How we research

Content about how a country works is easy to write badly: you gather what other blogs say, rephrase it, and publish with an authoritative tone. The problem shows up on the other end — when somebody lands without the document they needed, or budgets for a fee that changed eighteen months ago. So the method is open.

Where each number comes from

Rules, fees and requirements come from the institution that publishes them — the central bank, the tax authority, the federal police, the agency that regulates the road. The link and the date we read it are on the page. A figure without a date is information that expires without telling you.

When a company is the only one who publishes something — an operator's coverage, a bank's fee — the guide says that it is what the company states about itself, not something we verified independently. That distinction is the whole point of the fact box.

What "not published" means

When an institution does not publish something, the fact box says not published — never "no". The difference matters. "Not published" is a question you can still ask at the counter. If we wrote "no", you would have ruled out something that might well be available.

No field is ever filled with what is usually the case. A plausible number is indistinguishable from a checked number once it sits in a table, and that is exactly how bad information spreads.

The section that says what we could not verify

Most guides end with a short list of what we tried to confirm and could not. That list is deliberate. If a government portal will not serve a document, the guide says which portal failed — a fact you can check yourself — instead of claiming the information does not exist, which usually is not true.

The opposite failure is just as bad. Declaring a gap that is not real, for something that is published and easy to find, is a false statement in the place where being wrong costs the most. So a gap only goes on the page after a real attempt, and the sentence says where we tried.

We do not test things, and we say so

Every guide here is documentary research. We read what the institution published, note the date we read it, and write down what it says. No guide on this site claims that we tried something ourselves — not a card at a counter, not an app, not a queue at an office.

That is a deliberate choice, and it is stated here rather than left ambiguous. Plenty of sites imply first-hand testing they never did, because it reads better. A guide backed by a named source with a date is honest and sufficient, and it is what you can check. Claiming a test that did not happen would be inventing a fact about our own conduct — worse than getting a number wrong, because it is the one thing a reader has no way to verify.

The rule is enforced in the software, not just in intention: the build refuses to publish any guide whose text claims a test without a recorded one behind it.

What we do not do

• We never rank or recommend. You will not find "the best eSIM for Brazil" here as our own judgment. Where guides compare, they compare published facts, and the criteria are written on the page.
• Nobody pays to appear. No company has ever paid to be included, mentioned or described here, and none ever will. If that changes, it will be written at the top of the page in plain sight, not in a footer.
• We do not give legal, tax, immigration or medical advice. We explain what the rule says and where it is published. What to do about it in your specific case is between you and a professional.

Corrections

Rules change, and some of what is here will be wrong eventually. Every guide shows when it was published and when it was last revised, and those are two different dates: correcting a guide never changes the day it first went up.

If you find something wrong, tell us. Say which guide and what you saw — a correction that arrives with a source goes up the same week.

More about who writes this in about the site and on the author page.