Unlimited eSIM daily data limits, seller by seller

Last updated: 29 August 2026. Written by the RapideSIM Travel Team. Every figure below was read on the seller's own public pages on 29 August 2026, in US dollars, and each row carries the page it came from. We sell travel eSIMs and we are one of the eight sellers in the table, which is exactly why this page publishes our own number first and does not place us at the top of anything. The method, including what we could not check, is at the bottom.

The short answer

The published daily allowance, seller by seller

Where that leaves us: last, tied

Six of these eight sellers publish a daily allowance. Ours is 2 GB every 24 hours — the smallest of the six, level with Nomad and Simbye and less than half of Saily's 5 GB on its main country plans. On this specific measure, three sellers beat us and two tie us. That is the whole table, and we are not going to bury it three screens down.

What we will say for our own number is procedural, not commercial: it is written down, on a page anyone can open before paying, with the reset interval and the post-threshold speed attached to it. Two of the eight sellers here do not give a buyer that, and one of them is the largest brand in the comparison. A published 2 GB is a worse deal than a published 5 GB. It is a better deal than an unpublished number, because an unpublished number can be anything, including 2.

Saily's allowance is not one number, and the number is hidden by default

Saily is the most generous seller in this table and also the one most easily misquoted. The allowance changes with the destination: we read 5 GB/day on the United States, Japan, Turkey and Spain plans, and 3 GB/day on the Europe regional plan covering 35 countries — all five on 29 August 2026, currency selector set to USD. So "Saily gives you 5 GB a day" is true in Madrid and false on a Europe regional plan bought for the same trip. Any comparison page quoting a single Saily figure has read one product page and generalised.

Worth knowing before you shop: on the Turkey and Spain pages the pre-selected "Best Choice" tier is a capped plan, and the "Unlimited plan includes: 5GB/Day without a speed limit" panel only appears once you click the Unlimited option. The number is published, but it is not on screen until you ask for it.

What the daily allowance does not tell you

Three things sit outside that table and can matter more than the number in it.

1. The speed you drop to is not one speed

"Then it slows down" covers a real range. Four sellers publish 1 Mbit/s. Nomad's own Japan page publishes both 1 Mbps (in the plan data) and 512 kbps (in the notice above the plan selector) — we read both on the same page on the same day, and we cannot tell you which one applies. Simbye publishes no figure at all.

The gap is not cosmetic: 512 kbps is half of 1 Mbit/s. As a rough guide to what each carries — this is arithmetic and the sellers' own descriptions, not a field test we ran:

• 1 Mbit/s — our policy page describes it as enough for "messaging, maps and navigation, email, web pages, music and standard-definition video calls", and "not enough for high-definition video or for large downloads". Airalo describes its own 1 Mbps the same way: "enough for messages and maps, but not heavy streaming".
• 512 kbps — messaging, maps and email still work. A standard-definition video call is at the edge of what fits, so expect it to degrade rather than hold.
• An unpublished speed — you find out on the road. That is the honest description of what Simbye, Holafly and Yesim leave you with on this point.

A seller with a 3 GB allowance that drops to 1 Mbit/s and a seller with a 4 GB allowance that drops to an unstated speed are not comparable on the allowance alone.

2. Sharing your connection is often capped separately, and far lower

This is the trap that costs the most money. Some sellers apply a second, much smaller ceiling to tethering — or forbid it outright on the cheaper unlimited range — so the headline daily allowance is not the number that governs your laptop.

Read the first two rows together and the ranking in the first table inverts for anyone travelling with a laptop. A 4 GB daily allowance that does not permit tethering at all is worth less to you than a 2 GB allowance your laptop can draw on, and Holafly's unstated phone allowance comes with a stated 1 GB ceiling the moment you share it. Decide which of your devices needs the data before you compare the headline numbers.

3. A generous allowance only helps if it exists for your destination

An unlimited tier that covers a fraction of a catalogue is only useful if your country is in that fraction. This is measurable for the three sellers that publish a machine-readable catalogue, and not measurable for the other five, so here is the counting rule in full, so you can re-run it yourself: a product counts if the word "unlimited" appears in the product title or in the title of one of its variants, counted from the seller's public products.json file on 29 August 2026.

