How we test, and what we earn

What we earn, brand by brand the actual rates

All commissions come through the Travelpayouts network. The rate never changes your price, and it has never changed the order of a recommendation. The test we apply is simple: strip the commission out and ask whether the reasoning still holds. On this site the top pick pays the least and the second pick pays the most, and both of those facts are printed next to the picks.

Where the prices come from and why they carry a date

Plan prices are pulled from esimdb.com's per-brand Korea tables and cross-checked against each provider's own Korea page, in USD, before any promotional code. The full pull for this site was done on September 7, 2026 and covers 85 plans across seven providers, plus the three carriers' tourist products in won.

Three complications, named rather than hidden. Airalo and Nomad geo-serve Canadian dollars from our connection, so their USD figures come from esimdb rather than from their own pages. Saily's Korea page returned a bot challenge on the day we checked, so every Saily figure on this site is esimdb's, and Saily's throttle speed after its 5GB daily cap is marked unverified because Saily's own text says one thing and the listing says another. KT's tourist eSIM prices would not render on KT's site, so the KT column on the carrier page comes from a 2026 reseller listing and is labelled as such.

Every table carries the date it was checked. Prices in this category move by a dollar or two a month and occasionally more when a brand restructures, and won prices move with the exchange rate, which we quote at roughly ₩1,380 to the dollar and round. If a number on your screen does not match a number here, the date tells you how much to trust ours.

Network claims: published, or we say "not published" no guessing

Every claim about which Korean carrier a provider rides comes from that provider's own published Korea page, on the date shown. Where a provider publishes nothing, the tables say not published. On this site that is three of the four brands we link.

We do not fill those cells from blogs, database entries or other comparison sites, because those claims propagate and cannot be traced. Saily is the clear case: several guides say SK Telecom and KT, Saily itself says nothing, and every table here says not published. Airalo is the opposite case: a 2025 traveler review reported it on LG U+ with LTE only, Airalo's page now shows SK Telecom, and we quote the page as it reads today while recording the earlier report.

Carrier quality figures come from two sources and we name them every time: the Korean Ministry of Science and ICT's official 2025 quality evaluation, and Opensignal's December 2025 South Korea report. Where a widely repeated claim has no measurement behind it, the claim that SK Telecom is best in the mountains being the obvious one, we call it a reputation.

What we have not done said plainly

What we have done: pulled and normalised every plan we can verify, read every fair-use page, checked every Trustpilot profile on the same day including the notice on Holafly's, read the Korean government's own briefings on the December 2025 and June 2026 changes to line registration rather than an English summary of them, read Naver's June 2026 press release and the Korean press on Baemin's August 2026 change, and priced the carriers' tourist eSIMs from the carriers' own pages where they could be read.

Those are different kinds of work and we do not blur them. A price we pulled is a fact. A coverage note is a well-sourced judgement. A speed test we did not run is not evidence and will not appear here dressed as one.

The five rules the ones that cost us money

1. Unmonetised providers appear in every table. Ubigi is cheaper than everything we sell at 10GB and names two networks. It is in every comparison on this site with the reason next to it, and so are the three Korean carriers.
2. One real drawback per recommendation. Every pick card names a genuine reason not to buy it. Airalo's is a price gap and a low cap; GigSky's is an unpublished network and our highest rate; Saily's is an unreadable page and an unverified throttle.
3. Fair-use caps are published or marked missing. "Unlimited" is a daily allowance on every travel eSIM sold for Korea, and where a brand will not give the number the table says so rather than leaving the cell empty. Where the Korean carriers sell genuinely uncapped data for less, the table says that too.
4. Every price carries a date. No exceptions, including in the FAQ answers and including the won figures.
5. We say when the answer is not to buy anything from us. Buy the carrier eSIM if you need a 010 number or more than 3GB a day. Buy Ubigi if you want the cheapest 10GB. Those pages exist and they cost us the sale.

Corrections and what happens to them

If a price here is stale, a network claim is wrong, an app has started or stopped demanding a Korean number, or your experience on a Korean network contradicts our coverage table, we want to hear it. The app table on the phone-number page and the counter hours on the carrier page are the two things most likely to have moved since September 7, 2026.

Verified corrections ship in the next update and we note what changed. Send them here.