eSIM in Vietnam: One Brand Owns Both Ends of 5GB

Vietnam is the market where the same brand sells the cheapest and the dearest version of one product. Roami’s 5GB plan costs $5.99 for three days and $12.99 for thirty, and no other plan at that size in this market beats either end. Same brand, same volume, 2.17 times the price per gigabyte.

That single pair explains most of what goes wrong when a plan is chosen by headline price. The window is what the market sells, not the gigabyte, and the spread between the two ends of one brand’s own shelf is wider than the spread between some brands.

Two other things shape a Vietnam trip. Viettel carries the widest coverage outside the cities, which is why its name is searched more than any other carrier’s, and a Vietnamese line now requires a passport and a biometric check at a counter. The prices below come from the 185 plans ten brands sell into the country.

One brand holds both ends of the 5GB shelf

Start with the number that makes the point. Roami sells 20 metered plans into Vietnam, and its 5GB ladder runs $5.99 on three days, $8.99 on seven, $11.99 on fifteen and $12.99 on thirty.

The first rung is the cheapest 5GB sold anywhere in this market. The last rung is the most expensive 5GB sold anywhere in this market, at any window, from any brand. Nothing in between is odd. The steps are $3.00, $3.00 and $1.00, and the data does not change at all.

Per gigabyte the ladder reads $1.20, $1.80, $2.40 and $2.60. A traveller who needs ten days and buys the month pays 2.17 times what the three-day buyer pays for identical data, and the three-day buyer is the one who runs out.

The inversion is not a Roami quirk. It is what happens when validity is priced as a separate product. Roami’s 1GB tier does the same thing in miniature: $1.99 for three days and $3.99 for seven, which doubles the price per gigabyte for double the days.

The pattern runs across the market rather than inside one brand. Jetpac’s 5GB costs $7.00 on one day, $8.00 on four, $9.00 on seven and $11.00 on thirty, so the rate climbs from $1.40 to $2.20 per gigabyte as the window grows. Airalo’s 10GB moves from $1.70 on seven days to $1.80 on thirty, and Ubigi’s 10GB from $1.09 to $1.29. Validity is priced as a luxury here, not as a bulk discount.

So the choice is simpler than the shelf suggests. Buy the window the trip needs and no more, because the shorter clock almost always carries the better rate, and the only reason to pay for thirty days is thirty days.

What the thirty day shelf says per gigabyte

Take only the plans that run thirty days or more at 5GB and the spread narrows but does not close.

Roamic is missing from that table for a reason worth knowing. Its 5GB plan runs twenty-one days at $8.00, which is $1.60 per gigabyte and beats every thirty-day plan at the same size. The cheapest 5GB in the market over a long window is therefore not on the thirty-day shelf at all.

That is the pattern this country rewards. The size is fixed, the window is the variable, and a plan that expires three days early costs less than one that expires on the day of the flight home.

Why the Viettel question has no clean answer

Viettel carries roughly 56 per cent of Vietnam’s mobile subscriptions and is the operator most often described as holding the widest footprint outside the cities. On the Ha Giang loop, on the climbs around Sa Pa and along the Mekong, that difference is the one a traveller notices, because Vinaphone and Mobifone thin out where the road leaves the delta.

The searched phrase is a carrier name, so the searcher is usually asking for a product that pins the connection to that carrier. Travel eSIMs do not work that way. All ten brands in this comparison list Viettel, Vinaphone and Mobifone, which the network data for Vietnam records, so the profile attaches to whichever of the three is strongest where the phone is standing. No plan sold here can promise Viettel at the moment of purchase.

What can be pinned is a Vietnamese subscription. Viettel, Vinaphone and Mobifone all sell their own eSIM and prepaid products, and those carry a Vietnamese number because they are local lines. They also carry the registration step, and that step is the reason most visitors end up on a travel profile instead.

The honest answer to the search is therefore a trade. A travel plan gives up the ability to choose the carrier and keeps the price and the counter out of it. A carrier plan gives up neither the counter nor the passport, and buys the coverage argument in exchange.

What the counter asks for now

Since 15 April 2026 the rules are set by Circular 08/2026 of the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the state news agency’s account of it is precise about the mechanics.

