eSIM
Data in another country, delivered as a QR code. The one card with a third party behind it, and the one question that could still stop it.
A QR code your phone scans to install the plan, or the activation string behind it. No physical SIM, no shipping, and no shop counter where somebody photographs a passport before handing one over.
Prepaid mobile data is one of the few connectivity products that never needed to know who holds it. That is why it belongs on this surface: the privacy comes from the product as much as from how somebody paid for it.
The numbers
Pulled from a third party's live catalogue on 25 August 2026. The endpoint takes no key and answers a browser directly, so the card can show the real shelf rather than a description of one.
| What | Figure | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Smallest plan | $1.50 | 100 MB for seven days, in the United States and the United Kingdom. |
| The fee as a share | 5.5% | Comfortably past the threshold without anybody slicing the plan to get there. |
| The gate | nothing | No account, no email, no identity document. Pick a plan, pay, and the code appears. |
| Catalogue depth | 36 to 70 | Plans per country across the four checked. That feed scales its prices by ten thousand, so a raw read is wrong by that much. |