Orbislo Lifeline
Free rescue data. Because you cannot buy data with no data.
It is not a trial, it is not a first month promotion and it does not end. It resets on the same date every month for as long as the account exists.
The closed loop, spelled out
Picture the moment. You are in Bangkok, it is 23:40, and your data ran out an hour ago without you noticing. To buy more you need to open an app or a website. To open an app you need data. Your home carrier is switched off or would charge you $12 a megabyte. The hotel is 40 minutes away and you cannot load the map to get there. The airport wifi wants an SMS code you cannot receive because your travel eSIM has no phone number. There is a payment page waiting to take your money and no way on earth to reach it.
This is not a rare event. Running out of data mid trip is one of the most common support contacts in travel connectivity, and it is structurally guaranteed by the ticket model: you buy a fixed amount, it runs out at a moment nobody predicted, and the only remedy is on the far side of the thing you just lost. Every provider in this category knows it, and the standard answer is a support article telling you to find wifi. That is not an answer, it is a shrug.
What Lifeline always permits, precisely
Be precise about this, because a vague promise is worth nothing at 23:40. Three things are never blocked, at any balance, including zero, and including when your 100 MB is fully spent for the month.
- Buying data. The Orbislo app, the top up flow and the payment page always load and always work. You can be at zero balance with zero Lifeline left and still buy a wallet top up. This path is not metered against anything.
- Reaching a human. Support chat always opens. Our target is a human reply in under 60 seconds, 24 hours a day, and your diagnostics travel with the message so you do not have to describe your problem twice.
- Reaching an emergency number. Local emergency dialling, the cached emergency number list and the offline safety pack are always available. Nothing about your balance can stand between you and 112, 911, 119 or 000.
On top of those three, the 100 MB monthly allowance is general purpose. It is real internet on a real network at the normal speed of that network. Maps, messages, email, a boarding pass, a booking confirmation, a translation, a call over an app. It is not restricted to a walled garden of our own pages, which is how most operator style "free data" offers are built.
What 100 MB is genuinely worth
| What you are doing | Rough cost | How much 100 MB gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Loading a map screen | 0.2 to 0.3 MB | 300 to 500 screens |
| Messaging, text only | Under 0.01 MB | Thousands of messages |
| A voice call over an app | 0.4 MB a minute | About 4 hours, in theory |
| Email without attachments | 0.05 MB each | Hundreds |
| Loading a booking confirmation | 1 to 2 MB | 50 to 100 of them |
| Hailing a ride | 2 to 4 MB end to end | 25 to 50 rides |
| Streaming video | 700 MB an hour | About 8 minutes, so no |
Real usage is messier than a table, because background app refresh eats data you did not ask to spend. Lifeline turns background refresh down automatically while it is the active source, so the 100 MB goes to the thing you are actually doing.
100 MB
Free every month, every account
145
Countries where it works
$0
Purchase required to have it
60s
Support reply target, at any balance
Why nobody else does this
Two reasons, and neither is technical. The first is the disposable profile model: if your eSIM only exists for the length of one trip, there is no account to attach a permanent monthly allowance to. The profile is dead, so the free data has nowhere to live. The Orbislo Passport is permanent, so the allowance can be permanent too.
The second reason is that running out of data is commercially useful to a provider that sells tickets. A traveller who runs out buys another ticket, usually at the panic price, usually the biggest one on the page. Removing that moment of panic removes a chunk of margin. We think the trade is worth it, because a traveller who has never once been stranded by us is a traveller who does not shop around next year.
How it behaves day to day
When your paid balance runs out, Lifeline takes over automatically and you get a notification saying so, with the amount left. It does not silently pretend everything is fine, because the worst version of this feature would be one that quietly spends your rescue data on a video that autoplayed. When Lifeline itself runs out, the connection stops rather than crawling, and the top up screen opens. You then buy from the wallet at the normal price, not a stranded traveller price, because we do not have one.
If you want to see the networks Lifeline will attach you to in a given country before you fly, they are published on the coverage pages alongside the speeds real travellers measured and the sample counts behind them. And if you would rather simply not be near the edge, a small wallet top up starts at $4.89 for 1 GB and never expires.