The short version:
• Zero roaming: metered pay-as-you-go data with no contracts and no surprise line items.
• Nomad-grade: strong enough for video calls and laptop hotspots in San José, Heredia and the main beach towns.
• Whole-country reach: coverage spans San José, Alajuela, Cartago, Heredia and Liberia via three local networks.
• Your WhatsApp stays yours: same number, same chats, no SIM swap.
• Long-stay economics: credits never expire — leftovers roll into your next entry stamp.
Let's retire a myth: working remotely from Costa Rica does not require a punishing roaming plan or a morning wasted hunting SIM kiosks at Juan Santamaría airport. It never did. SLYNUMBER's eSIM installs before you fly, connects the moment you land, and bills you per gigabyte on networks built by Kölbi, Claro and Movistar. Café Wi-Fi in Tamarindo is charming right up until your client call starts stuttering — cellular data is the backup that quietly becomes your primary. One QR code, and the office fits in your pocket.
Network and coverage in Costa Rica
Your eSIM rides on three host networks: Kölbi (ICE), Claro Costa Rica and Movistar Costa Rica. The device weighs signal strength and picks the best of the three by itself — there is nothing to configure and no menu to find.
5G reality check: Costa Rica's 5G footprint is growing but city-centred. Opensignal's Costa Rica reporting puts users in San José, Alajuela, Cartago, Heredia and Liberia on 5G over 13% of connected time, with average 5G downloads above 165 Mbps. Figures from the regulator SUTEL show 4G/LTE reaching more than 98% of the population at suburban speeds of 25–65 Mbps — ample for calls and uploads, though remote corners like the Osa Peninsula and the Talamanca highlands can thin out to patchier signal.
Crossing borders: the Costa Rica per-GB rate applies while you're on a Costa Rican network. Continue into Nicaragua or Panama — or fly on to Colombia — and billing switches to that country's own rate, all published on the SLYNUMBER destinations page. Same eSIM, same credits, no settings touched.
Device check: the eSIM runs on iPhone XS and newer, Google Pixel 3 and newer, Samsung Galaxy S20 and newer (carrier-unlocked), plus most eSIM-capable tablets. Confirm yours in under a minute: Settings → Cellular → Add eSIM.
1. Built for the long stay
Short vacations forgive bad connectivity; a three-month stay does not. Here's what the pay-as-you-go model looks like when Costa Rica is your office.
Billing that matches nomad life
Monthly bundles assume you know your usage in advance. Nomads rarely do. With SLYNUMBER you buy data credits and burn them at the Costa Rica per-GB rate — a heavy week of client calls, then a quiet week surfing Nosara, and you only paid for the loud one. No contract, no plan tier to outgrow.
Fast enough for the actual job
Video calls, file syncs, 40-slide uploads — the everyday load of remote work runs comfortably on Costa Rica's 4G backbone, and 5G takes over across much of the San José metro area. Automatic selection across three carriers means the eSIM quietly abandons a weak tower before you even notice it was weak.
Central America on a single profile
The visa-run circuit — Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the south — doesn't interrupt your service. The same profile reconnects across the border at each country's own rate, and keeps doing that in 120+ destinations. Your number, your credits and your setup all travel as one piece of luggage that weighs nothing.
The dashboard lives in your pocket
Balance, real-time usage, top-ups and the SlyAI assistant sit in one app on iOS and Android. When a deadline week eats more data than planned, you'll see it happening — and fix it with a quick top-up from wherever your desk happens to be that day.
2. Cellular vs the alternatives
Every nomad forum thread ends in the same four options. A quick, honest scorecard for Costa Rica:
Home-carrier roaming
Convenient, until the invoice. Daily roaming passes stack up brutally over a multi-week stay, and metered roaming rates can turn one photo backup into a three-digit line item. SLYNUMBER meters honestly per gigabyte, and the app shows the running total before it can surprise you. Roaming is for weekends; this is for seasons.
The kiosk SIM ritual
A local prepaid SIM is cheap on paper, but it costs you an airport queue, a registration form, a swapped-out home SIM — and your usual number goes dark. The eSIM installs before departure, coexists with your home line, and skips the ritual entirely. Time is a currency too.
Café and coworking Wi-Fi
Coworking spaces in San José or Santa Teresa are great anchors — until the afternoon surge drags the shared network down mid-presentation. Cellular data is your unshared lane. Take the meeting from the beach if the vibe calls for it; the connection is yours alone, and it doesn't care how crowded the café gets.
Rented hotspot boxes
A rental hotspot is one more device to charge, insure and return on time — and it usually rides a single network. Your phone already contains better hardware: the eSIM uses all three Costa Rican carriers and turns the phone itself into a hotspot for your laptop. Fewer chargers, fewer deposits, fewer things to forget in a hostel.
