How we rank · 5 min read
Feed prices lie: what we found checking seller shops
A seller's price feed is what the seller says it charges. The shop is what it charges. They are maintained separately, and they drift apart, and every comparison site we know of publishes the feed. So we built something that reads the shop instead: a checker per storefront that opens the plan at the seller's own checkout, reads the price, and compares it with what the feed told us. By September 2026 it had run 52,076 checks. This is what it found.
The results
| Outcome | Checks | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Verified | 46,784 | Shop price matched the feed. Plan marked as checked. |
| Price moved | 5,011 | Shop price differed. We updated the plan to the shop price and logged the change. |
| Not found | 265 | The shop no longer sells the plan. Retired from the site that night. |
| Relabelled unlimited | 16 | The feed called it a fixed allowance; the shop sells it as unlimited with a daily cap. Corrected. |
One in ten checks found a price that did not match. Most were a few percent, which is currency movement and promotions coming and going. The largest was a plan 260 percent dearer at the checkout than in the feed, which is what happens when a seller reprices and forgets the partner feed exists. Every one of those 5,011 would have been a wrong price on a comparison site that trusted the feed, and the number grows every night.
How a check works
- The nightly import reloads every seller's feed and updates our catalogue.
- For each seller with a checker, the checker opens the seller's shop for each country and reads the plans and prices as a customer would see them.
- Each of our plans is matched to a shop plan on the seller's own plan identifier where the shop exposes one, otherwise on the exact title, and only as a last resort on data and validity. A loose match invents price cuts, so the matching is deliberately strict.
- Match with the same price: verified. Match with a different price: the plan takes the shop price and the change is logged. No match: the plan is retired.
- If the shop cannot be read at all that night, nothing is concluded. A seller's site being down is not evidence that its plans are gone.
That last rule came from a night when a seller's shop returned nothing for one country and an early version of the checker read it as every plan withdrawn. Thirty plans would have vanished because of a transient error. Now an unreadable shop leaves yesterday's data in place and says so in the log.
Where the drift comes from
- Repricing without updating the feed. The commonest large error. The shop moved, the partner feed did not.
- Currency. Feeds in one currency, shops in another, converted at different times.
- Promotions. A sale on the shop that the feed never knew about, or a sale that ended on the shop while the feed still carried it.
- Tiers with the same name. One seller sells the same plan in two tiers at different prices, with identical names. An early check matched on name and quietly wrote the dearer tier down to the cheaper price. Now the tiers are labelled at import and matched on the seller's own identifier.
- Retired products that stay in the feed. A plan the shop stopped selling months ago, still listed for partners. Those are the 265.
What the note under each table means
Under every comparison table on the site is a line like: 103 of these 548 plans were checked against the seller's own shop on 3 September 2026. The rest come from the provider's feed and are not yet independently checked. That is a literal statement. The checked plans had their shop price read that day. The rest are feed prices, which are usually right and sometimes are not.
The sellers we cannot check yet
In September 2026 we had a checker for 37 of the sellers we list and none for the other 12. The gap includes some large catalogues. The reason is mechanical. A checker has to be written for each shop, because each presents its plans differently, and several shops sit behind bot protection that refuses automated reads. For one of those, the seller's own partner feed on a public code repository is the only source we have, and we have asked them to allow our checker through.
We would rather say this plainly than imply every price on the site has been checked. Plans from unchecked sellers carry the note. Their prices are still reloaded nightly from the feed, which is the same standard every other comparison site applies to everything.
What this does to the rankings
Only what a corrected price does. A plan that was cheaper at the shop moves up; one that was dearer moves down. There is no verified bonus and no unchecked penalty. The note is information about the source of a number, not a score. The ranking remains price per gigabyte and nothing else, as it says on the how we rank page, with the rule about bulk pools explained in our price per GB guide.
If you find a price on our site that the seller's checkout does not match, the contact page reaches a person. We check it at the shop, correct it, and it feeds the next night's run. That is how the corrections above got found, one at a time.
What a check cannot tell you
That the price will be the same tomorrow. Sellers reprice, promotions start and stop, and currencies move. A check is a photograph of the checkout at one moment, which is why every page carries the time of its last check rather than a vague claim of accuracy. It also cannot tell you the plan will work well; that is what the ratings and the provider pages are for.
Why bother
Because a comparison site that publishes a feed price is repeating what the seller said, and the seller has no particular incentive to keep the partner feed accurate. The shop is the truth, because it is what you pay. Reading it plan by plan, every night, is slow and occasionally breaks, and it is the only way we know to put a number on a page and stand behind it.
Questions people ask
Where do eSIM comparison prices come from?
From price feeds the sellers publish for partners, in most cases. A feed is a list of plans and prices the seller maintains separately from its shop, and the two drift. Most comparison sites publish the feed. We check the feed against the shop for the sellers where we can read the checkout.
How often are the prices checked?
The feeds are reloaded nightly. The shop checks run nightly too, plan by plan, for every seller with a checker. Every page states the time of the last check behind its figures, and the note under each table says how many of its plans were checked against the shop that day.
What happens when the shop price is different?
The shop wins. We update the plan to the price the checkout actually shows and record the change. Thousands of such corrections are on file, and the count is on this page. A plan that the shop no longer sells is retired from the site that night.
Why are some sellers not checked?
A checker has to be written for each storefront, because each shop presents its prices differently, and some shops sit behind bot protection that refuses automated reads. A minority of the sellers we list have no checker yet. Their plans carry a note saying they are not yet independently checked, and we are working through them.
Does a price check affect ranking?
Only through the price. A corrected price moves a plan to where its real price per gigabyte puts it, up or down. There is no bonus for being verified and no penalty for not being; the note is information, not a score.
What was the biggest difference you found?
A plan priced 260 percent higher at the checkout than in the feed. Most differences are a few percent in either direction, from currency movements and promotions. The large ones are usually a feed that was not updated after a repricing.
Compare plans for popular destinations
236,973 plans from 61 sellers, ranked by real price per GB, with prices checked against the shops themselves.
