Affordable and flexible without data packages: This international eSIM impresses in our travel test
According to the eSIMs.io comparison portal, you can choose among more than 33,514 options in 2025, when you are looking for a data package for your next trip. By force of habit, many choose one of the earlier and therefore most known eSIM providers such as Airalo but then pay more than necessary. On the other hand, those who always pick the cheapest option for their destination are sometimes out of luck with the quality of the local provider at their destination used by the eSIM, as the author of this review knows from his own experience.
Data packages as a crutch
Another problem lies in having to choose your data volume before your trip in almost all cases and then buy it in advance. Are 3 GB enough for a month or should you better buy the 10 GB package that offers a much more attractive price per GB? And when you lose the unused part of your data volume at the end of your trip, the great deal turns out to be an unnecessary extra expense.
Regional packages with some traps
If you travel through several countries of one region, you can also choose regional packages with almost all providers, for example for the whole of Europe or Asia. But there can be some hidden traps here, as my colleague Andreas Sebayang recently found out in his recent eSIM test of Resolut. His Asia-Pacific package actually didn't include Taiwan, and sometimes Laos or Cambodia can also be missing from so-called Asia packages.
This means that you definitely have to check the list of included countries in regional or global packages, as I once had to learn painfully when the "global" eSIM from Eskimo refused to create a connection in Tunis. Unfortunately, Tunesia wasn't included in the global package of the Eskimo eSIM provider. It can become pretty uncomfortable if you have wasted your money on a package that leaves you without an Internet connection when you need it.
Pay as you go as the solution
If you want to stay flexible, you can also choose among the increasingly popular pay-as-you-go alternatives, where you don't have to buy your data package in advance. Instead, you get charged a fixed price per GB per country for the actual data volume used. Of course, you also need the corresponding credit balance on your account with the provider. At this point there are a few eSIM providers who offer this pricing model, although with a single exception they also offer the classic data packages - for good reason, as we will see.
Pay as you go providers
In addition to Roamless and Surfroam, the Swiss company Yesim also advertises its international eSIM. As currency, Yesim uses so-called Ycoins with 1 Ycoin conveniently corresponding to a Euro. After purchasing a credit balance via Google/Apple Pay, credit card, Paypal, or crypto and then setting up and activating your international eSIM, you can immediately start surfing in currently more than 175 countries at transparent prices. According to Yesim, more countries will be added in the future.
Easy installation
At this point, we assume that most people know how to install an eSIM - if necessary, you can also find out from illustrated instructions in the corresponding app (Android | iOS). We installed and tested the eSIM on our Vivo X100 Pro, although it is not shown in the list of compatible devices, although at least its successor is listed. In contrast to some other eSIM providers (such as RedBull Mobile) who limit their eSIM installation to a list of mainstream phones from Apple, Google, Samsung et al., we did not run into any problems at all with Yesim.
Cost control with pay as you go
Yesim shows the price per GB in the countries available for pay as you go both in their app and on their website. Currently this is already more than 175 countries. At the same time, your current Ycoin balance is also shown converted into Megabytes at the current GB price of the country where you are. Of course, you pay slightly more per GB without a fixed data package compared to buying a huge 10 GB package from some cheap providers, although the additional costs remain within limits in most cases.
Starting from 1.50 Euros ($1.71) in the EU and USA
I find the price per GB fairly affordable in most (but not all) EU countries and the USA. 1.5€ per GB without a prepaid data package is very competitive, if you consider that you are not paying any money for partially unused data packages. According to the price comparison tool mentioned above, packages start from about 0.60€ ($0.68) per GB, but that is only the case if you book at least 10GB or more from the most affordable provider and use it all within 30 days or so - while losing the unused data balance. In contrast, you won't ever lose any data balance with the "international Yesim," and there is no such thing as "unused data volume."
Asia and the expensive exceptions
Unfortunately, not all of Europe is currently covered at 1.5€ per GB: in some countries such as Hungary, Malta, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, the UK, and the Scandinavian countries, you pay 4€ ($4.56) per GB used. At the same price level on average, you can also travel through many Asian countries, although there are also cheaper destinations such as Malaysia at around 2€ ($2.28) per GB. In some less popular travel destinations, it can also become significantly more expensive. Those who surf in Zimbabwe, the Seychelles, or Ivory Coast using the international eSIM from Yesim can pay up to 100€ (~$114) per GB, with Bhutan being the most expensive at 120€ (~$137) per GB. Fortunately, those are the exceptions.
Price level: Slightly more expensive than data packages
For that reason, the pay as you go system from Yesim isn't currently a solution for all countries (yet). In addition to a few countries where the international eSIM doesn't work at this point but where you can get classical data packages from Yesim, the price per GB varies significantly even within Europe or Asia - although most countries still fall within the acceptable 1.5 to 5 Euro range. In the future, Yesim could make some welcome improvements here. But at least, you can see transparently in the app and on the website how many GB you can get for your Ycoins in the current country, allowing you to switch to another solution such as a data package if needed.
