
The cost of using different sites on mobile networks around the world - dutchbrit
https://whatdoesmysitecost.com
======
yoz-y
This site is useful and informative but I have a problem with their statement
in bold. From what I understand, they use the cheapest plan that satisfies two
conditions - it provides over 500MB of data and is valid for over 30 days.
They present that this is the _best case scenario_. This is false of course,
cheap plans have often a shitty value ratio. For example in France you can
easily get 50G non-renewable contract for around 20-25 euros, SFR even offers
100G for 20. Maybe these are not the cheapest plans you can get, but they have
much better ratio than what this site presents as a best case scenario for
France (which is ~$0.1/MB)

~~~
user5994461
You get 3-5GB for 20 euros from SFR.

What is the magic plan that gives you 50GB for 20 euros?

~~~
yoz-y
SFR RED gives you 100GB of which you can use 5GB in Europe. [https://www.red-
by-sfr.fr/forfaits-mobiles/forfait-4g-100go-...](https://www.red-by-
sfr.fr/forfaits-mobiles/forfait-4g-100go-sans-engagement/)

~~~
Coding_Cat
From June onward there will be a new EU legislation which would make it so
that you can use thee whole 100GB in the EU (under small roaming
restrictions).

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wheelerwj
I've been traveling more so i've been studying data and usage as it applies to
my personal usage.

The result: I've had to completely turn off cellular data for web browsing.

I can use mobile apps fine; chess.com, slack, telegram, email, etc. Streaming
even pandora is out, but luckily they have an offline mode that allows you to
download your station when you're on wifi and then play back whenever. But I
can't browse the internet at all.

I'd be willing to spend up to $50 a month for a limited package, but at most
that seems to get me is 1-2GB when I'm in Canada unless I want to sign another
long term contract.

Every page i download, every news article, easily 2-3MB, and when your total
data allotment is 500MB, you just can't browse the internet. Even hacker news,
a popular post ends up being 1MB worth of comments.

~~~
iicc
>I'd be willing to spend up to $50 a month for a limited package, but at most
that seems to get me is 1-2GB when I'm in Canada unless I want to sign another
long term contract.

[http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Canada](http://prepaid-data-sim-
card.wikia.com/wiki/Canada)

Some of the roaming options on there look a bit better.

~~~
nojvek
I guess Canada doesn't have the population to scale the cost down. It's a
huuuuuge country with a big spread of people.

$50 for couple of gigs is insane. I pay $50 with T-mobile for unlimited
everything except international calls. You could say unlimited for 20 gigs
before I get a bandwidth cap which is still usable. LTE speeds are faster than
my home Internet with Frontier Fios

~~~
Raphmedia
The issue is that whenever resellers pop up in metropolitan areas with great
prices they get aggressively acquired by the big players and prices stay up.

~~~
brokenmachine
I'm just not sure how this works. AFAICT there's four networks in Canada. Why
would they onsell their network, then have to acquire the company to stop the
competition? Why not just not onsell it in the first place?

Maybe there's some regulation saying they have to onsell it?

Just curious because it seems a bit similar in Australia.

I was with Vodafone then discovered a much better deal through Kogan which
uses the Vodafone network. I asked Vodafone to match the deal to keep me as a
customer, and they couldn't! They wanted me to pay something like 30% more for
the same network/data usage. I told them thanks but no thanks.

~~~
Raphmedia
e.g. Public Mobile would have a small network that operated only in cities and
metropolitan areas. Unlimited data, unlimited talk time over the entire Canada
and unlimited text messages. This cost me around $35/month. Telus purchased
them and changed it down to 1gb of data and incrased the price to around
$40-45. They killed all the Public Mobile physical stores and made it so that
getting support was a pain.

A few month ago every Public Mobile clients received a SMS. The SMS was a
promotion to switch from Public Mobile to Koodo. We would get the same deal we
had right now (or better price), a new cellphone and $150 in Koodo store
credits to get goodies. Everyone switched over. Right now I'm on a $50/month
plan with Koodo that is worst than the $35/month PublicMobile could give me.

Now nobody offers unlimited data or Canada wide data for $35.

(Disclaimer: I have a bad memory for dates and prices. This should however
describe the situation correctly enough.)

~~~
brokenmachine
But how could Public Mobile afford to offer such a good deal?

Presumably they were onselling another companies network, why would that
company sell their own network so cheap?

------
vultour
Wow the prices people pay in here are exorbitant. I have a UK no contract SIM
and pay 25 pounds a month, this includes uncapped internet and quite a number
of texts + minutes. I pretty much only use it for the internet as it's such
good value.

The best thing about it is that the uncapped internet works in pretty much any
EU country I've been to. This is really surprising from UK as most of the
stuff in there is usually more expensive than in the rest of the EU, however I
don't think I've ever seen a plan with uncapped internet and free roaming in
any other country.

