An AFFMaven case study by Ali
We ditched WordPress, built a full Next.js app using Claude Code, and four months later it’s pulling 5,000–6,000 clicks a day from Google Search. No huge backlink budget. No big SEO team. Just a different way of building.
I’ve been in affiliate marketing for around 10–12 years. I’ve run sites in SaaS, proxies, AI tools, dating, Marketing— pretty much every niche you can monetise.
So when I tell you eSIM is one of the new niches I’ve found in years, it’s not hype. The buyer intent is high, the commissions are real, the providers want affiliates, and Google hasn’t yet buried it under spam the way it has every other affiliate vertical.
Here’s exactly how we did it, with the real numbers — including what it cost.
Why eSIM, and Why Right Now?
Travellers are switching to digital SIM cards fast, and the data backs up what we’re seeing in our own traffic. The global travel eSIM market sits at roughly $1.75 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $4.06 billion by 2035.
The more aggressive forecasts are wild — one report puts the travel eSIM market at $125.61 billion by 2032, growing at a 65.5% CAGR. Pick whichever model you trust; the direction is the same, and it’s straight up.
A few numbers that explain why the buyer pool keeps expanding:
| eSIM Market Signal (2026) | Figure |
|---|---|
| Travel eSIM market value, 2026 | ~$1.75B |
| Retail spending growth, 2023–2028 | ~500% |
| Smartphone units eSIM-compatible by 2025 (GSMA) | ~60% |
| Projected eSIM smartphone connections by 2030 (GSMA) | ~76% |
| Share of travel connectivity now via eSIM | ~15% |
| Travellers preferring data-only eSIM plans | ~70% |
| First-time eSIM users among Airalo app users | ~85% |
That last row is the one that matters most. 85% of Airalo app users are first-time eSIM buyers. First-timers don’t know which provider to pick. They search, they compare, they read reviews. That search-and-compare behaviour is exactly what a comparison site is built to capture — and it’s the same behaviour we already tap into with our 10 best eSIMs for international travel guide.
Then layer on the events calendar. Big global moments — the FIFA World Cup, the Olympics cycle, major tours — push millions of people across borders inside the same few weeks, and nearly all of them need data the moment they land.
That’s a predictable demand spike that maps perfectly onto programmatic country and event pages.
And the affiliate economics are genuinely good. eSIM providers run open, generous programs because every sale is a digital product with near-zero fulfilment cost:
| eSIM Provider | Reported Commission |
|---|---|
| Airalo | ~8% per sale, 30-day cookie |
| Amigo eSIM | up to ~15% |
| Saily (Nord Security) | ~15%, recurring on renewals |
Recurring commission on renewals, in a market growing 500% — that compounds. If you want the wider picture, we break down the full travel category in our best travel affiliate programs roundup; eSIM is the fastest-moving slice of it right now.
The 2026 Affiliate Backdrop
eSIM doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The whole channel is healthy. US affiliate spending is climbing ~10% to over $13 billion in 2026, and globally the industry is valued at around $18.5 billion, projected to hit $31.7 billion by 2031. The model still delivers — businesses earn an average of $12–15 for every $1 spent.
But here’s the part nobody says out loud: most of those dollars flow into niches that are already brutally competitive. SEO is the main traffic tactic for ~78% of affiliate marketers, which means every profitable niche gets carpet-bombed with identical WordPress review blogs.
eSIM hasn’t been fully carpet-bombed yet. That window is the opportunity. (We keep a running file of these numbers on our statistics hub if you want to cite them.
Why We Killed the WordPress Plan
Our first instinct, like everyone’s, was to spin up a WordPress site. Comparison plugin, a few “best eSIM for Japan” posts, affiliate links, done. We’ve published the playbook for exactly that — how to start a blog on WordPress — and for most niches it still works.
We didn’t do it here. Here’s the reasoning.
Google has gotten very good at recognising the WordPress affiliate-blog fingerprint: thin templated posts, a comparison table, an affiliate CTA, repeat. When a site looks like that at scale, it reads as made for affiliate revenue rather than made for users, and rankings suffer.
We’ve watched it happen across our own portfolio. In a competitive niche, a WordPress affiliate blog is fighting uphill from day one — which is partly why we now think carefully about the website builder you pick for affiliate marketing before a single page goes live.
