The cheapest mobile data in South Africa right now works out to R4.99 a gigabyte, the most expensive to nearly four times that, and almost nobody buying data on a Tuesday afternoon at a Shoprite till has any idea which side of that line they are standing on.
Geekhub ranked the country’s prepaid and month-to-month data products by what actually matters, which is not the headline price of the bundle but what each gigabyte inside it costs. A R99 bundle sounds identical wherever you buy it. It is not, and the spread is wide enough to be worth twenty minutes of anyone’s afternoon.
How this was ranked
Only prepaid and month-to-month products were included, since contract pricing bundles in a handset and stops being a data comparison. Every figure was divided by the anytime data allocation to get a cost per gigabyte, and night-time or off-peak allocations were excluded from that calculation, because data you can only use between midnight and five in the morning is not the same product as data you can use at two in the afternoon.
Prices were checked in August 2026 and cross-referenced against MyBroadband’s July price survey, which covered a wider field of operators and virtual operators than this ranking does. Anything promotional or time-limited was left out of the ranking itself and flagged separately.
The winner is a network most people have never heard of
MTN Pi, the digital-only operator MTN launched in March 2026, takes the top spot at almost every allocation above 10GB. Its 80GB package at R399 works out to R4.99 a gigabyte, which is the cheapest anytime data on the open market by a comfortable margin. The 40GB tier at R299 lands at R7.48, and the 20GB at R199 comes to R9.95.
Pi runs on MTN’s network, which as of MyBroadband Insights’ Q2 2026 testing recorded the highest average download speed nationally at just over 91Mbps, so this is not a case of cheap data on a compromised network. There are no credit checks and no call centre, and the whole thing is managed through an app, which is the trade-off. Pi also allows unused data to roll over for up to twelve months, and applies a cumulative family discount of 5% for each additional line up to a maximum of 20%, according to its launch details as reported by Gadget and Connecting Africa.
The genuinely strange part is how far Pi undercuts MTN’s own prepaid offering. The same parent network sells a 20GB prepaid bundle at several hundred rand more than Pi charges for the identical allocation on the identical towers, which tells you something about how much of a prepaid price is infrastructure and how much is legacy pricing that nobody has been forced to defend.
At the small end, the till counter still wins
For anyone buying 5GB at a time, Shoprite’s K’Nect Mobile is the cheapest at R89, working out to R17.80 a gigabyte. It runs on Cell C’s network, it recharges at more than three thousand Shoprite, Checkers, Usave and Hyper tills nationwide, and for a household without a card or an app that last point is not a footnote, it is the entire reason the product exists. Shoprite Money Market account holders have historically received a discount on smaller bundles on top of that, so it is worth asking at the counter.
Pi, Vodacom and Axxess Mobile all sit at R99 for roughly 5GB, or R19.80 a gigabyte. Vodacom adds a matching 5GB of night-time data, which is either excellent value or completely worthless depending on whether anyone in the house is awake at 01:00 to schedule a download. Its bundles also carry 30-day validity where most competitors run to 60, which quietly costs you anything you fail to finish.
Telkom is the outlier worth understanding. Its on-network bundles are priced aggressively, with 7.5GB at R99 coming out to R13.20 a gigabyte and a 3GB entry bundle at R49, plus a matching Night Surfer allocation usable between midnight and 07:00. The catch sits in the phrase “on-network”, because those bundles work on Telkom’s own towers only and not while roaming on Vodacom or MTN, and Telkom’s average national download speed in the Q2 2026 testing was roughly half of MTN’s. In Fourways that may not matter but on the N2 somewhere past Mtunzini it very much will.
The ranking, by what a gigabyte actually costs
- Under R6 a gigabyte: MTN Pi 80GB at R399 (R4.99). Nothing else on the market is close at this allocation.
- R6 to R10: Telkom 80GB at R529 (R6.61), MTN Pi 40GB at R299 (R7.48), Vodacom 50GB at R379 (R7.58), Telkom 40GB at R369 (R9.23), MTN Pi 20GB at R199 (R9.95).
- R10 to R15: Telkom 25GB at R259 (R10.36), Vodacom 20GB at R229 (R11.45), Afrihost Air Mobile and Capitec Connect 40GB at R450 (R11.25), Telkom 7.5GB at R99 (R13.20), the 10GB tier from Pi, K’Nect and Vodacom at R149 (R14.90).
- R15 to R20: Shoprite K’Nect 5GB at R89 (R17.80), MTN Pi, Vodacom and Axxess at R99 for around 5GB (R18 to R19.80).
- Above R20: FNB Connect sits at the expensive end across the range, with small bundles priced at more than double the cheapest equivalents. Melon Mobile’s smaller tiers also price well above the market, though it includes SMS bundles the others do not.
What a price per gigabyte does not tell you
Cheapest is not always best, and there’s three things worth talking about. Expiry is the first, because a 60-day bundle at R14.90 a gigabyte that you finish beats a 30-day bundle at R11 that you do not. Coverage is the second, since a Cell C-backed virtual operator is excellent value in Soweto and considerably less so on a farm road outside Vryburg. Out-of-bundle rates are the third and the most punishing, because the moment a bundle runs dry the per-gigabyte maths stops applying entirely and the operator’s raw rate takes over.
That last one is about to change. ICASA’s End-User and Subscriber Service Charter Amendment Regulations, published in January 2026, take effect on 23 January 2027 and will stop operators charging out-of-bundle rates unless the customer has explicitly opted in, while requiring unused bundles to roll over at least once. Vodacom and MTN have both taken parts of those regulations on review, and ICASA told Parliament on 11 August that the near-identical shape of the two challenges raised questions the regulator wants answered.
The short version
Anyone using more than 20GB a month and not on MTN Pi is almost certainly overpaying, often by a factor of two. Anyone buying 5GB at a time in cash is best served at a Shoprite till. If you’re on FNB Connect and have not compared prices in the past year, you should do so this weekend. And anyone still buying data in 1GB increments is paying the highest effective rate in the country, which is the oldest and most expensive habit in South African mobile.
Prices checked August 2026 and cross-referenced against MyBroadband’s July 2026 price survey. Pi product details per launch coverage. Network speed figures from MyBroadband Insights Q2 2026 testing. Cost-per-gigabyte figures calculated by Geekhub on anytime data allocations only. Operators change pricing frequently, so confirm in-app or in-store before buying.
