Revolut eSIM vs Lotsotravel: The Price You Can't Read Until You're Inside the App (2026)

Most travel eSIMs are sold the way petrol is sold: the number is on the sign before you pull in. Revolut sells data the way an airline sells a seat. The sign says "from", the rest is behind a login, and the figure you end up paying depends on where you are, where you are going and which storefront your app happens to be on.

That is not an accusation of anything. Revolut is a money app first, the eSIM lives in the same place as your account balance, so buying one happens next to your card and your balance. That is a convenience, and the app is already on a lot of travellers' phones. But it does change the kind of comparison we can write. We cannot put Revolut's Europe ladder beside ours, tier by tier, because there isn't one in public to put. So this post does the next most useful thing: it sets out exactly what Revolut's own pages and its eSIM terms commit to, in writing, and then prints our whole price list beside it so you can do the arithmetic the moment the app shows you a number.

We are Lotsotravel, an independent travel eSIM provider, and we sell the competing product. Every Revolut claim below is linked to the Revolut page that carries it.

At a glance

Two rows carry the post. One product's price list is public and one is not, and only one of the two sells anything other than a fixed bucket of gigabytes.

Who you are buying from

Start with the paperwork, because it is the part nobody reads and the part that defines the purchase.

Revolut's general conditions of sale for eSIM data plans say that Revolut Ltd markets and facilitates the sale of the plans as an agent of 1GLOBAL Operations (Netherlands) B.V., and that 1GLOBAL is the service provider. So the app is Revolut's, the money moves through Revolut, and the connectivity contract is with a wholesale mobile company most travellers have never heard of.

That is not unusual in this category, and it is not a defect. Nearly every eSIM brand sits on top of someone else's platform, and 1GLOBAL is a serious one. What is worth knowing is that the arrangement has moved. Revolut also hosts a separate set of conditions for plans supplied by Gigs UK Ltd, a different supplier entirely, on the same agent model, and Revolut's help centre says each travel data plan is provided by one of the two. So the answer to "who owes me the service I just bought?" depends on which supplier the app sold you.

The practical advice is dull but useful: the terms shown in the app at checkout are the ones that govern your purchase, not the ones a review quotes. Open them once. They are short.

The price you cannot read yet

Here is the whole of what Revolut publishes about what its plans cost.

Its eSIM landing page, which is also where the data plans page lands, says local plans start from £3.49 for 1GB and that pricing by country is in the app. On the English-language Europe eSIM page the floor reads £1.50 for 1GB; on the euro storefronts of the same page it reads €1.50; the global plans page and the UK page carry the same "from £1.50" line. The UK and North America pages list the tiers you can buy without pricing any of them, and every tier card says "Buy in-app".

So the whole of Revolut's published pricing is: one number for the smallest plan they sell, in a currency that depends on which storefront loaded, and not even the same number on every page. We are not the only ones to notice. Wise's walkthrough of the product records the same two things: that Revolut's pricing is not displayed on its website and can only be viewed in the app, and that plans start at £1.50 for 1GB. Wise also puts most plan lengths at 7 to 60 days.

We are not going to turn a third party's screenshot into a price table and call it Revolut's pricing. Instead, here is ours, in full, so that the comparison takes you ten seconds once the app shows you its number. This is our Europe Fixed Data ladder, 33 countries on one profile, read on 2026-11-03:

Our ladder starts at $1.65 a gigabyte and ends at $0.70. Revolut's published floor is a single gigabyte at £1.50 or €1.50, depending on the page. Comparing across currencies needs the day's exchange rate, so we will not pretend that one line settles anything. The point is narrower and it holds regardless of the rate: one of those two ladders can be read by anyone with a browser, and the other cannot be read by anyone without an account.

A bucket with a clock, versus an allowance that resets

Plan shapes Revolut does publish, and they are worth comparing carefully, because this is where the two catalogues diverge.

Revolut's Europe page lists 1GB over 7 days, then 3GB, 5GB and 10GB over 30 days, then 50GB and 100GB over 60 days where those are offered; some storefronts also show a 20GB tier at 30 days. Revolut's conditions of sale say the price, data amount, validity period and included countries of each plan are shown in the app before you buy, so the duration the app shows you is the one that counts.

Every one of those is a fixed bucket with a clock on it. That is also most of what we sell, and the table above is exactly that product. Where we sell something Revolut does not is the daily-allowance plan.

A Lotsotravel Unlimited plan gives you a full-speed allowance each day, which resets the next day; when it is spent, speed drops to a reduced rate stated on that plan rather than the plan stopping. The name is the daily figure multiplied by the days:

The difference matters on exactly one kind of trip: the one where you cannot predict the days. A fixed bucket punishes a single heavy day (one hotel with no Wi-Fi, one afternoon of maps and tethering) by taking it out of the whole trip's allowance. A daily allowance absorbs it and starts you fresh tomorrow. If your usage is steady and known, the fixed bucket is cheaper and you should buy it; our unlimited data guidelines spell out which is which, and our Europe eSIM travel guide has the usage ranges if you have never counted.

