Free Mobile eSIM: price, ordering, activation and setup (2026)

How much a Free Mobile eSIM costs, and when you pay

€10. One flat amount, regardless of your plan, how long you have been a customer, or whether you take a plastic card or an eSIM. The carrier's own help pages are explicit: SIM card, or eSIM, fees are 10 euros.

When you pay depends on the situation. On a new line, the €10 is charged to your card at sign-up. On an existing line, when you order a new medium from your subscriber account, the amount lands on your next bill.

There is no published free-of-charge case, unlike other carriers. At Sosh, for instance, activation is waived in three specific situations, as detailed in our breakdown of Sosh eSIM fees. At Free, the grid is flat: €10.

Amount checked on 28 August 2026 on Free's help centre and confirmed in the carrier's contractual price list.

The rat's advice: If you are still torn between a plastic card and an eSIM, price will not settle it, the two cost the same. What should decide is how many slots your phone has: an eSIM frees the physical tray, so you can keep a local SIM beside it when you travel.

Free eSIM card: nothing to receive, and yet €10

Many people look for the Free eSIM card the way you look for an object to receive. There is none. An eSIM is a software profile downloaded into a chip already soldered into your phone: nothing lands in your letterbox, nothing slides into a tray. What the carrier gives you is access inside your subscriber account.

Billing, however, never followed that logic. The price brochure files the "SIM / eSIM card" on one single line, at €10 payable on ordering, whether you pick the plastic or the dematerialised profile. You pay the same price for a manufactured, shipped object as for a file downloaded in two minutes.

That vocabulary confusion has a practical consequence. When an article tells you about "receiving your Free eSIM card", be wary of what follows: there is no postal delay, no tracking number, no card to activate. The only real delay is the profile becoming available in your subscriber account, roughly two minutes.

The rat's advice: the word "card" survives in every carrier's vocabulary because the billing never moved. When you compare two offers, look for the "SIM card fee" or "activation fee" line: that is where the real entry cost hides, eSIM or not.

Ordering your Free eSIM: the steps, screen by screen

The whole thing happens in the subscriber account, with no store visit and no call to support. Allow five minutes, login included.

Step 1. Sign in to your Free Mobile subscriber account with your ID and password.

Step 2. Open « Mon compte », then « Mon offre ».

Step 3. Click « Commander une nouvelle SIM ou eSIM », then the « + » button.

Step 4. Pick the eSIM format. The option only shows if your phone is recognised as compatible.

Step 5. Confirm the order. The €10 will appear on your next bill.

The profile then becomes available within two minutes in your subscriber account, ready to download. That is the real difference with the plastic card, which has to be posted to you.

Procedure checked on 28 August 2026 on Free's official portal.

One case is worth ruling out straight away: if your SIM card has been lost or stolen, the carrier recommends suspending the line first, rather than ordering a replacement right away.

The 14 days: what happens if you do nothing

This is the worst-explained part of the subject, and the one that causes the most unpleasant surprises. The 14 days are not a waiting period before you can install your eSIM. Several guides present it that way. They are wrong.

It works the other way round. Your eSIM can be ordered and downloaded immediately: you open the « Ma eSIM » page and tap « J'active ma eSIM » whenever you like. The 14 days are a deadline: past that point, with no action from you, Free activates the eSIM automatically, the button turns into « Je télécharge ma eSIM », and your old SIM card stops working.

The practical consequence matters. Order an eSIM, then leave for a fortnight without installing the profile, and you can come back to a dead line on a phone where nothing was ever installed, plus a plastic card that has gone inert.

The rat's advice: Only order your Free eSIM on the day you have the phone in hand and ten minutes to spare. An eSIM ordered and left alone for two weeks is not an eSIM on hold, it is a line about to switch over on its own.

Installing the Free eSIM: without a QR code, with one, or by hand

The carrier offers four routes, and the first one changed things for anyone with a single device to hand.

Direct install from the phone. From the « Ma eSIM » page of your subscriber account, opened on the phone itself, copy the confirmation code shown on screen, then tap « Installer l'eSIM sur ce mobile ». The install starts with no QR code at all. This route needs iOS 9 or later, or Android 10 or later. The carrier announced it on 21 October 2025.

Install by QR code. The classic route: display the activation QR code on a second screen, scan it with the camera of the phone you are setting up, enter the confirmation code, and the profile downloads.

Install from the Free app. On iPhone, the « Ma eSIM » section offers the install directly. On Android, copy the confirmation code from the app, then paste it into your phone settings.

Pre-installed eSIM. On a phone bought directly from the carrier, the line installs itself at first boot: connect to Wi-Fi and follow the on-screen instructions.

In every case, restart the phone once the profile has downloaded. And change the PIN: the factory one is 1234.

Methods and requirements checked on 28 August 2026 on Free's help centre, plus the QR-code-free install announcement relayed by Univers Freebox.

Which Free plans take the eSIM

All of them. The eSIM is not a premium-tier option, it is a line medium. From the €2 plan to the Forfait Free Max, every offer can ship as an eSIM, and the €10 fee applies the same way across the board.

