You've got your trip planned, you know you'll need data, and the only thing left to decide is the package size. So let's get straight to the point with how many GB I need for Indonesia and how the figure changes depending on whether you're a two-week tourist based in Bali or a digital nomad spending a month in Canggu. Spoiler: there's a three or fourfold difference between those two profiles, which is why most generic guides give you a number that doesn't work.
The short answer, in gigabytes
For 14 days in Indonesia with Bali as your base, most people will be fine with 10 GB: about 500 MB per day for maps, Gojek, WhatsApp, and social media, relying on your accommodation's WiFi. If you're a digital nomad and working for a month, aim for 30 GB. If you upload videos daily, 50 GB.
That's the figure I give to nine out of ten people who ask me. And I believe it because in Indonesia there's something that works in your favor: the WiFi in accommodations and cafes is much better than people expect. In Canggu and Ubud, a decent cafe gives you plenty of speed to work, and almost any mid-range villa or hotel has a reasonable connection. That means your mobile data is mostly used outside: on the scooter, in the Grab car, in the rice fields, at the market, in the ferry queue.
If you're coming from the general guide on how much data you need for travel, the logic is the same, but here the distribution between WiFi and data is more favorable than, for example, on a road trip through the United States. What does change the number in Indonesia are four specific things: transportation apps, long journeys between islands, hours without coverage on volcanoes and boats, and the brutal amount of photos and videos one ends up taking. I'll break them all down.
Why Indonesia moves the number
Each destination has its own consumption footprint, and Indonesia's is peculiar: you spend little at once but for many hours straight. A month in Bali is not like a month in Tokyo or ten days in Morocco.
What pushes your consumption up:
- Gojek and Grab. You open them ten or fifteen times a day to order a scooter, car, or food. Each time, live map, driver tracking, and chat with them.
- Very long journeys. From Canggu to Uluwatu you can spend an hour and a half in traffic. From Bali to Ijen or Borobudur, half a day. That's where people devour Instagram, Spotify, and YouTube.
- Non-stop photos and videos. Indonesia is one of the destinations where the most content is generated per day of travel. And uploading it weighs much more than just viewing it.
- Ferries, ports, and domestic airports. Dead hours with your phone in hand, and public WiFi almost never works there.
What pushes it down:
- Good WiFi in cafes and coworking spaces in Canggu, Seminyak, and Ubud, with speeds that handle video calls without a hitch.
- No mandatory VPN needed or constant camera translator: in tourist areas, English works, and signs are legible.
- Entire hours without coverage during trekking, snorkeling, and crossings, where consumption is literally zero.
If you also want to understand what operators and what kind of connection you'll find on the ground, it's broken down in the guide to internet in Indonesia. Here I'm only focusing on gigabytes.
How much each thing really consumes
Before choosing a package, it's good to know how much each activity weighs. These are reasonable reference figures; your phone may deviate a bit depending on network quality and your settings, but the order of magnitude is this:
| Activity | Approximate consumption | On a normal day in Bali |
|---|---|---|
| Google Maps navigating (standard map) | 5-10 MB/hour | 20-40 MB |
| Google Maps in satellite view | 120-150 MB/hour | Avoid it |
| WhatsApp text only | Practically nothing | 5-10 MB |
| WhatsApp voice call | ~1 MB/minute (60 MB/hour) | 30-60 MB |
| WhatsApp video call | 5-12 MB/minute (300-700 MB/hour) | 0-300 MB |
| Instagram or TikTok scrolling | ~700 MB/hour | 200-700 MB |
| Uploading a photo | 3-5 MB each | 50-150 MB |
| Music streaming (normal quality) | 50-70 MB/hour | 50-150 MB |
| YouTube at 480p | 250 MB/hour | 0-500 MB |
| YouTube at 1080p | 1.5 GB/hour | WiFi only |
| Email and web browsing | 10-20 MB/hour | 30-60 MB |
What stands out: maps are not the problem, not by a long shot. Many people buy huge packages "because I'm going to use GPS a lot" when navigating all day in Bali costs less than two minutes of high-quality video. Video—watching it and especially uploading it—is 80% of any modern traveler's data bill. If you want more detailed activity numbers, I've compiled them in the mobile data usage statistics by activity.
How many GB depending on your profile and days
This is the table that truly answers the question. It's calculated assuming what's normal in Indonesia: that you sleep somewhere with WiFi and use it for heavy tasks (backups, series, downloads). If you're going to be in beach bungalows without a decent connection, step up a level.
| Profile | 5 days | 10 days | 15 days | 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tourist using maps and WhatsApp | 2 GB | 3 GB | 5 GB | 8 GB |
| Tourist taking photos and using social media (most common) | 3 GB | 7 GB | 10 GB | 20 GB |
| Digital nomad / remote work | 5 GB | 10 GB | 18 GB | 30 GB |
| Content creator uploading videos | 10 GB | 20 GB | 30 GB | 50 GB or more |
| Family sharing one phone as a hotspot | 5 GB | 10 GB | 15 GB | 25 GB |
A couple of honest clarifications. The first: if your trip is two weeks long and you identify with the first row, 5 GB will be more than enough and you don't need to spend more, even if we sell larger packages. The second: the family row assumes only one phone sharing a connection with the rest; if each person has their own data, apply the row that corresponds to each person, and it will be cheaper to distribute than to concentrate.
