DEV Community: global

eSIM price per GB: what the number hides (data from 11 providers)

global — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 14:16:40 +0000

Travel eSIM providers love one comparison metric: price per gigabyte. It is simple, it is sortable, and it is easy to game. This article looks at what the per-GB number really tells you, using the 11 travel eSIM providers in our ranking.

The range

Using the per-GB price taken from each provider's official price pages:

Provider	Price per GB
Airhub	$0.13
BNESIM	$0.56
aloSIM	$0.62
MobiMatter	$0.80
Airalo	$0.84
Roamless	$0.84
Ubigi	$0.88
Nomad	$1.19
Jetpac	$1.50
Truely	$1.62
GigSky	Not verified

The cheapest is more than ten times cheaper than the most expensive. Does that mean Airhub is the obvious choice? No, and the reason is the point of this post.

Why per-GB is only one input

Per-GB prices depend on the bundle you buy. Larger bundles usually have a lower per-GB price, so comparing a provider's 20 GB bundle with another's 1 GB bundle tells you about the bundle, not the provider. That is why you should always compare the same size and duration.

Two other things the number cannot show:

Where it works. Coverage is a separate factor. Most providers in the table list 200 countries; Airhub, Truely and GigSky list 190.
What you can do with the data. Hotspot (tethering), top-up, a phone number or SMS, and a mobile app change how useful a plan is. Not every provider has all of them.

Our ranking therefore uses price as 30% of the Score, not all of it.

How the Score is built

Factor	Weight	What counts
Price	30%	Price per GB, unlimited plans
Coverage	25%	Number of countries, regional and global plans, 5G
Features	20%	Hotspot, top-up, phone number, mobile app
Reputation	15%	App Store rating
Transparency	10%	Refund policy, fair-use disclosure, company age

Each metric comes from one published fact. A fact without a source does not count, and a missing fact scores zero rather than being guessed. A provider is ranked only if at least 70% of the Score is backed by confirmed facts.

The current top of the table

Airalo - 93/100
Nomad - 92
Roamless - 92
aloSIM - 91
MobiMatter - 89

Notice how tight it is: the top four are within two points, and Airhub, with the lowest price per GB, is 7th at 84. That is exactly the effect described above. Price matters, but coverage, features and transparency matter too.

What is checkable and what is not

Everything above comes from official pages: price lists, coverage lists, feature pages, app-store listings. We do not measure real-world speed or coverage quality in specific places. Those depend on the local partner network and on the day, so we don't pretend a desk review can reproduce them.

Practical advice from the data:

Compare the same bundle size and validity period across providers.
Check whether your phone supports eSIM and is unlocked before buying anything.
If you need to share data with a laptop, check hotspot support in the plan.
Look for a published refund policy and a fair-use statement for "unlimited" plans.

A worked example: reading two rows

Take Airalo (93, $0.84 per GB) and Airhub (84, $0.13 per GB). On price alone Airhub wins by a wide margin, and the price factor reflects that. But the Score is a weighted sum: Airalo has 200 countries against Airhub's 190, plus the full feature set (5G, hotspot, phone number or SMS) and its other facts are confirmed. When you read a ranking, look at the factor bars, not only the total. If you only care about the price per GB, sort by that column and ignore the order; if you travel to a few well-covered countries, the coverage difference may not matter to you at all.

The same logic applies in reverse. A provider with a low total can still be the right pick if its strong factor is the one you need. A ranking is a starting point for a shortlist, not a verdict.

Limitations

Prices change often. Each fact has a check date on the company page.
GigSky has no verified per-GB price, which lowers its completeness and, with it, its place (11th, 64/100).
Some official pages block automated access. We don't bypass protection, so a few cells stay empty.

Full ranking and sources: https://global-rating.com/en/telecom/esim/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=esim

How to read a hosting uptime guarantee: 11 providers, one comparison

global — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 13:39:15 +0000

Every shared-hosting landing page promises "99.9% uptime" or even "100% uptime". The number looks like a measurement. It is almost never one. It is a guarantee: a line in the terms of service that says what the provider owes you if it fails to keep that number. This post explains how to read those numbers, using the 11 hosting providers in our ranking as examples.

What 99.9% actually means

Uptime percentages are easy to misread because the gap between them looks tiny.

99.9% allows about 43 minutes of downtime in a 30-day month (0.1% of 43,200 minutes).
99.99% would allow about 4 minutes.
100% allows none, at least on paper.

So "99.9%" is not a promise that the site will be up. It is a promise about how much downtime can happen before the provider has to compensate you, usually with account credit.

What we found across 11 providers

We collected the uptime guarantee from each provider's official terms or SLA page. The result splits into two groups:

99.9%: SiteGround, ScalaHosting, Kinsta, GreenGeeks, Hostinger, InterServer (6 providers)
100%: IONOS, DreamHost, Hosting.com (A2 Hosting), Hostwinds, WP Engine (5 providers)

A "100%" guarantee sounds stronger, but two things matter more than the headline:

What is excluded. Scheduled maintenance, network problems outside the provider's control and "abuse" are commonly carved out of the calculation. The headline number says nothing about the size of the carve-outs.
What the remedy is. Most guarantees pay in credit toward future service, not cash, and you usually have to file a claim within a short window.

