Costa Rica SIM Cards and Data: Every Published Prepaid Price

Verified on 26 August 2026, on Kolbi’s, Liberty’s and Claro’s own prepaid pages, plus Airalo’s Costa Rica product page.

The cheapest published mobile-data package in Costa Rica is Claro’s Noches Ilimitadas at ₡550, and it buys eight hours rather than a day; the cheapest full day of unlimited data is Kolbi’s Paquete Día at ₡1,500 — and “unlimited” there means 3GB before the throttle. Cheaper full days exist with a capacity figure printed on them: Liberty’s Pack Promo is ₡1,000 for 1GB over 24 hours, and Claro’s M@s Navego is ₡600 for 300 MB over a day. For a longer stay, Liberty’s Plan Libre Prepago is ₡5,900 for 5GB over 30 days — and Airalo’s 30-day unlimited eSIM, which runs on the Liberty network, is USD 89.00.

Every one of these prices is published in colones by the carrier and in dollars by the travel eSIM, and that difference in unit does most of the work in any comparison. What the rest of a trip costs, priced the same way from published figures, is on our Costa Rica trip cost page.

Prepaid data prices, as published

Carrier prices are in colones. The dollar column is our conversion at the BCCR reference sell rate of 1 USD = 453.50 CRC on 26 August 2026; the colón floats and that rate moves daily.

Kolbi’s “unlimited” has a number in it

Kolbi’s own capacity and speed tables put a figure on the word:

So the ₡600 hour pass is the only one of the three with no capacity cap at all, and the day and night passes throttle to 512 Kbps once 3GB is used inside their window.

Why buying a package matters, in one line

Kolbi’s published pay-as-you-go prepaid rates, with no package bought:

These are two different Kolbi products, not a contradiction, and neither is “the Kolbi rate.” The base prepaid chip charges roughly twice the Dominio Prepago out-of-bundle rate on all three services.

At the base prepaid rate, one gigabyte — 1,048,576 Kbytes — comes to about ₡9,145 by our arithmetic, roughly USD 20.16. That is six times the ₡1,500 Kolbi charges for a day pass that includes 3GB before throttling. At the Dominio Prepago rate the same gigabyte is about ₡4,503, roughly USD 9.93.

A Dominio Prepago plan runs 30 days or until fully consumed, with 7 further days to renew after that.

Every Costa Rican mobile price carries three separate levies

Claro states it on every package card: “Precio con impuestos incluidos (IVA (13%), 911 (0,75%) y Cruz Roja (1,0%)).” A 13% value-added tax, a 0.75% emergency-services levy and a 1.0% Red Cross levy — three charges, published as already inside the price. Claro’s prices in the table above are therefore tax-inclusive as shown.

Claro prepaid packages are bought by dialling *555#, or by sending the package keyword to a short code — 444 for data packages, 111 for voice — with a matching “fin” keyword to stop auto-renewal. Claro also states that top-ups can be sent from the United States “desde $7 al instante”.

Liberty’s headline plan, and its two extras

Liberty publishes Plan Libre Prepago on both an English and a Spanish page, and the two agree on every figure — the same ₡5,900, the same 5GB, the same 140 and 70 minutes, the same 70 SMS and the same 30-day renewal. Two things sit alongside it:

• Roaming at no extra cost across North and Central America, branded Liberty Sin Fronteras: “Liberty without borders to navigate at no additional cost in North America and Central America.” A footnote adds that 35% of the plan’s 70 minutes to all Costa Rican networks are valid for calling the Tigo network in Nicaragua, the USA and Canada — the asterisk sits on that 70-minute line, not on the plan’s 210 minutes, so it scopes to roughly 24 minutes rather than roughly 74.
• A top-up multiplier with a validity ladder. Top up ₡3,000 or more and the balance triples, valid 10 days; ₡2,000–2,999 triples with 8 days; ₡1,000–1,999 triples with 6 days. A separate non-ported tier doubles rather than triples. The balance is usable for data, calls and messages to all Costa Rican networks and to the USA, Canada and Tigo Nicaragua.

The plan is bought at any Liberty point of sale, or an existing prepaid line is switched onto it by texting LIBRE30 to 606 — the same keyword renews it early.

eSIM: both carriers offer it, neither prices it

Kolbi and Liberty both publish eSIM as a form factor obtained in person, not as a priced travel product:

• Kolbi: available on prepaid and postpaid, obtained at kolbi stores or ICE agencies and activated by scanning a QR code, with support for running a physical SIM and the eSIM at the same time. Device guides published for Apple, Honor, Huawei, Nokia, Samsung and Xiaomi.
• Liberty: “Activa tu eSIM en todas nuestras tiendas Liberty”, with support for more than two lines on one handset alongside the physical SIM slot. Guides for iPhone, Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Honor and Motorola.

Both omit an eSIM-specific price.

The travel eSIM, and the network it actually runs on

Airalo’s Costa Rica eSIM page names its network in its own words — “Costa Rica / Liberty / Shows primary network the eSIM uses” — so this is a comparison between two prices on the same physical network. Airalo is a primary source for its own product only; it is not a Costa Rican carrier.

The page title states the range starts from USD 7.50.

