Firsty vs Lotsotravel: What Does Free Data Cost? (2026)

Most eSIM comparisons argue about dollars. This one has to argue about minutes, because Firsty's headline product does not cost money. You watch an advert in the app, you get 20 MB, and you can do that eighteen times a day. No card, no plan, no expiry date beyond a week.

That is a real product, not a gimmick, and it deserves a real answer rather than a sneer from the company selling the thing it competes with. So here is the answer: the free tier is worth about $2.80 an hour of your attention, it tops out near 360 MB a day at 1 Mbps, and the moment your trip needs more than a few gigabytes, you are back to buying data like everyone else. At that point the question is whose gigabytes are cheaper.

We are Lotsotravel. We sell the gigabytes, so read this knowing which side of that question we are on, and check the links: every Firsty number below points at Firsty's own page or at an independent review.

At a glance

Two rows carry the argument. The free-tier row is the reason anyone downloads Firsty. The 10GB and 50GB rows are the reason most people stop relying on it.

The price of free, in minutes

Firsty's free tier is documented better than most paid products in this category, which is to its credit. The help centre spells out all four limits:

• 20 MB per advert. Watch, earn, repeat.
• 18 adverts a day, which caps the day at 360 MB.
• 240 MB held at once. Hit that ceiling and you have to spend some before you can earn more, so stockpiling before a flight only gets you so far.
• Seven days before earned data expires, and 1 Mbps on everything you earn.

Now do the arithmetic that Firsty's marketing leaves to you. A fortnight abroad at the daily ceiling is 5.04GB, and reaching it means sitting through about 250 adverts. At a 30-second spot (the usual length for a rewarded video, though Firsty does not publish a figure), that is a little over two hours of watching, spread across the trip in nine-minute daily instalments.

The same 5GB from us is $5.95 at full speed on a Europe plan covering 33 countries. So the exchange rate on Firsty Free is roughly $2.80 for an hour of your attention. If their adverts run 15 seconds you are doing twice as well, about $5.60 an hour. If they run 45 seconds you are down near $1.85.

The other thing the arithmetic hides: 1 Mbps is not a speed, it is a posture. Maps load, messages send, a web page arrives in its own time. A boarding pass PDF, a video call with the family, a 40-photo upload from dinner: those are the moments where the free tier stops being clever and starts being a reason you are standing in an airport not doing the thing you needed to do.

What the gigabytes cost

Once the free tier runs out, Firsty sells data three ways: Classic prepaid bundles from 0.5GB to 50GB with a floor rate of €0.98 per gigabyte and 30 days of validity from activation, Unlimited at €2 a day, and monthly subscriptions for people who want one eSIM running all year.

Every Firsty row below uses the €0.98 floor, which Firsty applies to its largest bundle. It is the best rate they advertise, and we give it to them on every line. Converted at €1 = $1.15.

Three things sit behind that table.

The 3GB row is a loan, not a loss. €0.98 a gigabyte is the price of Firsty's 50GB bundle, not its 3GB one. Nobody buying three gigabytes pays the floor rate, and Firsty keeps per-bundle prices inside the app, so the honest statement is that Firsty's small bundles start somewhere above $3.38 and we cannot tell you where. Our 3GB is $4.95 with 15 days on it.

The crossover sits between 5 and 10 gigabytes. Our Europe tiers work out at $1.65 a gigabyte on 3GB, $1.19 on 5GB, $0.90 on 10GB and $0.70 on 50GB. Firsty's floor is $1.13. So the small end is theirs on paper, the middle is a coin toss against a price we cannot see, and everything from 10GB up is ours by a margin that grows with the bundle.

Validity is not the same clock. Firsty's Classic data runs 30 days from activation, and you choose when to start it, a nice touch if you buy in advance. Our fixed-data plans publish their window on the plan page, from 5 to 30 days, and the shorter windows are where our cheapest per-gigabyte rates live.

Unlimited, two different ways

Firsty's Unlimited plan is €2 a day, the same rate wherever you are, with 5GB a day at full speed before it steps down to 512 kbps. That is a different shape from ours, and on one axis it beats us outright.

Read those two columns honestly and they answer different questions.

If you use about a gigabyte a day (most travellers, most of the time), €2 a day is rent on headroom you never occupy. Fifteen days of it costs $34.50 against our $9.95, and the 75GB you were entitled to goes back to Firsty unclaimed.

If you use five gigabytes a day, Firsty is the only one of the two of us who will sell you that, and the comparison ends there. Somewhere in between, at around 3GB a day for a month, our 90GB plan at $46.95 is still under their $69. Their throttle, though, is the softer landing. Ours drops to 128 kbps, which is a speed you notice; theirs holds 512 kbps, which is a speed you can still message on. If you expect to run past the ceiling rather than stay under it, that difference is worth more than the money.

