YonoSIM is live on Find Your eSIM

Most partnership announcements are about a contract. This one is about a purchase.

Find Your eSIM is an independent comparison site for travel eSIMs, run by Onne Bakker — who also runs the same comparison under its original Dutch branding at reissim.nl. If you’ve shopped for an eSIM recently you know the problem it solves: every provider claims coverage in the same countries, quotes prices in a different shape, and publishes almost nothing you can verify before you’ve already paid.

What makes Onne’s approach unusual is what he does about that. He doesn’t compare spec sheets. He buys the plans. On a single recent trip he tested more than fifty plans across Vietnam, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan — real purchases, real installs, on real networks in the country the plan is sold for. Providers that don’t work don’t get listed. The line under the heading on his comparison page is the whole policy in six words: “Only the names we’ve tested ourselves.”

That grid now has YonoSIM on it, next to Airalo, Nomad, Saily, Ubigi, aloSIM and Jetpac — most of them with funding, ad budgets and staff. We have none of those. What we had was a plan that worked when somebody bought it without asking us first.

We found out we’d passed after the fact

The first we heard about any of it was a message from Onne, after the test was already done:

I tested 50+ plans so far on this trip (in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan). I just sneaked YonoSIM in and tested a plan in Korea. Everything went well!

Being evaluated without knowing it is the only kind of evaluation that’s worth anything. We had no chance to hand-hold the activation, no chance to put the order in front of a human first, no chance to pick a favourable network. He bought what any traveller buys, through the same checkout, and it either worked or it didn’t.

What the South Korea test actually showed

These are Onne’s screenshots, not ours.

Just over a gigabit down on a travel eSIM is a good day on any network, and South Korea is a good place to have one. The number that matters more to us is the boring one though: it installed and connected first time, unattended, for someone we didn’t know was testing.

The part where the screenshot says “Singapore”

Look closely at that speed test and it reports the carrier as Singtel, Singapore — on a plan bought for Korea, tested in Korea. That looks wrong. It isn’t, and it’s worth explaining rather than cropping out.

The eSIM roams on Korean 5G, so the radio is local — that’s where the gigabit comes from. But the traffic breaks out to the public internet in Singapore, which means the IP address is Singaporean. Speedtest geolocates by IP, so it names a Singapore carrier and picks Singapore servers. It’s also why the latency test shows Singapore pinging lowest while Seoul — a city the phone was physically sitting in — reads several times higher. The packets really are going to Singapore and back.

This is normal for travel eSIMs and almost nobody in the category tells you about it. It matters, because a foreign breakout IP is what makes your banking app ask for extra verification, your streaming subscription show the wrong catalogue, and a local service occasionally refuse you outright.

So we publish it. Every plan on YonoSIM carries its IP-breakout country alongside the data, validity and network list, and where a plan’s breakout is likely to cause trouble we surface an alternative that doesn’t. You can see the breakout before you pay, not after your bank locks you out.

Why this one matters to us

This is the second comparison site to carry YonoSIM, after eSIMDB. Two isn’t a distribution strategy yet, but it’s the difference between a listing and a pattern.

We’re a small, bootstrapped, one-person operation. The hard part has never been building the thing; it’s getting anyone to take a chance on a name they haven’t heard of. Comparison sites are how travellers de-risk that decision, and getting onto one that actually buys and tests what it lists is worth more to us than a much larger site that lists on a spreadsheet.

It was a genuine pleasure working with Onne. He was direct, fast, asked good questions, and did the work before he asked us for anything. If more of this category operated that way it would be a better category.

For the record on how we do partnerships: we pay commission on conversions and nothing otherwise. No listing fee, no setup fee, no paid placement. We turned down a marketplace this month that wanted money upfront, and we’d turn it down again — a fee that gets paid whether or not a traveller buys is the wrong incentive on both sides of the table.

If you run a comparison site or marketplace and you want to do what Onne did: buy a plan, test it wherever you are, and come talk to us afterwards. Our partner feed is live, and the invitation to test us before you trust us is a standing one.

— Roc · #YouOnlyNeedOneSIM

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