The third, and most important for Indonesia: the distance between row 2 and row 3 is not a matter of personality, it's a matter of screen time with a laptop connected to a mobile phone. As soon as you share a connection with a computer, consumption multiplies by three or four without you noticing.
The two-week tourist
The typical trip: you land in Denpasar, base in Canggu or Ubud, a couple of days in Nusa Penida or Lembongan, maybe a jump to Lombok or the Gilis, and if you're brave, sunrise at Ijen or Bromo in Java. Fourteen or sixteen days. How much do you really spend?
Breakdown of a normal day for this profile:
| Time of day | What you do | Data |
|---|---|---|
| Morning | Maps, searching for places, ordering Gojek, replying to WhatsApp | 60-80 MB |
| Transfers | Instagram and music in the car or on the scooter | 150-300 MB |
| Afternoon | Uploading photos and a story, searching for a restaurant | 100-200 MB |
| Night | Everything via accommodation WiFi | 0-50 MB |
| Total day | 350-600 MB |
Multiply by 14 and you get between 5 and 8.5 GB. That's why 10 GB for two weeks is the recommendation with a margin: it covers unusual days (the long video call home, the delayed flight in Ngurah Rai, the villa with broken WiFi) without leaving you with half a dozen unused gigabytes. If your trip is a short week, 5 GB is enough, period. And if you're someone who barely looks at their phone and only wants maps and messaging, 3 GB for ten days is perfectly realistic. I prefer to tell you clearly so you'll buy again next time, rather than selling you a package you won't use up.
The one-month digital nomad
Everything changes here. It's not the same traveler with more days: it's different consumption, a different structure, and different risks. The nomad in Canggu or Ubud works six or seven hours a day, has video meetings, uploads and downloads files, and—this is important—uses their mobile as a hotspot every time the cafe WiFi fails, which in high season is more often than they'd like.
The good news is that Bali's infrastructure is up to par: coworking spaces with stable connections, cafes designed for working, and villas with decent fiber. The bad news is that in July, August, and Christmas, cafe WiFi gets saturated with the crowds, and that's when you rely on data precisely during an important video call.
The nomad doesn't buy gigabytes to work: they buy gigabytes to not depend on someone else's WiFi on the day it fails. That's the insurance, which is why they buy extra.
Real figures for 30 days working from Bali:
- Video calls with data: 500 MB - 1 GB per hour in high quality. Two emergency hours per week already amount to 8 GB per month.
- Hotspot for laptop: 1-2 GB per full day if the cafe leaves you stranded.
- Personal use (social media, music, maps, errands): 8-12 GB per month.
With 30 GB for a month, you'll be comfortable; with 20 GB, you'll be tight but viable if the accommodation has a good connection; with 10 GB, you'll run out by the second week. If your work is demanding in terms of uploads—design, editing, large transfers—go straight for 50 GB.
The content creator who uploads videos
This profile deserves a separate chapter because it breaks all the tables. Watching videos consumes data; uploading them consumes much more, and you do it from the beach, from the rice fields, or from the scooter, that is, always with data.
| What you upload | Approximate size |
|---|---|
| A normal photo from your phone | 3-5 MB |
| Carousel of 10 photos | 30-50 MB |
| A 15-second story | 10-15 MB |
| A 30-60 second Reel or TikTok | 20-50 MB |
| A long or high-quality video | 100 MB or more |
| Automatic camera roll backup for one day | 500 MB - 2 GB |
| Transferring raw material to the cloud for editing | 2-5 GB per session |
Look at the last two rows: that's where anyone's data package evaporates. If you leave automatic backup enabled with mobile data and spend a day filming in Nusa Penida, you could consume 2 GB before dinner without having published anything. It's the number one mistake I see in Bali. If you publish daily—three or four video pieces, stories, and also reply to live messages—estimate 1.5-2 GB per day just for uploads, plus your normal usage. That's 50-60 GB per month, and it's not commercial exaggeration: it's arithmetic. My advice is to do two things: upload light content (stories, a short Reel) with data when appropriate, and save heavy material and backups for the accommodation or coworking WiFi at night. With that discipline, you can reduce from 60 GB to about 30 GB without sacrificing publishing.
Gojek, Grab, and the real island WiFi
Transportation apps are the small, constant data sink in Indonesia. Individually, they consume little—a live map for a twenty-minute journey is around 3-5 MB—but you open them so many times a day that they add up to between 50 and 120 MB daily between location, driver tracking, chat, food order photos, and notifications. In a month, that's 2 to 4 GB just for getting around and eating. Nobody accounts for it, and everyone spends it.