Price comparison with the few competitors
This brings up the question whether the other pay as you go competitors can perhaps offer a better deal. To be honest, we didn't find many direct competitors. As mentioned above, Roamless and Surfroam are first and foremost here. Even though some other competitors offer some more or less widely usable global eSIMs, they use the classic data package charging with expirations between a month and up to two years (Eskimo). According to our random sampling, Surfroam is at a similar level as Yesim in many countries. Roamless uses a unified 2.45 US-Dollar price per GB (2.15 Euro) in more countries which sometimes makes it cheaper and other times more expensive. We did not find any premium price peaks up to 100 Euros in some exotic countries with Surfroam at all, and with Roamless it was less often than with Yesim.
Special Yesim offer: virtual numbers
What neither of the two competitors offer is virtual phone numbers. In addition to its international data SIM, Yesim also offers a phone number from the USA, the Netherlands, Canada, or Israel, which you can then use to register for services such as Whatsapp, Telegram, Tinder, Tiktok, or Grindr, if you want to use these or other services anonymously. The phone number costs 3 Euro per month (paid yearly) or 6 Euros (paid monthly), which makes it fairly expensive, particularly since you cannot use the number to make phone calls. Incoming SMS messages are displayed in the YeSim app. I tested this with a dating app, for example. Unfortunately, you lose your reservation for the number as soon as you cancel the subscription. Since the number will then be available for other users, it means that you shouldn't use it for critical services such as a personal email account.
Special Yesim offer: At least 4G "guaranteed"
In addition, Yesim advertises with so-called "switchless networks." In their list of countries, you can see the local mobile service providers used by Yesim. If one of them only offers 3G/LTE coverage, it should automatically switch to another provider that offers "affordable" 4G/5G coverage. This statement sounds a bit spongy, particularly since LTE/4G is often used synonymously for similar mobile communication technologies. But at least I never noticed any drop in the Internet connection on a trip lasting several weeks from Austria to Japan and Taiwan and now to Vietnam.
Personal experiences
Previously, I had encountered some eSIMs where the coverage of the locally used provider was already weak at the airport. After currently more than 7 weeks on a trip, I have not experienced this with the international eSIM from Yesim yet. Whether in the rice fields in the Vietnamese Mai Châu or in the mountainous Onsen regions in Hokkaido, Japan, I always got a good-quality 4G reception. Even in very busy and overcrowded places such as the Expo in Osaka or Computex in Taipei, I encountered no reception issues at all, in contrast to using local WLANs - a blessing, if you depend on reliable Internet access for your work. While this of course doesn't necessarily say anything about the general quality of the local providers used by Yesim in the rest of the world, you can take it as anecdotal evidence of my own experience.
The 24/7 support works
In my current test phase lasting about 7-weeks so far, I only ran into a technical problem once when setting up a virtual number. Within a short time, this could be resolved via the in-app chat. Yesim advertises an average response time of 6-minutes and generous refund policy, which is also not a given in the eSIM universe.
Questions and answers
At this point, I would like to clear up some questions that always come up in my experience: Sharing the Internet connection with a laptop or other devices (tethering) worked without any problems. Purchased Ycoins will be valid for a year, before they expire if they haven't been used. So there is an expiration date after all? While it hardly matters, unless you convert hundreds of Euros in Ycoins at once, I would prefer an unlimited Ycoin balance. After all, it's my own money that I converted to the Ycoin currency. Those who stay longer in a country or region and already know beforehand that they will need larger amounts of data can of course purchase some fixed data packages in the app from Yesim.
Switching is possible anytime, since the international eSIM and classic data packages are installed as separate Sims. If you switch to a new smartphone, you can take your Ycoins with you. But you cannot do that with the eSIM that you installed already - you need a new QR code from Yesim support for that. I also asked specifically about an eSIM adapter that could be used with eSIM-less smartphones from China such as the Vivo X200 Ultra or Oppo Find X8 Ultra. Officially, these haven't been supported until now, but I am planning to try this myself in a future test.
Verdict and transparency
Personally as someone who travels a lot, I am very excited about Yesim's international eSIM. At least in the countries where I am only traveling for a few days or weeks, for example when visiting a trade show, I don't have to worry beforehand anymore how much data balance I might need. Since I often use the hotel WLAN, I might end up needing less than I thought. I also don't have to worry anymore when I cross the boundary to another country. As soon as I arrive in the airport, the international eSIM has connected with the hopefully best available network at a good or at least acceptable price.
I don't have to deal with contacting support about mistakenly purchased data packages but only pay for what I actually end up using. However, the Yesim pay as you go alternative currently still isn't the right solution for everyone and every country. If you stay longer in one place or require extreme amounts of data, you will mostly do better financially with the classic data packages, but you can also purchase those alternatively or additionally at any time.
If you often go to destinations less traveled, you should keep in mind the more extreme price outliers, although fortunately, the app shows them very clearly. In addition, several regions are still not accessible with the international eSIM. Both of those issues are hopefully temporary problems on the path toward an all-on-one world eSIM. Even though Yesim has granted the author a generous Ycoin balance for his travels, it had no editorial influence on this article.
Source(s)
Own experiences and Yesim