The sign-up list is not the coverage list

A detail worth knowing before you build a trip around the free tier: Firsty's registration list and its coverage list are different documents. Firsty's help centre names roughly 50 countries you can sign up from (most of Europe, the US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and a run of Latin America), while paid coverage stretches across the 170-plus destinations Firsty advertises. Firsty's own example of the gap is Panama: paid plans, no free tier.

The practical rule that follows is simple. Install Firsty and register before you leave home, not at the arrivals gate of a country that is on one list and not the other. It costs nothing to have the profile sitting there.

For what it is worth, the same "check the list" advice applies to us, in a different shape. Our regional plans are named for a country list rather than a continent: Europe is 33 countries including the UK, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Türkiye; Asia-Pacific is 12, and China is not among them. A regional plan is only cheap if your itinerary is inside the list.

Where the money comes from

Firsty was founded in Amsterdam in 2023 by two former Adyen product managers, and is funded by venture capital: €1.1M pre-seed in early 2024, then a €5.1M seed led by Speedinvest with the Dutch Founders Fund alongside. The free tier is a growth engine: it acquires users at close to zero marginal cost, and Firsty reported passing half a million of them inside nine months without paid marketing.

That is a legitimate way to build a telecom business, and it is worth understanding as a buyer for two reasons.

The first is that advert-funded data has to clear a bar that cash-funded data does not. Every free megabyte has to be worth more to an advertiser than it costs Firsty in wholesale data. That bar moves with advertising markets, which is why free-tier limits in this category tend to be revised rather than fixed. Firsty has revised its line-up already, retiring the Comfort+ and First Class names that still fill most reviews to a legacy page of its own. Read the app, not the review, for today's terms.

The second is the more interesting one. Firsty's cheapest product costs you time and its expensive products cost you money, which means the company is indifferent to which you spend. We only have the one currency. That is a narrower proposition, and it is the reason our prices have to do the work: we cannot hand you a free tier as consolation for a pricey gigabyte.

The app is the product

Everything Firsty does lives in the app: buying, activating, topping up, and watching the adverts that fund the free tier. You register with a phone number to get started, and the iOS and Android builds are where the current prices and limits live.

That design is not an accident. An advert-funded tier needs a surface to show adverts on, and a web checkout has nowhere to put them. The app is the business model made visible.

We are the opposite, with the trade-offs that implies. There is no Lotsotravel app to install, no account to register with a phone number, and no advert anywhere in the product. You buy on the website, the QR code is delivered through the website with an email when it is ready, and installation is the standard iPhone or Android eSIM flow with Apple's own instructions a click away. For a traveller on a locked-down work phone, or one setting up an eSIM for a parent from a laptop, that is the whole ballgame. For a first-time eSIM installer who wants a hand held, an app with a walkthrough in it is the better experience and we will not pretend otherwise.

What we're not measuring

Four things this comparison leaves out, stated so you can go and check them yourself:

• Customer support. Neither of us publishes a controlled, comparable dataset on resolution times, so any claim we made here would be marketing dressed as a metric. We do not compare it in any post.
• Network speed. Speed depends on the partner carrier, the tower, the hour and your handset. Published Firsty reviews report full-speed results in line with the tiers they bought; we have no matched dataset that would be fair to either side.
• Firsty's per-bundle Classic prices. They sit inside the app. We priced Firsty at its advertised floor rate throughout, which favours Firsty on every row.
• Advert length. The $2.80-an-hour figure assumes a 30-second spot, because Firsty publishes a megabyte figure and not a duration. The sensitivity is in the section above; time one yourself and redo the sum.

Making the call

Firsty built something clever, and the cleverness is in the pricing rather than the technology. Selling attention to advertisers and handing travellers data instead of change solves a real problem for a real group of people: the light user, the one-night emergency, the traveller who wants a profile sitting on the phone costing nothing between trips. Install it for that. It is free, and free is a hard price to argue with.

What it does not solve is the ordinary two-week trip with photographs, maps, a couple of video calls and a hotspot for the laptop. That is five to fifteen gigabytes, it wants full speed, and no number of adverts gets you there. At that point you are buying data, and from 10GB upward our Europe plans land between 20 and 38 per cent under Firsty's best advertised rate, against a floor price their small bundles never see.

So the honest recommendation is not "one of us". It is Firsty Free as the backup profile you never delete, and a paid plan from whoever prices your actual trip lower. On anything from ten gigabytes up, we think that is us, and the links above are there so you can prove it before you spend anything.