Because of this, we treat the guarantee as one input, not as a measurement of real reliability. In our methodology it is the single biggest metric inside the reliability factor (weight 3 of 8), next to the money-back period, company age and daily backups.

The money-back window is a better signal than it looks

The refund period is the one guarantee you can use without proving anything. In our data:

9 of 11 providers state a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Hostwinds lists 0 days.
For WP Engine we could not confirm the period from an official page, so the table says "Not verified".

If you are choosing a host for a new project, the practical test is simple: pick one with a refund window, move a real copy of your site there, and watch it for a couple of weeks before the window closes. Your own monitoring beats any SLA percentage.

Price: look at the term and the renewal

The cheapest plan in the table is priced on a 12-month term:

Provider	Cheapest plan, per month (12-month term)
IONOS	$1.00
InterServer	$2.50
DreamHost	$2.89
ScalaHosting	$2.95
GreenGeeks	$2.95
SiteGround	$3.33
Hostwinds	$6.99
WP Engine	$28.00
Kinsta	$30.00

Hosting.com (A2 Hosting) and Hostinger show "Not verified" here, because we could not read a clear price for that term from their pages.

The spread between $1.00 and $30.00 is not a sign that one is a rip-off and the other a bargain. Kinsta and WP Engine are managed WordPress platforms, and the low-end shared plans are a different product. That is why we keep the price factor at 25% of the Score rather than letting it decide the order. We also score whether the renewal price is published, because many shared plans are cheap only for the first term.

How the Score is put together

The hosting Score (0-100) combines five factors with fixed weights:

Factor	Weight
Reliability (uptime guarantee, refund window, company age, daily backups)	30%
Price (cheapest plan, published renewal price, free domain)	25%
Features (free SSL, data-center locations, staging, email)	20%
Support (24/7 live chat, phone)	15%
Transparency (status page, security certification)	10%

A provider is ranked only if at least 70% of its weighted facts are confirmed. Where we can't verify a fact, it stays empty and counts as missing, not as "no".

The current top of the table

SiteGround - 82/100
IONOS - 79
DreamHost - 79
Hosting.com (A2 Hosting) - 76
ScalaHosting - 74

Limitations

We do not run our own uptime monitoring. A guarantee on paper is not the same as measured availability, and we say so in the methodology.
Terms change often. Each fact shows the date it was last checked, and the ranking is recalculated after every update.
Some providers hide details behind interactive pages. We don't work around that, so some cells stay "Not verified".

If you see a number here that has gone stale, say so in the comments and we'll re-check the source.

Full ranking, sources and methodology: https://global-rating.com/en/software/hosting/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hosting

We ranked 13 AI coding assistants using only verifiable facts. Here's what we found

global — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 10:11:17 +0000

Most "best AI coding assistant" lists are opinions, affiliate links, or both. We wanted the opposite: a ranking where every number can be checked by anyone, because every fact links to the vendor's own page.

So we took 13 AI coding assistants and scored them on facts published on their official pricing, docs, trust and privacy pages — nothing else. No benchmarks we ran ourselves, no "vibes", no paid placements.

The methodology

Four factors, with fixed weights:

Factor	Weight	What counts
Code privacy	30%	Code not used for training by default on the cheapest paid individual plan, training opt-out, a zero-data-retention option, SOC 2 Type II / ISO 27001
Capabilities	30%	Number of supported IDEs (from one official page), a CLI/terminal agent, an agent mode for multi-file edits, a self-hosted option
Price	25%	A free plan, and the cheapest paid individual plan per month (monthly billing)
Transparency	15%	Company age, a public status page, whether the models used are disclosed

A service is ranked only if at least 70% of its weighted facts are confirmed. If we couldn't verify something, it stays empty — we never guess, and "not mentioned" is never treated as "no".

What we found

Privacy defaults differ a lot. On the cheapest paid individual plan, 5 of 13 assistants state that your code is not used for training by default (Amp, Augment Code, JetBrains AI, Tabnine, Zed). For 6 others the official policy says code can be used unless you opt out or switch plans. For 2 we couldn't find an unambiguous statement — so that fact is left blank rather than guessed.

Free plans are the norm. 10 of 13 have a free tier. The exceptions are Augment Code, Claude Code and Tabnine.

CLI agents are everywhere now. Almost every tool has a terminal agent or CLI in 2026; it no longer separates the field. Self-hosting does: only a few (JetBrains AI, Tabnine, Windsurf, Zed) offer a way to run it on your own infrastructure or with local models.

The current top 5:

JetBrains AI — 85/100
GitHub Copilot — 77
Zed — 75
Amp — 71
Windsurf (Devin Desktop) — 69

The full table, every fact and its source link are on the ranking page.

Limitations (and a disclosure)

Some vendor pages block automated access. We don't bypass bot protection, so a few facts are missing — those services lose completeness, not points for "no".
We don't measure answer quality. Facts about privacy, price and features are checkable; "writes better code" isn't, at least not in a way anyone can reproduce from a public page.
Disclosure: the research and texts were produced with the help of Claude (Anthropic), and Claude Code is in this ranking. It's scored with the same formula and sources as everyone else — it's currently 10th, mainly because it has no free plan and its policy allows training unless you opt out.

Full ranking and methodology: https://global-rating.com/en/software/ai-coding/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ai-coding

If you spot a fact that's outdated, tell us in the comments — we re-check sources and update the ranking.