Anyone who has traveled with friends knows how a trip like that usually goes: One person pays for dinner, someone else covers the taxi, a third person books the museum tickets in euros while the rest of the group thinks in dollars and by the last night nobody has any idea who owes what. Then there’s data: five people, five separate eSIM purchases and at least one friend who didn’t bother and spends the week asking restaurants for the Wi-Fi password. Saily, the eSIM app went after both problems on August 31 with two features built for groups: shared expenses and shared data plans.
The data sharing is the one most travelers will use first: One person buys a Saily plan for any of the 200+ destinations the app covers and shares it with up to four other people, so five people get online with one purchase. Setup is simple: You pick a plan you haven’t activated yet, enter up to four email addresses and Saily sends each person a link. Your friends tap it, log in or create a Saily account, confirm they want to join, and they’re on the plan. Everyone draws from the same pool of data, and the plan runs until the data is gone or the validity period ends, whichever comes first.
Discover Saily’s shareable data plans
There are limits and you can see it on our screenshot below: Only the 3 GB, 5 GB, 10 GB and 20 GB plans can be shared for now and the 1 GB, unlimited and Ultra plans are excluded. The other catch is timing: you have to invite everyone before you activate the plan because once it’s running you can’t add anyone. If you’re planning a two-week trip through several countries with friends, a 20 GB regional plan split five ways is a lot cheaper than five individual plans and our guide to the best eSIM for Europe is a good place to compare what Saily charges against the other providers before you buy.
Saily Wants to Replace Your Bill-Splitting App Too
The expenses feature is the bigger surprise since it has nothing to do with mobile data: You create a group in the Saily app, give it a name and an icon, and invite up to 20 people. They don’t need to be Saily users already: anyone without the app gets an email explaining how to download it and once they’re in, they can invite other people as well.
From there, anyone in the group can log an expense in any currency and Saily converts it automatically into the group’s default currency. That takes care of the familiar scene where someone opens a calculator at the table to turn a bill in Thai baht into dollars. Each expense can be split equally, unequally or by percentage, and the details can be edited at any time, with balances updating immediately. Saily doesn’t handle the money itself: Payments between friends happen outside the app and you tap “Record a payment” once you’ve paid someone back.
The most useful part is a tool called Smart settle. On a long trip a group can log dozens of expenses and paying everyone back one by one turns into a mess of small transfers. Smart settle adds up everything and reduces it to one payment per person, using the fewest transactions possible to clear every balance. Each settlement stays recorded in the group’s history so if someone wants to check six weeks later why they sent $47 to a friend, the breakdown is still there.
This is the same approach Saily has followed all year. The app launched at the end of 2023 selling data and little else and since then Nord Security has added a US phone number add-on, cruise ship plans, pricing in euros and pounds, and the Ultra subscription with lounge access and the Nord Security apps included. Splitwise and Tricount users won’t necessarily switch, but if your group is already using Saily for data, having the expense tracker in the same app means one less download before the trip. It’s also part of why Saily keeps coming up near the top of our ranking of the best eSIM providers.
Both features are live now in the Saily app on iOS and Android at no extra cost. Data plans still start at around $3 to $4 for a few days in most countries, and the Saily coupon code GIZMODO takes 15% off any plan at checkout (shareable plans included). If one person in the group buys the plan with the code, all five people get the discount.