3. Set up in three steps
The whole process fits comfortably between packing your bag and finding your passport. Do it before you fly and arrival becomes a non-event.
Download the app,
pick your plan
Install SLYNUMBER from the App Store or Google Play, create your account and choose a data plan sized for your stay. The one-time $5 eSIM activation fee is settled at checkout; credits for data are a separate purchase and never expire.
Install by QR
before you fly
On solid home Wi-Fi, scan the QR code the app generates — or key the profile in manually. Two minutes now saves you from arrivals-hall problem-solving later. The eSIM sits dormant until you need it.
Enable and
auto-connect
Flip the eSIM on in settings after landing. Your phone registers on Kölbi, Claro or Movistar on its own, always chasing the strongest signal — from the arrivals hall in San José to the last bar of coverage past Uvita.
4. Your apps on Costa Rican data
Connectivity is only as good as what it lets you actually do. Four apps, field-tested across the country:
WhatsApp without the SIM swap
Your WhatsApp number doesn't change when your country does — the eSIM supplies data while your existing line stays put. Run the family group chat from a café in Barrio Escalante, share your live location with the shuttle driver headed to Monteverde, or take a video call from a coworking terrace in Santa Teresa. Voice calls sip roughly 4 MB per minute, so even a chatty month of daily check-ins stays well under a single gigabyte. And because cellular doesn't collapse the way crowded hostel Wi-Fi does at 8 p.m., calls hold steady when everyone else's connection is dropping. For nomads, WhatsApp is the phone system; this keeps it running on the road.
Post the postcard in real time
Costa Rica hands you content daily — Arenal steaming at sunrise, sloths over the trail at Manuel Antonio, golden-hour sets rolling into Tamarindo. With live data you post from the spot rather than from tonight's Wi-Fi. A 60-second 1080p Reel uploads in roughly 60–70 MB; a Story burns a fraction of that, so a week of steady posting fits inside a gigabyte or two. All three host carriers hold strong 4G at the marquee tourist sites, and Instagram drafts save locally if you dip out of signal on a jungle trail. Shoot, upload, get back in the water — the feed can run itself while you work on your bottom turn.
Film, cut and upload from the field
Between the market energy of Mercado Central in San José, the cloud-forest hanging bridges at Monteverde and the late-December chaos of the Fiestas de Zapote, Costa Rica is a TikTok goldmine. Uploading a standard 60-second clip takes about 40–90 MB depending on resolution, which the pay-as-you-go model absorbs without drama. In packed venues where thousands of phones fight one cell tower, the eSIM's habit of hopping between Kölbi, Claro and Movistar earns its keep — it settles on whichever network is breathing easiest. Watch your running data balance in the app between takes. Trends don't wait for hotel Wi-Fi, and with a live connection you don't have to either.
Navigation for roads with no names
Costa Rican addresses are famously directions-from-a-landmark, which makes live Google Maps less a convenience than survival gear. Track your bus down Route 27, reroute around a landslide on the Interamericana, or find the unsigned turnoff to your rental outside Nosara. Coverage holds along the main corridors, but this is a country with honest dead zones — before driving the Osa Peninsula or the Talamanca passes, download the offline map of Costa Rica (under 240 MB) over Wi-Fi. The moment signal returns, navigation flips back to live traffic on its own. GPS never needed a network anyway; the data just makes it smart.
Best eSIM for Costa Rica
Prefer watching to reading? The whole setup, filmed end to end.
A short walkthrough: buying the plan, installing the eSIM by QR code, and going live on Costa Rican networks before your first coffee order in San José.
6. How SLYNUMBER compares
Plenty of products promise a private, travel-proof number — burner apps, dual SIMs, portable hotspots. The table below lines them up against SLYNUMBER on the things nomads actually check: real-number status, verification success, longevity and cost.