~~~
lucaspiller
> uncapped internet works in pretty much any EU country I've been to

This is merely providers trying to be competitive and gain market share before
EU abolishes roaming fees on 15th June [0].

A lot of providers I've seen have in the small print a limit for the time you
can spend outside the home country (e.g. Three with their 'Feel At Home' limit
you to two months a year abroad), so it'll be interesting to see what they
come up once this comes into effect.

I'd be very surprised if my €5/month 'unlimited' (fair usage) 4G will really
be unlimited throughout the EU.

[0] [http://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/telecoms-
inte...](http://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/telecoms-
internet/mobile-roaming-costs/index_en.htm)

~~~
wiredfool
Last year, I had a 3 UK data sim (30pounds, 12 gig, 1 yr) that travelled with
me, and it was good. Ireland was fine, France was fine.

This year, I got a new one, and once I cross into Ireland it's throttled
pretty badly. Which is better than my Irish one that goes on roaming at
.25/meg once I cross the border, but it's still not as good as it was.

------
solox3
I just got a bar graph full of $0.00
([http://imgur.com/uciLhOG](http://imgur.com/uciLhOG)). Maybe there's a bug in
measuring images and fonts referenced by CSS? More decimal places are a good
idea.

~~~
tkadlec
Yeah, it's a rounding thing. I'm guessing your site is so lightweight that the
cost ends up being negligible. You should be able to click through from the
result page to a fully detailed report from webpagetest.org.

------
clvx
There's a dilema of browsing with a web app(firefox, opera, chrome) and
navigating using a native app when you are in development countries. Using web
browsing consumes your data pretty fast and the cap limits are low(~500mb),
but it gives you good energy consumption. Using apps to navigate is more
efficient with your data consumption; however, battey life drains pretty fast.
The latter is due many cheap or mid mobile phones; if you have a high end
phone shouldn't be a problem. I used to live in Peru, and worked in mobile geo
localization services.

~~~
lmns
I'm pretty sure native apps with the same functionality consume less energy
than web apps. Native apps and their frameworks are highly optimized.

------
pasta
In 2013 Amazon (I think) estimated that 1 second delay would cost you 7% of
your sales.

And while most developers know this there are still developers creating slow
and bloated sites.

So this site is also nice, but I don't think it will change anything. Unless
the loss would be cut from the developers paycheck.

~~~
dageshi
Cut from the designers paycheck...

Most of the size in modern sites is due to developers building out the design
they've been given.

~~~
ashark
Yeah, it's not developers pushing video header backgrounds, ten analytics
packages, and form designs that require 2mb of JS, CSS and images to achieve
cross-browser. Designers, marketing/growth-hackers. Clients. Developers aren't
blameless but we can only push back so much (usually very little—few trust us
on design/ux, even when we're right)

------
bhouston
I am in Canada and the prices seemed a bit high on this website. Here is the
math for my situation:

I use Freedom Mobile, an urban focused discount mobile service, formerly known
as Wind Mobile: [http://www.freedommobile.ca/plans-and-
devices/plans](http://www.freedommobile.ca/plans-and-devices/plans)

I get 9GB for $60/month, so that works out to 150MB/$ if I am at full usage.

Realistically I am average about 2GB/month so my real costs are 33MB/$.

The average website is 2.552MB according to this website.

Thus at full usage (9GB/month) my costs are 1.7 cents CAD (1.25 cents USD) per
average website (2.5MB).

At average usage (2GB/month) I am hitting 7.7 cents CAD (5.6 cents USD) per
average website (2.5MB).

I may be getting a better than average deal in Canada.

~~~
Ensorceled
> I may be getting a better than average deal in Canada.

Pretty much.

Freedom Mobile has limited coverage and is still rolling out LTE to the
coverage it has. You can't really use it as a counter-example when it's a no-
go for many Canadians. The site seems pretty close to what you can get if you
shop around (it's exactly what I pay for example).

CRTC continues to do a bang up job of protecting Canadians!

~~~
bhouston
> You can't really use it as a counter-example when it's a no-go for many
> Canadians.

It covers most of the main metropolitan areas.

~~~
Ensorceled
How is that not still a no-go for many Canadians?