Four fields have to authenticate: identity number, full name, date of birth and a facial image, checked against the national population database. A new subscription cannot be activated without them. A foreigner registering on a passport has to attend a service point in person with the physical document, the SIM and a face for the camera, and existing passport-registered lines were given sixty days from the effective date to repeat the process.

The device rule is the part that catches people later. Move a registered SIM into a different handset and the operator has two hours to notice, at which point outgoing calls and texts are suspended until the face check is repeated. Thirty days of silence after that turns the suspension two-way, and five days after that the contract can be ended. The regulator’s summary published by Vietnam News sets out the whole ladder.

None of it applies to a travel eSIM, for a structural reason. A roaming profile is not a Vietnamese subscription, so there is no subscriber record to authenticate. That is not a loophole in the rule. It is the rule describing a category the product is not in.

Whether a +84 number is worth the counter trip

The list of what a Vietnamese number opens is short and specific. Domestic food delivery, the local wallet apps that were built around a domestic number, the Vietnamese form of the ride-hailing apps, and anything that verifies by text to a +84 line. Banking and long-stay admin sit in the same category, which is why the number matters to residents and much less to a visitor.

Everything else runs without it. Grab accepts a foreign number on an international account, hotels and tour operators are reachable on the number already in the phone, and messaging runs over data. A two-week holiday that never orders delivery loses nothing by skipping the counter.

What changed in 2026 is the price of the counter. A new line needs the passport, the face scan and the four-field check, and a passport-registered line that already exists had sixty days to repeat the process. Two weeks rarely justifies that. A month, a long motorbike rental or a stay that orders food daily might.

There is a middle route worth naming. A traveller who wants the number for one purpose and the data for everything else can run both: the travel profile carries data while the local line sits in the second slot for calls and texts. That is the arrangement dual SIM exists for, and it costs the counter trip once rather than twice.

What 185 plans cost

Ten brands sell 185 Vietnam plans, 97 of them flat-rate. The 88 metered plans run from $0.60 to $7.00 per gigabyte with a median of $1.70.

Each cell is the cheapest plan that brand sells at that allowance, whatever its window, so the table compares sellers rather than every plan. The 3GB row is a genuine three-way tie at $8.00, and the windows behind it differ: Airalo sells it on seven days, aloSIM and Nomad on thirty. The 1GB row is where the market looks expensive, with a 3.5 times gap between Jetpac at $7.00 and Roami at $1.99, and the dearer plan buys one extra day.

Where the floor sits

Roamic sets the floor at $0.60 per gigabyte on 50GB for thirty days, and it does that with a plan count worth noting: 36 plans, 30 of them unlimited. Jetpac sells 24 plans at a best rate of $1.00, and the two most expensive brands by rate are Saily and aloSIM, both at $1.45.

The floor is not where the volume is. Only four brands sell 50GB into Vietnam at all, and the range across them is $30.00 to $49.00. At 20GB the cheapest plan is Ubigi at $16.00, which is $0.80 per gigabyte and beats every other brand at that size, while the dearest is Jetpac at $40.00, or $2.00.

Ubigi is also the one brand with no flat-rate plan for Vietnam: nine plans, all metered, from $6.90 to $180.00. That absence is a fact about the seller rather than about the country.

The 240GB year that loses to a month

One plan in this market runs a full year. Ubigi sells 240GB over 365 days for $180.00, which is $0.75 per gigabyte.

A 50GB month from Roamic costs $30.00 and works out at $0.60, so the annual product is 25 per cent dearer per gigabyte than the monthly one. Against a 1GB plan at $1.99 the year looks like a bargain per day, and that comparison is the trap, because nobody buying a year of data is buying it one gigabyte at a time.

The annual plan is priced for a resident or a returning business traveller, not for a holiday. A traveller staying two months is better served by two monthly plans, and one staying a fortnight by a single 10GB plan at $8.99 for the short window or $12.00 for the month.

That is worth stating plainly because the answer is not the same in every country. Vietnam is the case against the annual tier, and the reason is arithmetic rather than marketing.

