There is no sale. There has never been a sale. This is a deliberate choice and it costs us something, so it is worth explaining.
A great deal of pricing in this industry is theatre. A number with a line through it. A timer. A banner saying that a plan is popular. A discount that has been running continuously for two years and is therefore not a discount but a price.
We do not do any of it, and we want to be clear that this is a choice with costs rather than a virtue we are claiming.
What we do
Print the size on the front
Every plan has an amount of data and a period, both stated before you buy. This sounds unremarkable and it is the main thing that distinguishes us from a large part of the market, where the headline is a word rather than a number.
Keep the price the price
What you see is what it costs, and it does not move because you looked at it twice, because it is Friday, or because you are on a phone rather than a laptop. Our own market tracking found that about eighty-six per cent of travel eSIM prices do not change at all over seven months, so the industry mostly works this way already — the theatre is layered on top of stable prices rather than reflecting moving ones.
Publish what the market charges
We track competitor prices daily and publish the results quarterly. Sometimes those results are not flattering to us. We publish them anyway, because an index you only publish when it suits you is marketing rather than data.
What we deliberately do not do
No countdown timers. If a price is going to expire, that is information. If it is not, a timer is a lie with a clock face.
No "only three left". Data does not run out. Any scarcity we displayed would be invented.
No struck-through prices against a figure nobody was ever charged. If we ever offer something to say thank you, it will be a real reduction from a real price, and we will say plainly what it is and how long it lasts.
No personalised pricing. The same plan costs the same to everyone on the same day in the same currency.
No plans sold as unlimited, because the threshold in the terms is the real size and we would rather print it.
What this costs us
It would be dishonest to list the above and imply it is free.
Urgency works. Countdown timers and scarcity messages measurably increase conversion, which is why so much of the internet uses them. Choosing not to means fewer people buy on the first visit, and some of them do not come back.
Sized plans are also harder to sell than unlimited ones. "Unlimited" requires no thought from the buyer. "Ten gigabytes" requires them to have some idea what ten gigabytes is, which most people reasonably do not. We have had to write a small library of articles explaining how much data things use, which is effort a one-word answer would have avoided.
It also means that when we do offer something — a thank-you for an early customer, a gesture when we have got something wrong — it has to be real, stated plainly, and time-bound for a reason we can explain. That is more work than a permanent banner announcing a sale that never ends, and we think it is the version worth doing.
THE TRADE, STATED PLAINLY
We are accepting a lower conversion rate and a harder explanation in exchange for a price you can check against anyone else, and a number you can plan around. Not because generosity is wrong, but because a price should mean something before anyone offers you a discount on it.
Whether that is the right trade is a commercial question we do not yet know the answer to. It is the trade we have chosen to make.
How the price gets set
Broadly: we look at what the market charges for a comparable plan in the same place, we work out what we need to cover the cost of supplying it, and we set a price that sits under the market and above our costs. When those two constraints conflict — which happens more often than you would think, in places where supply is expensive or competition is fierce — we do not sell that plan at all rather than sell it at a price we do not think is fair or at a loss we cannot sustain.
That is the honest general answer. We are not going to publish the exact formula, and we will say why rather than pretend the question did not arise: our competitors read this blog, and the formula is the part they would use. Publishing the market data is useful to everyone. Publishing the mechanism is useful to four companies.
What we would rather spend the effort on
Getting the price right in the first place, and then leaving it alone. A price you can trust without checking is worth more to a traveller than a price that is theatrically better today than it was yesterday.
That is a quieter promise than most of this industry makes. We think it is the one that holds up on the twelfth day of a trip, which is when it matters.