Here is the range as listed on 28 August 2026, with what each plan covers outside France, since that is where the gaps open up:

Forfait Free Max, €29.99/month: unlimited 5G and 5G+ data in France, and unlimited data from more than 140 destinations.

Forfait Free 5G+, €19.99/month: 350 GB in France, and 35 GB per month from 117 destinations.

Série Free, €12.99/month for the first year, then it rolls onto the Forfait Free 5G+: 110 GB in France, and 30 GB from Europe and the French overseas departments.

Forfait 2 €, €2/month: the entry-level offer, with a very small allowance.

Prices and volumes checked on 28 August 2026 on mobile.free.fr, roaming verified in the carrier's price list.

The line that matters to a traveller is the second one. The 35 GB on the Forfait Free 5G+ are generous, but they stop at the 117 destinations on the list, and that list has holes. We went through it country by country in our Free Mobile destination list.

eSIM Watch option: included, but not on every plan

Free offers an eSIM Watch option to link a smartwatch to your mobile line, and the price brochure lists it as included, at no monthly extra. That is far from standard: several competitors charge a few euros a month for the same function.

The conditions are specific. The option is reserved for Forfait Free Max, Forfait Free and Série Free subscribers: the €2 plan is excluded. It works on 4G only, in mainland France, subject to coverage, with a compatible watch and phone. You subscribe from your watch's app on your phone, and the offer is limited to one watch per mobile plan.

In practice, your watch takes calls and notifications without the phone in range. What is not covered: use abroad, since the option is valid in mainland France. When travelling, the watch falls back to being tethered to the phone, and your main line takes over.

Source: Free Mobile price brochure, 21/07/2026 version, checked on 01/09/2026.

Switching phones: the right order of operations

An eSIM does not move the way a plastic card does. There is nothing to pull out of a tray, which makes the order of operations matter.

The rule set by the carrier is simple: to install your eSIM on another device, you must first delete it from the first phone, and that deletion has to happen while the device is connected to the internet. Over Wi-Fi, or through another SIM card that is still active.

The classic mistake is resetting the old phone, or selling it, before removing the profile cleanly. You then end up with an eSIM registered to a device you no longer own, and unlocking it means going through customer support.

On fees, the answer is not in the help centre but in the price brochure: a "SIM / eSIM change and eSIM download" is billed €10, exactly what the initial order costs. Reinstalling your line on a new phone is therefore not free. Check the amount shown in your subscriber account before confirming, and note that number portability, by contrast, is offered.

Source: Free Mobile price brochure, 21/07/2026 version, checked on 01/09/2026.

The rat's advice: Do it with both phones on, charged and on the same Wi-Fi. Delete the profile on the old one, install on the new one right away. In between, your line is down: not the moment to rely on it for a login code by SMS.

Your Free eSIM abroad: what it covers, and where it gets expensive

This is the blind spot of most guides on the subject: they explain how to get the eSIM, never what it is worth once you have crossed a border.

Across the 117 included destinations of the Forfait Free 5G+, all is well: 35 GB a month, nothing to set up. Past that allowance from Europe and the French overseas departments, data falls back to €0.0013 per megabyte, around €1.33 per gigabyte. That is reasonable.

The problem lies elsewhere. Outside the included destinations, data is billed at €9.70 per megabyte. Not per gigabyte, per megabyte. Three heavily travelled destinations sit in that bracket across the whole Free range: Cambodia, the Philippines and Cuba. Thailand, for its part, is included in the 35 GB, and Japan is only included on the most expensive plan of the range.

Take the Philippines, to measure the gap. Here are travel eSIM plans on a strictly identical footing, 10 GB valid 30 days, pulled from the comparator's catalogue on 28 August 2026:

Esimzon: €10.84, or €1.08 per gigabyte.

voilà: €12.30, or €1.23 per gigabyte.

Ubigi: €16.00, or €1.60 per gigabyte.

eSIM Card: €16.37, or €1.64 per gigabyte.

Saily: €16.99, or €1.70 per gigabyte.

Prices checked on 28 August 2026 in the comparator's provider catalogues. Full detail, kept up to date, on our Philippines eSIM page.

The comparison speaks for itself. A single megabyte out of plan at Free costs €9.70, while 10,240 megabytes of travel eSIM cost €10.84 from the cheapest in this sample. On this exact footing, Esimzon comes first and voilà second, €1.46 apart.

So on this Philippines sample voilà is not the lowest price, but stays in the top third, which makes for solid value for money on this footing. The brand also leans on an eSIM that is simple to install and an app that is easy to use, and on human customer support, reachable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Every provider has its own ground: the right pick depends on your data profile, not on a universal winner. You can compare all five on our eSIM providers page.

The trade-off fits in one sentence. Your Free eSIM stays your main line, the one that keeps your number for calls and texts. A travel eSIM sits alongside it, for data only, only in the destinations Free does not cover. Both profiles live together without conflict on a recent phone.