Two things fall out of that ladder by our arithmetic. The per-day rate falls consistently as the package lengthens, and the 7-to-10-day step is the cheapest move on it — USD 1.50 more, 4%, for 43% more days. And against the local carrier on the same network, Liberty’s own 30-day Plan Libre at ₡5,900, about USD 13.01, sits against Airalo’s 30-day unlimited at USD 89.00 — roughly seven times more. They are not the same product: the Liberty plan is 5GB with unlimited WhatsApp, X and Waze plus 2GB of YouTube, and includes minutes and SMS; the Airalo package is unlimited data and nothing else. Airalo’s dearest daily rate — USD 6.50, on the 3-day package, the short end of the ladder above — is about twice Kolbi’s ₡1,500 day pass. Its cheapest daily rate, USD 2.97 on the 30-day package, sits just below that Kolbi day pass.

What the carriers don’t publish

These are gaps in the carriers’ own published information:

• A price for the SIM card itself. Kolbi, Claro and Liberty all publish package and plan prices; none publishes what the starter chip costs on the pages read.
• A Kolbi tourist SIM. Kolbi maintains a chip turista landing page, but on 26 August 2026 that page served outbound roaming content for Costa Rican customers travelling abroad — activation of kolbi Roaming in 140-plus destinations — with no tourist SIM product, allowance or price anywhere on it. This page states no Kolbi tourist-SIM price.
• eSIM data bundles priced as eSIM products. Both Kolbi and Liberty treat eSIM as a form factor, not a priced package.
• Network coverage figures. Carriers publish no population or geographic coverage percentage in text — only interactive maps — and the regulator’s indicators portal served no data to a plain fetch.
• Mobile market shares by subscriber. Published by the regulator in its annual sector report; that document was not located in this session’s fetches.

How we researched this

Scope: this page reports source research, not an on-site test. We checked the booking systems, timetables and official sources named below on the date shown; calculations, unresolved disagreements and information we could not verify are labelled explicitly.

On 26 August 2026 we read each carrier’s own prepaid pages directly and quoted the price cards and tariff tables verbatim: Kolbi’s prepaid internet, chip prepago, Dominio Prepago and eSIM pages; Liberty’s Plan Libre (in both English and Spanish), packs, planes and eSIM pages; Claro’s prepaid packages and prepaid landing pages; and Airalo’s Costa Rica eSIM page.

Liberty’s English page was cross-checked against its Spanish page rather than trusted alone, because carrier pages in English often lag — here they agree on every figure. Claro’s package listing is JavaScript-rendered and returned an empty result to a plain HTML fetch, so it was retrieved through a reader proxy against the Claro URL; the figures quoted are the ones that page renders.

Carrier prices are published in colones and are recorded in colones. Every dollar figure on this page is our own conversion at one day’s BCCR reference sell rate, stated above, on a currency that floats. The per-gigabyte figures, the per-day Airalo rates and the two ratios are our arithmetic on the carriers’ published values.

Prepaid SIM registration is a regulatory procedure and is out of scope for this site; those carrier pages were not opened and nothing about registration appears here.

Last verified: 26 August 2026. Prepaid prices and the exchange rate both change without notice.

Figures on this page labelled our arithmetic are calculated by us from the sourced inputs cited below — comparisons, percentages, multiples, differences, per-night and per-person conversions, running totals and currency conversions. Every other figure is reproduced as its named source published it. Where an operator or authority publishes a per-person or per-night rate directly, that is their figure and it is attributed to them at the point it appears.

Sources

• Kolbi (ICE) — Internet prepago — the ₡1,500 Día, ₡600 Noche and ₡600 Hora prices, and the capacity-control and browsing-speed tables behind the 3GB cap.
• Kolbi — Chip Prepago — the base prepaid per-Kbyte, per-minute and per-SMS rates.
• Kolbi — Planes Dominio Prepago — the out-of-bundle rates and the 30-day-plus-7 plan term.
• Kolbi — eSIM prepago — in-store acquisition, QR activation, dual-line support and the device guides.
• Kolbi — chip turista landing page — checked and found to carry outbound roaming content, not a tourist SIM.
• Liberty — Plan Libre Prepago (English) and (Spanish) — the ₡5,900 plan and everything in it, the 30-day renewal, the Tigo Nicaragua/USA/Canada footnote, the Sin Fronteras roaming benefit and the LIBRE30 keyword.
• Liberty — packs — the ₡1,000, ₡2,500, ₡1,300 and ₡600 data packs and their validity periods.
• Liberty — planes / recargas — the top-up multiplier tiers and their validity ladder.
• Liberty — eSIM — in-store activation, multi-line support and the device guides.
• Claro — paquetes prepago — every Claro package price and inclusion, the IVA / 911 / Cruz Roja levy line, and the *555# / 444 / 111 purchase and cancellation keywords.
• Claro — prepago landing page — the USD 7 top-up-from-the-USA statement.
• Airalo — Costa Rica eSIM — the Liberty network line, the six unlimited packages and the “from $7.50” range.
• BCCR — reference sell rate indicator feed — the 453.50 rate dated 2026-08-26 used for every dollar conversion on this page.

Written by Estuardo Enriquez. This site is independent, carries no affiliate relationship with any carrier or eSIM provider named here, and is not connected to any previous owner of this domain.