Coverage: 100+ countries or 150+, depending on the page

Revolut's regional and global eSIM pages advertise data plans across 100+ countries and territories, on local, regional and global shapes, and its own blog post on the product uses the same figure. Its main eSIM page says 150+.

What we noticed while reading those pages is that the country lists differ by storefront too. The English-language Europe page's list and the Lithuanian storefront's English version of the same page do not match (the second adds Malta and the United Kingdom), and the Europe page's FAQ sends you to the app for the most up-to-date list. If a specific country is the reason you are buying, that is a check to make in the app, not on the marketing page.

Our side of this is fixed and published. Our Europe plan is 33 countries on one profile, and Türkiye is one of them: Romania, Poland, Portugal, Finland, Norway, Türkiye, Lithuania, Croatia, Latvia, Sweden, Bulgaria, Belgium, Slovakia, Slovenia, Cyprus, Austria, Malta, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Hungary, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Estonia, Czechia, Greece and Iceland. Our Asia-Pacific plan is 12: Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Macau, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and New Zealand. Mainland China is not in it. Across single-country and regional plans we reach roughly 190 destinations.

A trip that crosses regions does not need two purchases either. Our Global plans put a multi-region itinerary on one profile, in versions covering 45, 67 and 154 countries.

What the terms commit to, precisely

This is the section we wish existed for every eSIM, our own included. Five things Revolut's published documents say:

• Data only, no number. The conditions of sale state the eSIM provides data coverage and does not provide voice coverage or a local phone number. Data apps work; your bank's SMS code does not arrive on it. Keep your home SIM enabled for that, exactly as you would with ours.
• Auto-renewal has hard caps. Per the 1GLOBAL conditions, renewals stop after 90 days, after four renewals, or at the end of a plan period you did not use up, whichever comes sooner. The help centre adds that a plan with data still on it at its expiry date will not renew.
• A 14-day cancellation window with a 500MB ceiling. You can cancel within 14 days of purchase, but a proportionate refund for unused service applies only while the plan has not expired and you have used no more than the 500MB the conditions allow for inspecting the quality of the service. A refund is also available where a network or technical failure is verified. It is better to know where that line sits before you buy than after.
• Fifteen plans per device. Both the 1GLOBAL and Gigs conditions of sale allow up to 15 active data plans on each device. Where several cover the place you are in, the most local one is used first: country, then region, then global. A second plan for the same country waits until the first one expires.
• A published device list. Revolut keeps a supported-device page listing the earliest eSIM-capable model per manufacturer. Our own device support guide covers the same ground for any provider.

One thing the Revolut pages we read do not state is what happens to unused gigabytes when a plan expires. We are not going to assert it on their behalf. Ours we will state: a fixed-data plan is a bucket for its window, and anything left in it when the window closes is gone. That is why the daily-allowance plans exist.

What we're not measuring

• Speed, latency and coverage quality. No matched speed tests, no latency figures, no tower-by-tower coverage comparison. Both products ride local carrier networks, and which one is quicker where you are standing is not something either of us can generalise about.
• Customer support. Neither company publishes a controlled dataset on resolution times, so there is nothing fair to compare. We have left it out entirely rather than trade anecdotes.
• Revolut's actual per-country prices. Not because we could not find a screenshot, but because a screenshot of someone else's app is not a published price and we will not source a price table from one.
• The Revolut app's wider value. Interest, FX, budgeting, points: a Revolut subscription is not bought for the eSIM, and a travel-data post is the wrong place to price the rest of it.
• Promotions. Both of us run them. Promotional pricing is temporary by design and a comparison built on it goes stale the week it ends.

If any of these decide it for you, go and check them yourself before buying. Both products are cheap enough to test on a single trip.

Making the call

What we would not do is treat "from £1.50" as a price. It is a floor, in one currency, for the smallest plan on the list, and you cannot test it against anything until you are through a login with a destination selected. Our numbers are on this page, at every tier, for anyone: $4.95 for 3GB, $8.95 for 10GB, $34.95 for 50GB across 33 European countries, and $15.95 for a gigabyte a day for a fortnight when the trip is too unpredictable to budget. When the app finally shows you its figure, divide it by the gigabytes and look back at the table. That is the comparison, and it takes ten seconds.

And you need not pick one for good. Two eSIM profiles coexist on any modern phone, so install ours on the next trip, keep theirs for the one after, and let the arithmetic decide the one after that.