How the ranking is produced
Methodology
This page describes exactly how the default ordering is produced. It is published so that any figure on this site can be checked against the process that produced it.
Overview
This page describes exactly how the default ordering is produced. It is published so that any figure on this site can be checked against the process that produced it.
Commission carries zero weight
The ranking code cannot read payout data. This is enforced rather than promised: no commission field is passed into the scorer, and an automated test fails the build if the ranking code so much as mentions payout, commission or wholesale. The reason is concrete — one provider pays a flat five dollars per sale where another pays eighteen percent, so any correlation between ranking and payout would be both real and eventually noticeable.
Every sort other than "Recommended" bypasses the formula entirely. Cheapest, best value, most data and longest are plain orderings of a single column, so you can route around our judgement in one click.
The formula
Weights sum to 1,000 and the result is scaled to a score out of 1,000,000.
| Weight | Factor | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| 350 | Value percentile | Where the plan sits on price per GB within its country and size bucket. Unlimited plans are ranked on price per day instead, because they have no gigabyte denominator. |
| 200 | Feature completeness | 5G, hotspot, top-up, no ID check, local IP. |
| 150 | Data freshness | Full weight within 24 hours, decaying to zero at 30 days. |
| 120 | Provider price accuracy | Measured from our own outbound clicks: the price you were shown against the price we later found. |
| 90 | Coverage fit | A local plan outranks a regional bundle on a country page, all else equal. |
| 60 | Reader ratings | First-party only, and neutral until at least five approved ratings exist. |
| 30 | Verified promo available | A code we have checked within the last two weeks. |
What we exclude from medians, and why
Unlimited and pay-per-GB plans are excluded from every median and percentile on this site. A plan marketed as unlimited normally means full speed up to a fair-use threshold and throttling after it; a threshold is not an allowance. Including such plans in a median makes a gigabyte appear cheaper than it is, and it is the flaw that distorts value rankings elsewhere in this category.
Where a fair-use threshold is published we do show a price per GB of full-speed data, because that figure is real and useful. It is still kept out of the median. Where a provider publishes no allowance we show an em dash rather than an estimate.
Units and currency
Data volumes are normalised to binary gigabytes, where 1 GB is 1024 MB. Prices are stored as whole minor units in their source currency and converted for display at a rate whose date is shown beside the price. The provider's own checkout is always authoritative.
Promo codes
Every code carries the date it was last reviewed. Providers are reviewed on staggered weekly cycles, and a code not confirmed within 14 days is downgraded to stale and labelled as such rather than quietly removed. We do not test codes by placing orders, because automated coupon testing means submitting fake purchases against a merchant who did not agree to it.
Ratings
Ratings come from readers, are read by a person before publication, and are never shown as an aggregate score until at least 5 have been approved. Our own opinion is never presented as a user rating.
When we refuse to publish
An import is rejected outright if more than 30% of a provider's plans change price at once, if the median moves by more than half, if the plan count falls by more than 40%, or if prices imply an impossible cost per gigabyte. That pattern is almost always a units error rather than a repricing, and publishing it would be worse than publishing nothing.
Corrections
If a price here does not match what you were charged, tell us and we will check it. Reports of that kind feed the accuracy score shown on every provider page. Send a correction.