you would never know it unless you compared properly.
There are five or six major international eSIM providers — Airalo, Saily, eSIMo, aloSIM, Airhub — all targeting the same traveller audience with fairly similar products. The price differences between them for the same destination and data amount can be enormous. We're talking 200–300% variance for what is essentially the same service.
The reason most people never notice is that comparing them requires opening five separate apps or websites, cross-referencing plans with different naming conventions, doing your own mental maths on cost-per-GB across different data sizes, and doing this all over again for each new destination.
Nobody does that. So most people just buy from whoever they used last time or whoever appears first in search, and overpay consistently.
The tool that actually solved this
I found esim.coupons — a free comparison site that aggregates plans from all the major travel eSIM providers on one page, with one filter system, and one critical column that nobody else was showing me: price per gigabyte.
That single number changes everything.
Before I found the site, I was comparing $18 against $12.90 and thinking "well $12.90 is cheaper." What I didn't internalise was that the $18 plan was 10GB and the $12.90 was 5GB. The $18 plan was actually better value at $1.80/GB versus $2.58/GB. Without that calculation sitting in front of me, I was flying blind.
The site also shows connection speeds per plan — something I hadn't seen on any provider's own app. This matters more than I expected. A $0.90/GB plan running at 900kbps after the high-speed allowance is technically cheap but practically unusable for video calls or uploading files. A $2.58/GB plan running at 2,580kbps is a completely different working experience. Seeing both numbers side by side let me make a decision I actually understood.
What the numbers looked like in practice
For my last Japan trip (12 days, fairly heavy data use — Maps constantly, a few video calls, the usual) I ran a comparison on the site before buying.
The plan I would have defaulted to — Saily Japan 5GB, 30 days — was sitting at $20.39, or $4.08 per GB.
The plan I actually bought — Airalo Japan 10GB, 30 days — was $18.00, or $1.80 per GB.
Then I checked the eSIM coupons page on the site (which lists verified, active discount codes for every provider with expiry dates — a detail that sounds boring but saves real money). The AIRALOESIM10 code brought the Airalo plan to $16.20.
So: twice the data, $4.19 less, and I arrived in Tokyo with the eSIM already installed and active. Landed at Narita. Signal before I stood up from my seat.
Compare that to the year before when I landed, spent twenty minutes hunting for a SIM card kiosk in arrivals, paid ¥3,500 for a local card that took another fifteen minutes to activate, and started my first day in Japan already slightly behind schedule.
The actual workflow now — for anyone who wants to copy it
I've turned this into a repeatable five-minute step I do before every trip, the same way I check in online the night before flying:
1. Go to esim.coupons, search the destination
2. Filter by trip length and minimum data requirement
3. Sort by price per GB
4. Cross-check the speed column for anything that'll affect work calls
5. Open the coupons page in a new tab, copy the relevant discount code
6. Buy through the provider's checkout with the code applied
7. Scan the QR code when it arrives by email, install the eSIM at home before departure
The whole thing takes under ten minutes if you're new to it. Under five once you've done it a couple of times.
Why this is relevant to the IH community specifically
I suspect a lot of people building and running things independently have the same relationship with travel data costs that I did — treating it as unavoidable overhead rather than something worth optimising.
The aggregated saving for me across eight trips last year was somewhere around $680 compared to what I'd been spending. That's not life-changing money, but it's a reasonable chunk of a software subscription, a conference ticket, or just cash that stays in the business.
More than the money, there's something genuinely useful about arriving at a destination already connected. If you're running a business solo, being unreachable for even an hour because you're sorting out a SIM card in an arrivals hall has a real cost that doesn't show up in any spreadsheet.
The travel eSIM comparison problem is the kind of unsexy, niche-but-real pain point that I think this community appreciates. It's not glamorous. It's just a market where information asymmetry was causing people to consistently overpay, and a simple aggregation tool closed that gap.
A few honest caveats
Not trying to make this sound like a perfect tool with no rough edges:
Coverage depth varies by destination. The site currently lists five providers. That's the main players covered, but it's not every eSIM option on earth. For very obscure destinations you might still need to go direct.
Speeds are estimates. The kbps figures shown are the throttled speeds after high-speed data runs out, not guaranteed real-world performance. Actual speeds depend on local networks. I've found the figures accurate enough to be useful for filtering, but treat them as indicative rather than precise.
The coupon codes have expiry dates. The site displays these clearly, but it's worth double-checking before you assume a code is still valid. In my experience they've always been current when I've used them, but worth a two-second check.
The broader point
There's a version of this for a lot of things in the indie founder toolkit. We optimise our subscription costs, our hosting costs, our tooling — and then somehow accept that travel data is just expensive and there's nothing to be done about it.
The international data plan market moved fast enough in the last three years that the default assumptions most of us have about what travel data costs are genuinely out of date. The infrastructure for cheap eSIM activation before travel is fully there. The comparison tooling is there too. The only thing that was missing was awareness.
Hopefully this is useful for at least a few people here who are running the same old roaming add-on out of habit.
Would be curious to hear how others in the community handle this — particularly anyone doing heavy international travel. Are you using eSIMs already? Any providers or approaches worth knowing about beyond what I've covered?
Link: esim.coupons — free comparison, no account required
Coupons page: esim.coupons/coupons — current verified discount codes for all providers
Tags: travel, remote work, digital nomad, tools, cost optimisation, founder lifestyle, eSIM, international travel
