Saily, a travel data app owned by NordVPN, launched unlimited data plans in May 2025, moving beyond the fixed-package model that has dominated travel eSIM services since the category took off roughly five years ago.

The move was announced on 7 May 2025 and puts Saily in a growing minority of services offering unlimited data to international travellers — a shift from the traditional "buy what you need by the gigabyte" approach.

What Saily Does

Saily is an app that lets you buy mobile data for travel without changing your physical SIM card. Instead, it works with your phone's built-in eSIM slot — a virtual version of the tiny chip that normally stores your carrier information. Think of Saily as a middleman: it negotiates with local carriers around the world, buys bandwidth wholesale, and sells it to you through a simple app interface. It does not own the phone networks itself, just resells access to them under a branded app experience. The NordVPN connection gives it a ready audience of privacy-conscious travellers, though you do not need a NordVPN subscription to use Saily.

Travel eSIMs have solved a real problem. Before them, getting data abroad meant finding a local SIM at an airport kiosk, fumbling with a tiny SIM card and an ejector tool, and risking losing your home SIM in the process. Switching to an eSIM — which happens entirely in software — removed all that friction. What it did not fully solve was the guesswork: you still had to estimate how much data you would actually use before buying a package.

How the Unlimited Plans Work

Saily's unlimited plans are sold on a per-country or regional basis, which is important to understand. "Unlimited" in international travel does not mean truly unlimited in the way your home carrier might offer it. Local carriers in each country have their own limits — usually hidden thresholds where speeds slow down dramatically if you exceed a certain amount of high-speed data use. Those thresholds are set by whoever owns the network, not by Saily.

Once you buy a plan through the Saily app on iOS or Android, your phone downloads the profile over the internet using the standard eSIM protocol (technical details: it uses GSMA's Remote SIM Provisioning framework). Within minutes, you can start using data. Your phone handles switching between your home profile and the Saily travel profile automatically, though the experience varies a bit depending on your phone brand — it works more smoothly on iPhones than some Android devices.

Why This Matters

The practical benefit is straightforward: instead of trying to guess whether you need 2GB, 5GB, or 10GB before a trip, you buy unlimited and stop thinking about it. For frequent business travellers, that is one less thing to manage, and one line item to expense rather than multiple per-trip charges.

Saily is not the first to offer this. Competitors like Holafly have sold unlimited plans for years on some destinations, and others like Nomad have experimented with mixed models. But Saily's backing by NordVPN — a company millions of people already trust for online security — gives it brand recognition that many pure-play eSIM startups lack. Whether that translates to real market share will show up in the next few quarters as actual usage data comes in.

The Throttling Reality

The broader context here: every "unlimited" mobile data plan carries an implicit catch. In the EU, UK, and US, regulators have started pushing carriers to be transparent about when speeds slow down on supposedly unlimited home plans. But travel eSIM services live in a grey zone. They are sold as consumer products, but they are not subject to the same roaming regulations that apply to major carriers operating within Europe or the US. That means Saily gets to decide when speeds drop, and those terms are buried in the conditions of service rather than spelled out upfront.

This matters if you are relying on fast, consistent speeds — streaming a video call from a job site, or running a VPN tunnel to move large files. Casual browsing will work fine even when speeds are deprioritised; demanding uses will struggle. We have seen this pattern before, when US carriers first rolled out "unlimited" plans in the home market around 2017–2019. The headline sounded great; the fine print told a different story. The FTC eventually pushed carriers to be clearer about throttling. The travel eSIM market is earlier in that cycle and has no equivalent regulatory pressure yet, so it pays to read the terms carefully.

What Changes Day-to-Day

For most travellers, an unlimited plan removes one decision point at purchase. You do not have to guess or worry about rationing data. For power users — people tethering a laptop, streaming video for hours, or running constant background sync — the real-world experience depends entirely on what the partner network in each country considers "fair use" and how good that network actually is.

Saily's move aligns its product with consumer expectations shaped by domestic unlimited plans, even though the economics of international roaming make a true comparison impossible. Over the next few months, we will see whether the pricing lands at a point that actually moves customers away from competitors, once real usage patterns emerge.

The broader trajectory of travel eSIM is clear: the per-gigabyte model is becoming a commodity. What now separates providers is how simple the plans are, how smooth the app experience is, and whether you trust the brand. That is a pattern we have seen play out with every layer of consumer connectivity that came before.