Two cautions on that table. First, "not established" is not "none": Airalo's own FAQ says "You can buy Airalo eSIMs with unlimited data packages for over 130+ countries worldwide", and that is their marketing count, not an inventory we audited. Second, an earlier version of our own comparison pages counted only variant titles, which understated both competitors and flattered our lead. The rule above is the corrected one, and it is written here so you can check the arithmetic rather than take our word for it.

The conclusion that costs us sales: if you tether, buy a capped plan

Every plan in the first table has a daily ceiling. A fixed-volume plan does not. Ours says so in our own policy, in a sentence we could have left out and did not: "Our fixed-volume plans — 1 GB, 5 GB, 10 GB and up, depending on the destination — have no daily ceiling: the volume you bought is yours to use at full speed, on whichever days you choose. If you expect to work from a tethered laptop, a fixed-volume plan will usually suit you better than an unlimited one."

The arithmetic is simple. A laptop doing a normal working day of video calls, cloud sync and browsing will pass 2 GB before lunch, and then you are at 1 Mbit/s until the reset — every day of the trip. A 20 GB capped plan spent at whatever rate the week actually demands will serve that traveller better than any of the eight unlimited plans above, including Saily's 5 GB. If you are buying data for a laptop, the daily allowance table is the wrong table to be reading.

Unlimited is the right buy for the opposite profile: a phone-first traveller who wants one price, no arithmetic, and no risk of running out on day nine. That is a real and common profile. It is just not the one that shows up searching for daily data limits.

How this page was checked

• Every figure was read on the seller's own public pages on 29 August 2026. Nothing here comes from a third-party blog, an affiliate roundup or a price aggregator.
• Where a seller's number appears in more than one place, the page quotes each place and says when they disagree — Nomad's two throttle speeds and eTravelSim's three tethering answers are in the tables for that reason, not as accusations.
• Saily displays euros by default from Europe and hides the unlimited allowance behind the plan selector on some destinations. We switched the currency selector to USD and clicked the Unlimited tier on each of the five pages before reading.
• Catalogue shares were counted from the sellers' own products.json files with the single rule stated above, applied identically to all three.
• We did not test network speed, latency or coverage anywhere. No claim on this page describes how fast any of these eSIMs actually runs in the field. Any page that ranks eSIMs by speed without publishing test locations, dates and devices is guessing.
• Where a cell says "not covered by this survey" or "not established", it means we did not verify it — not that the seller fails on it.
• Sellers change these pages. Ours changed on 29 August 2026, which is the day it first carried a number. Use the links, not our summary, when the stake is real money.

Two things on our own site we are still fixing

A page that audits other sellers' published figures should audit its own. As at 29 August 2026: the title tag on our home page reads "from $1.90", while the cheapest plan in our catalogue is $1.49 (1 GB for 7 days, several destinations, read on our public catalogue file). And our Trustpilot profile describes a service "in over 150 countries" when our catalogue holds 103 products and our home page says "100+ destinations". Neither error is in your favour to discover after buying, so they are named here.

If you want to look at our plans

Now that the table is on the record: our unlimited tier exists on 91 of our 103 plans at 2 GB every 24 hours then 1 Mbit/s, and our capped plans run from 1 GB to 75 GB depending on the destination, starting at $1.49, with no daily ceiling. The catalogue is on rapidesim.com; the four destinations most often compared are United States, Japan, Turkey and Europe. Whichever of these eight sellers you choose, open their unlimited usage policy before paying. Ours is at rapidesim.com/pages/unlimited-usage-policy-1.

Related

• Travel eSIM comparison: eight sellers, one table — prices on identical tiers, apps, top-ups and review scores
• Saily alternatives — the seller with the largest allowance in the table above
• eTravelSim alternatives — 4 GB a day, and the tethering rules that come with it
• Holafly alternatives — one flat price, and no published daily figure
• Nomad alternatives — the same 2 GB allowance as ours
• Yesim alternatives — the seller that states it sets no fair use policy of its own
• Simbye alternatives — 2 GB a day, and a third of the catalogue
• Airalo eSIM: what you get, what it costs, and the alternatives

Last updated 29 August 2026 by the RapideSIM Travel Team. Every figure on this page is re-read when the page is updated, and the page is re-dated the day that happens. Found a number that has changed, or one we got wrong? Tell us and we will correct it and re-date the page.