We publish this once a year because coverage claims in this industry are close to meaningless. Everybody says "190+ countries". What that usually means is that a row exists in a database and, on a good day, three services have four numbers between them. Here is what we counted, and what we counted it against.
What "added" means
A country goes live on the pricing page when it has held all three of these for fourteen consecutive days: at least twenty services with non-zero stock, a trailing seven-day success rate of 75 % or better across those services, and at least two pools able to fill a purchase, so that one upstream having a bad week does not empty the country. Countries that only meet two of the three sit in the waiting room and are not listed.
By that rule, twenty-four countries went live in 2024. Prices are the median across all services in that country on 31 December; success is the trailing seven-day figure on the same date.
| Country | Live since | Services at launch | Median price | 7-day success |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Georgia | 2024-01-16 | 142 | €0.14 | 91.2 % |
| Armenia | 2024-01-16 | 128 | €0.16 | 89.7 % |
| Uzbekistan | 2024-02-04 | 161 | €0.11 | 88.4 % |
| Kyrgyzstan | 2024-02-27 | 97 | €0.13 | 86.9 % |
| Azerbaijan | 2024-03-11 | 119 | €0.18 | 85.1 % |
| Nepal | 2024-03-29 | 104 | €0.12 | 87.6 % |
| Sri Lanka | 2024-04-08 | 133 | €0.10 | 90.3 % |
| Cambodia | 2024-04-22 | 88 | €0.15 | 84.8 % |
| Laos | 2024-05-06 | 61 | €0.19 | 81.4 % |
| Ghana | 2024-05-20 | 112 | €0.13 | 88.9 % |
| Senegal | 2024-06-03 | 94 | €0.17 | 83.7 % |
| Côte d'Ivoire | 2024-06-17 | 86 | €0.18 | 82.2 % |
| Uganda | 2024-07-01 | 121 | €0.12 | 89.1 % |
| Zambia | 2024-07-15 | 78 | €0.16 | 85.6 % |
| Mozambique | 2024-08-05 | 69 | €0.21 | 79.8 % |
| Paraguay | 2024-08-19 | 107 | €0.14 | 88.0 % |
| Bolivia | 2024-09-02 | 115 | €0.13 | 86.4 % |
| Honduras | 2024-09-23 | 92 | €0.17 | 84.3 % |
| Guatemala | 2024-10-07 | 126 | €0.15 | 87.2 % |
| Nicaragua | 2024-10-21 | 73 | €0.20 | 80.9 % |
| Albania | 2024-11-04 | 138 | €0.16 | 90.6 % |
| North Macedonia | 2024-11-18 | 131 | €0.15 | 89.4 % |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina | 2024-12-02 | 124 | €0.17 | 88.7 % |
| Myanmar | 2024-12-16 | 58 | €0.24 | 77.5 % |
Where the growth actually came from
Three clusters, and none of them were a strategy on our side. The Caucasus and Central Asia opened because two upstreams onboarded local SIM aggregators within a month of each other, which took Georgia and Armenia from a handful of services to over a hundred almost overnight. West and East Africa opened slowly and by hand: Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Uganda and Zambia each needed a second pool before they passed the two-provider rule, and Uganda spent nine weeks in the waiting room waiting for it.
Central America was the one place we pushed. Customers running marketplace and delivery-app testing had been asking for Guatemala and Honduras since 2022, and the demand was concentrated enough to justify holding SIMs in our own pool rather than waiting for a reseller to appear.
What adding a country actually involves
Almost none of the work is technical. A country appears in the offer table as soon as any upstream lists it, which takes no effort at all and means nothing. The fourteen days that follow are the job: we buy activations across the twenty most-requested services, at different hours, and watch which ones deliver. Roughly a third of candidate countries fail this immediately, usually because a single operator dominates inbound international SMS and filters it, and no amount of buying from a different pool changes that.
The rest fail slowly, which is more expensive. Uganda looked fine for eleven days and then one pool's numbers stopped receiving on a Thursday; the pair recovered on the Monday and we restarted the clock. This is why the launch bar is a consecutive-days rule rather than an average — an average would have listed Uganda in week one, and the customers who bought that week would have paid to discover the Thursday.
Total spend on soak testing in 2024 was about €4,100, which is a small number for the amount of argument it settles.
Three countries we removed
Coverage is not a ratchet. We delisted three countries in 2024 and we would rather say so than let the count look tidier than it is.
- Bangladesh, delisted in June. Carrier-side filtering of international A2P traffic pushed the trailing success rate under 60 % for six weeks. Numbers were plentiful and useless.
- Sudan, delisted in April for reasons that were not technical. We could not source numbers through a route we were comfortable with.
- Turkmenistan, delisted in September. It never really worked; it passed the launch bar for exactly fifteen days in 2023 on the back of one pool that then withdrew. That was our error in the launch rule, not a change in the country, and the fourteen-day window plus the two-provider requirement both exist because of it.
The waiting room
Eleven countries currently meet two of the three criteria. The one people ask about most is Ethiopia: service breadth is fine, stock is fine, and delivery has been stuck between 68 % and 74 % since August because a single operator handles the bulk of inbound international SMS and filters aggressively. We will not list it at 71 %. Listing a country you cannot deliver in is worse than not listing it, because the customer pays to find out.
Total at the end of 2024: 190 countries with at least one service in stock, 147 that clear the full launch bar. Both numbers are on the coverage page, and the second one is the one worth reading.
Articles are published in English.