So we flipped the model. Instead of a blog that links to eSIM products, we built a product — a real comparison app that happens to earn affiliate revenue. The difference isn’t cosmetic. It changes what the site is in Google’s eyes.
The site has:
None of that is achievable with a stack of blog posts. It’s a SaaS-shaped tool, and Google treats genuine tools very differently from affiliate content farms. That’s the core bet, and it paid off.
The Stack — Built Entirely With Claude Code, Zero Hand-Written Code
I’m a non-technical founder. I don’t write code. I direct it. The entire build was done by pasting structured phase prompts into Claude Code and running them.
| Layer | What We Used |
|---|---|
| Framework | Next.js (SaaS-style app, not a blog) |
| Build tool | Claude Code (paste-and-run phase prompts) |
| Plan data ingestion | Apify SDK scrapers + Firecrawl |
| Provider data | Official eSIM affiliate APIs where available |
| AI features | OpenRouter (DeepSeek + Nemotron + free models) |
| Auth | Magic-link / standard email signup |
| Monetisation | Affiliate links + coupon codes only (no ads yet) |
On data ingestion: We didn’t scrape everything blindly. We selectively chose proper, legitimate eSIM sources and used Apify-based scrapers plus Firecrawl to fetch live plan data — prices, coverage, durations, data caps.
Where a provider offered an official affiliate API, we used the API instead of scraping, because clean structured data beats a fragile scraper every time.
(If you’re newer to this side, our web scraping with proxies guide covers the infrastructure layer.) That live-data layer is what keeps the comparison accurate — and accuracy is what keeps users and Google trusting the site.
On AI features: Both the country-plan finder and the trip builder run on OpenRouter models — DeepSeek as primary, Nemotron and other free models as fallback.
No expensive per-query model costs. This keeps the AI features cheap to run at scale, which matters when you’re serving hundreds of thousands of users.
On the build process: It took about one month to go from nothing to a complete, working system — features, bug fixing, the AI tools, auth, the data pipeline, everything. I never opened a code editor to type logic myself.
I wrote clear phase prompts describing what each part should do, ran them through Claude Code, tested, found bugs, described the bugs, ran the fix prompts. Ship and iterate. That’s the whole loop.
The Cost — And Why It Was Worth It
I’ll be straight about the spend, because most case studies hide this part. The build cost us around $4,000, made up of the Claude Code subscription, Claude API usage, and going over the limits during the heavy build month.
That’s not cheap for a single site. But compare it to hiring a Next.js developer to build a full SaaS app with auth, live data pipelines and two AI features — that runs many multiples of $4,000 and takes far longer. And the return justified it: we’ve been getting strong eSIM sales and solid affiliate revenue from the providers, with traffic still climbing.
We are intentionally not running ads yet. Right now monetisation is affiliate links and coupon codes only. Ads and more programmatic expansion are next on the roadmap — but we wanted to prove the affiliate model alone could carry the site first. It does.
The Results
| Metric (last 4 months) | Result |
|---|---|
| Total users | 300,000+ |
| Daily clicks from Google Search | 5,000–6,000 |
| Time to build full system | ~1 month |
| Lines of code I personally wrote | 0 |
| Total build cost | ~$4,000 |
| Ad revenue | $0 (affiliate + coupons only) |
300,000+ users in four months, and 5,000–6,000 Google clicks every single day — without a massive backlink campaign or a big SEO budget. The traffic came because the site is structured as a useful tool with real, fresh data and programmatic country pages, not because we out-spent anyone on links.
That’s the discovery: in eSIM, being a genuine tool is itself the SEO strategy.
How You Can Replicate This
Here’s the part that matters for everyone reading this on AFFMaven. The eSIM win wasn’t really about eSIM. The transferable lesson is the model:
If you’ve already got a WordPress site sitting in a tough niche, you don’t necessarily torch it — sometimes the smarter move is to migrate it without losing your SEO or affiliate revenue and run the app as a separate property. That’s roughly what we’re doing across the network now.
We’re already mapping this same playbook onto other niches. The pattern works wherever there’s a comparison decision, a buyer with intent, and a provider willing to pay commission — which is a lot of niches.
eSIM was the test case. The model is the asset.
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