I even live in a "main metropolitan areas" and can't use it because I
regularly travel out of "main metropolitan areas".

------
DCRichards
We crashed it... apparently the performance cost is the greatest of all...

------
mamon
I'm happy to see that Poland has the cheapest mobile internet :)

~~~
rodionos
Poland, Russia - these are not exactly cheap countries. What makes data
services so inexpensive in those locales?

I know that in Russia the telcos were able to grab the spectrum at almost zero
cost. Bad for the state budget, great for telco market cap, but looks like
it's also good for consumers.

~~~
mamon
I think that there are few different reasons:

\- Polish people are tech savvy and get easily excited about new tech, so
there's high demand for data services

\- there is a lot of competition. There are four major vendors, and there's
already more than one mobile phone per citizen (and that's including infants).
So the only way of acquiring new customers is to make them switch from other
telecom.

\- Poland is pretty small and have relatively high population density, so it's
pretty easy to have good coverage.

\- It is easy to avoid taxes (and even if you pay them, they are pretty low),
so telecoms have a lot of spare cash to invest in the infrastructure :)

~~~
rodionos
Makes sense but the driving factor has to clearly set Poland apart from the
likes of Germany or South Korea which also have savvy consumers and rapid
adoption.

In the U.S. there are multiple competing carries of meaningful scale but the
data plans tend to be expensive.

~~~
mnx
Yeah,but in the US you have coverage problems with most of them. And in
Poland, basically they all have great coverage. I've used two of the major
carriers, didn't have coverage problems even in remote parts of the country.
(HSPA+, but even LTE is getting pretty universal)

------
DamonHD
Ooooh, hurrah! 10% of normal page weight (at ~260kB)!

[http://m.earth.org.uk/](http://m.earth.org.uk/)

But if it weren't for the single Google ad it would be reduced to more like 1%
of normal page weight, which is more like my mental target for pages, ie 10s
over dial-up...

PS. Yes, [http://www.exnet.com/](http://www.exnet.com/) from the days when I
was _providing_ dial-up in the UK, is ~20kB.

------
rcarmo
Pretty cool. Also nice to see that [http://taoofmac.com](http://taoofmac.com)
is confirmed to weigh in at only 0.33MB - I do progressive image loads and
strip everything I can precisely to cater to mobile users...

[https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/test/170425_QK_0642ee2ef13f49...](https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/test/170425_QK_0642ee2ef13f4993060467d0ad4fe740#usdCost)

------
Pxtl
O Caaaaaanaaadaaaa, our home and native land.....

~~~
kentt
We're number one!

------
kalleboo
Japanese carriers have a very high base rate on all their "smartphone" plans
that they justify by forcing you to get an unlimited calls plan. You can get a
far better deal on data with the multitude of MVNOs; the majority of which are
on the former telco monopoly, NTT docomo, since the telco regulator has more
influence on them. You'll get drastically lower priority on the network though
(in the tune of 2 MBit/s instead of 20 Mbit/s as soon as the network has any
load)

------
stephen123
Those page size's are a bit less to what I get in chrome. Must be hard to
catch all the dynamic content.

Still a cool site.

------
vcdimension
I'm sceptical of these figures. How can the US rank higher than Botswana and
Brazil in PPP adjusted dollars, when it ranks lower in unadjusted dollars and
the cost of living is higher in the USA?

~~~
deadbunny
Because US telcos are some of the most price gouging in the world?

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ss64
I tried it with SS64.com, the chart shows that $0 is four times bigger in
Canada than $0 in Italy ([https://ss64.com](https://ss64.com) weighs 0.02MB)

~~~
tkadlec
Ha! I'll try to add some decimal points for sub $.01 sites.

------
Gracana
Can't view the site properly right now (I'm text-only), but is it possible to
see how much your ads cost your users? I would looove it if
businesses/developers cared about that.

~~~
DamonHD
See my comment earlier: for my front page _very_ roughly one AdSense ad is 90%
of the entire page weight (well over 200kB of ~250kB).

------
tmaly
So my side project costs about 2 cents in most developed countries and 1 or 0
cents in developing nations.

Is that good? I wish there was some comparison to say the major internet
sites.

------
axtscz
I'm happy to see that my server side rendered react site is cheaper in every
country other than my own. In most countries less than a cent.

------
SilasX
Would also be nice to measure the typical battery percentage consumption based
on a standard usage pattern.

------
blurrywh
This site rather tells differences between national mobile data plans than how
expensive your site is.

------
Corristowolf
Did we crash the site?