| Feature |
SLYNUMBER |
Google Voice |
Burner Apps |
Carrier 2nd line |
| Real U.S. mobile number | Yes | No | Varies | No |
|---|
| SMS verification for apps | Yes | Limited | Often blocked | Yes |
|---|
| Immune to SIM swapping | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
|---|
| Custom voicemail | Yes | Yes | Rarely | Yes |
|---|
| International calling | Yes | Limited | Rarely | Carrier dependent |
|---|
| eSIM / Data plans | Yes | No | No | Carrier dependent |
|---|
| Number permanence | Permanent | Permanent | Temporary | Permanent |
|---|
| Requires carrier number | No | Yes | Varies | Yes |
|---|
| Starting price | $14.99 / 3 months | Free | $2–$5/week | $10–$15 add-on |
|---|
7. Features and pricing
Core features
The eSIM is one half of SLYNUMBER; the other is a real U.S. mobile number living in the same app. Together they cover the connectivity stack a long-stay traveler actually needs:
- A genuine U.S. mobile number — carrier-grade, not VoIP-flagged
- Number works over data in 150+ countries; eSIM data in 120+
- Pay-as-you-go credits that never expire
- Automatic host-network selection by signal strength
- Calls, SMS and MMS handled in-app from anywhere
- SlyAI assistant built into the app
- No contracts — pause, resume or scale as your travels change
Because the number is real U.S. mobile infrastructure, verification flows just work: WhatsApp, Telegram, PayPal, Venmo, Instagram, Snapchat, Amazon and Gmail all accept it for signup and 2FA.
Security
Traffic is protected with TLS and SRTP encryption, and with no physical SIM card in circulation there is nothing for a SIM-swap fraudster to port away at a carrier counter.
Pricing
Numbers first, small print after — this is everything:
- $4.99/month on the quarterly cycle, billed $14.99 every 3 months
- $49.99/year on the annual plan
- $10 for 1,000 credits — one credit is a minute of talk, an SMS or an MMS
Platforms
The SLYNUMBER app ships on the App Store and Google Play, with the SlyAI assistant on board to handle setup questions, usage checks and quick support without a ticket queue.
8. Costa Rica eSIM FAQs
For most of the ride, yes. The main corridors — Route 27 toward Jacó, the Interamericana north to Liberia — sit inside Kölbi, Claro and Movistar coverage, and your eSIM hops between all three automatically. Expect solid 4G for messaging, music and map tracking, with short dead patches through Guanacaste's dry-forest stretches and a few mountain curves. Queue up podcasts and offline maps before departure and those gaps become invisible. Signal returns on its own; so does your download.
It does, without ceremony. Cross at Peñas Blancas or Paso Canoas — or fly on to Colombia — and your phone simply registers on a supported local network, usually within a minute. Data then bills at that country's own per-GB rate, listed on the SLYNUMBER destinations page. No second eSIM, no APN fiddling, no profile swap. Credits you bought while in Costa Rica remain valid wherever you land next, and whatever is left comes back with you.
Budget by workload, not trip length. If your accommodation and a coworking space carry the heavy lifting, 6–8 GB a month covers on-the-go calls, navigation and social posting. If you routinely hotspot a laptop from a beach café in Santa Teresa or Nosara, plan on 15 GB or more — a single hour of video conferencing over a hotspot can burn 500 MB to 1 GB. Since billing is per gigabyte and credits never expire, overbuying costs you nothing in the long run.
It's a genuine U.S. mobile number that lives in the SLYNUMBER app instead of on a plastic SIM. Because it isn't flagged as VoIP, services that reject internet-only numbers — WhatsApp, PayPal, Venmo, Instagram, Amazon, Gmail — treat it like any American cell number. You call, text and receive verification codes through the app from wherever you happen to be working that month.
Burner apps typically issue VoIP numbers, and the big platforms have learned to refuse them at signup or verification. A SLYNUMBER line is a real mobile number on U.S. carrier infrastructure, so it passes those checks. It's also built to keep, not to toss: your subscriptions, banking alerts and two-factor logins all anchor to one stable number you can hold for years while your address keeps changing.
The number runs $4.99 a month on the quarterly cycle, billed as $14.99 every three months, or $49.99 flat for a full year. Calls and texts draw from credit packs — $10 buys 1,000 credits, where one credit equals a minute of talk, an SMS or an MMS. The eSIM itself carries a one-time $5 activation fee, and data credits are a separate, never-expiring purchase.
Meaningfully, yes. Classic SIM-swap fraud works by sweet-talking a carrier clerk into porting your number onto a criminal's SIM card. A SLYNUMBER line has no physical card to port and no retail counter to social-engineer — access is tied to your authenticated account, and traffic is protected with TLS and SRTP encryption. For a nomad whose bank, broker and email all hang off one phone number, that's a serious upgrade.
Yes — this is the core reason nomads keep one. Because the number is a real U.S. mobile line rather than a VoIP endpoint, verification texts from banks, PayPal, Venmo, Gmail, Amazon and social platforms arrive normally. Codes reach the app over any data connection, so you can approve a login from a hostel in Puerto Viejo just as easily as from home.
That's the design. The number works over any internet connection in 150+ countries, and it pairs naturally with SLYNUMBER eSIM data in 120+ of them. Take calls in San José, answer texts from Lake Arenal, verify a login from your next country entirely — the number never notices you moved. One identity, carried in an app, wherever the work takes you.