Ninety seven flat rates and the cap behind each

97 of the 185 plans are unlimited, which is more than half the shelf. Their thirty-day prices run from $55.00 to $79.00, and the published daily allowance behind them runs from 500MB to 5GB.

Saily publishes 5GB a day at full speed, the most generous figure in this market. Airalo, Roamic and Jetpac each publish 3GB, then 1 Mbps. Nomad publishes 2GB. aloSIM publishes 1.5GB to 2GB and falls to roughly 512 Kbps. Yesim states a figure between 500MB and 2GB depending on destination. Holafly publishes nothing at all and charges $73.90 for thirty days.

Set the caps against the prices and the ordering changes. Roamic at $55.00 buys 3GB a day at full speed. aloSIM at $79.00 buys between 1.5GB and 2GB and then 512 Kbps. The dearer plan is the one that stops being useful first, and it is not close.

The bottom of the shelf is cheap. Roamic sells one day unlimited for $4.00 and Yesim sells one day for $3.97, which is the lowest flat rate in the market and about the price of a coffee. For a single long travel day that is the entire purchase.

Per day of cover the flat rates converge on each other and separate from the daily plans. $55.00 across thirty days is $1.83 a day and $79.00 is $2.63, while the one-day products are sold at $3.97 and $4.00. A trip of a week can therefore be cheaper on the day plans and a trip of three weeks is not, which is the same window logic the 5GB shelf showed at the top of this page.

The fair-use table carries the published threshold for each unlimited plan here, and the full plan table sorts all 185 by gigabyte price.

Crossing into Cambodia or Thailand

A Vietnam plan names one country, so any route that leaves needs a second product. That catches the Mekong route into Cambodia and the overland run to Thailand, and the phrase “esim vietnam cambodia” describes a purchase that does not exist as a single plan from these ten brands.

There are two ways to cover it. A regional bundle names several countries and is priced for the widest of them, so it tends to cost more than two single-country plans on a fixed two-country route. Two separate profiles are cheaper and more controllable, because each can be sized and started on its own schedule, and they can sit on the phone at once. On a route where the second country is three days, the two-profile answer usually wins on price as well as on control.

The Thailand guide covers the second half of the common route, the Thailand table prices it, and the Asia coverage breakdown shows which bundles actually name Cambodia rather than only the big markets.

The Vietnamese-language search for this purchase, mua eSIM du lịch Việt Nam, lands on the same products, because the thing being bought is a travel profile rather than a domestic subscription.

What the handset must do before you pay

Two checks, both settled at home, and one of them matters more here than in most countries.

The phone has to accept an eSIM at all, which the compatibility list answers from the manufacturer’s own model list. It also has to be carrier-unlocked, because a handset still tied to a home network will refuse a Vietnamese profile outright.

The local fallback is worse here than usual, and that is the reason to check twice. A traveller whose phone cannot take a profile has to buy a physical SIM at a carrier counter with a passport and a face scan, which is an errand inside opening hours rather than a kiosk stop. Discovering that at Tan Son Nhat costs an evening.

Installation belongs before the flight, because the setup steps end by switching the physical SIM off for data, and that is easier on wifi than in a taxi. The profile itself sleeps until it first registers on a Vietnamese network, so installing a fortnight early costs nothing. Running both lines keeps the home number live for the codes that a wallet or a bank still sends.

Who answers when a profile dies in Hanoi

Not Viettel, and not the hotel. A travel profile rides a Vietnamese network under a wholesale arrangement, and no Vietnamese carrier holds a record of the sale, so the seller is the only party that can reissue or explain it.

Two failures look like the seller’s fault and are not. A carrier lock refuses the profile at installation, and a home SIM left carrying data produces a phone with signal and no traffic. Both are visible before departure, and both are more common than a network fault.

What to have ready is the order reference, the address the QR code went to, the handset model and the step where the connection fails. Support desks open with a reinstall, a reinstall deletes the profile, and deleting it before the order number is in hand removes the only evidence that a purchase exists.

One failure is genuinely local and worth knowing about. A profile that works at the airport and dies in a hotel has usually been replaced by hotel wifi, because the handset prefers a known network. The fix is a setting rather than a ticket, and the network report for Vietnam explains how the three carriers divide the country so a dead zone can be told apart from a dead plan.