The other factor is where there's real WiFi and where there isn't:
| Where you are | WiFi | What you do with data |
|---|---|---|
| Coworking in Canggu or Ubud | Very good | Almost nothing |
| Laptop-friendly cafe | Good, gets saturated in high season | Occasional backup |
| Mid-range villa or hotel | Decent | Almost nothing |
| Beach bungalow or homestay | Weak or intermittent | Everything |
| Gili Trawangan | Regular; Air and Meno, worse | Almost everything |
| Ferry, port, and domestic airport | Token | Everything |
| Village restaurant or warung | Sometimes yes | Depends |
The practical rule is simple: the further you get from the Canggu-Seminyak-Ubud triangle, the more you rely on your own gigabytes. A 100% South Bali trip consumes significantly less than the same trip with a week split between Gili Air, Lombok, and Labuan Bajo, where accommodation WiFi is a lottery and you end up relying on your mobile for everything, including boat reservations.
Where you won't use a single megabyte
Almost no one calculates this part, and it's why people buy larger packages than necessary in Indonesia. There are many hours—many—when your phone simply has no coverage, and therefore consumes nothing:
- Volcano climbs. Mount Batur at dawn, Ijen, Rinjani, Bromo. Between three and eight hours of trekking with no or intermittent signal.
- Boat crossings. The fast boat to the Gilis, Nusa Penida, or Komodo. You lose coverage within minutes of setting sail.
- Komodo and the park islands. Labuan Bajo has signal in the town; on the islands and multi-day boats, forget about it.
- Snorkeling, diving, and beach days. It's not a lack of coverage, it's that your phone stays in the dry bag.
- Inland Java and rural areas of Sumatra or Sulawesi. Irregular coverage outside main roads.
On a two-week trip with two treks and three crossings, that's easily three or four equivalent days of zero consumption. That's a fifth of the trip. That's why calculations like "500 MB per day for 14 days" always come out inflated: not all days are the same.
The practical consequence is twofold. First, you might need to lower your estimate if your route is very remote. Second, and more importantly: download offline maps before going up any volcano or boarding any boat, because otherwise you'll be without data and without a map at the same time. I explain all of this with detailed coverage by area in the eSIM for Indonesia guide.
Estimate your usage before you leave
All of the above are averages. You have the good data yourself, for free, in your pocket: what you used last month at home. It's the best predictor available and takes two minutes to check.
On Android: Settings → Network & internet → SIM → Data usage. On iPhone: Settings → Mobile Data, and then the total for the period at the bottom (it's a good idea to reset statistics on the 1st of the month for a clean measurement). You'll see total megabytes and a breakdown by application, which is where the surprises are.
Now adjust that number with three corrections for Indonesia:
- Subtract home and office Wi-Fi. In Bali, you'll also have Wi-Fi most nights, so if you use 12 GB per month with data at home, when traveling you'll likely be at a similar or slightly higher figure, not triple.
- Add the travel effect. Maps, transportation, occasional translations, more photos, more stories: between 30% and 60% more than your normal month.
- Adjust by days. Divide your monthly consumption by 30, multiply by the number of travel days, and add that 30-60%.
Real example: if you spend 8 GB per month in Spain, that's 265 MB per day; for 14 days in Bali with an extra 50%, that comes out to about 5.6 GB. Buy 10 GB and sleep soundly. This two-minute calculation is worth more than any table, including mine, because it's based on your habits, not those of the average traveler.
Stretching your GBs and what to do if you run short
Once you've purchased the package, there are five adjustments that make a huge difference in Indonesia and should be made before leaving home:
- Offline maps of Bali, Lombok, East Java, and any areas you plan to visit. Google Maps lets you download by area and works perfectly without data.
- Backups only via Wi-Fi. Photos, iCloud, Drive, everything. This is the biggest gigabyte saver at this destination.
- Auto-play video disabled on Instagram, TikTok, X, and Facebook. This alone can reduce social media consumption by 30-40%.
- System data saver mode, plus specific saving within YouTube and Spotify. Download playlists and podcasts the night before.
- Reduced upload quality if you're posting: 1080p instead of 4K for stories and Reels isn't noticeable on a phone and weighs half as much.
You can find the complete list of settings in the guide on tips for saving data while traveling.
And if you run short? Not much: you top up. And that's precisely why my advice is to err on the side of caution rather than overspending. A digital package can be extended from your phone in a couple of minutes with the same line, without going to a store or changing anything—if you've never used one, here's an explanation of what an eSIM is and how topping up works. On the other hand, the extra gigabytes you buy and don't use don't come back. Buying 30 GB "just in case" for a two-week normal tourist trip is highly likely to be a waste of money. Start with a tight estimate, check your usage on the third day, and make decisions with real data.
Frequently Asked Questions
The most common questions I get about gigabytes and Bali, answered concisely.
How many GB do I need for 10 days in Bali?
Between 5 and 7 GB for a normal tourist. If you only use maps and WhatsApp, 3 GB is more than enough. If you take many photos and upload daily stories, expect 7-10 GB. The key is how much you'll rely on your accommodation's Wi-Fi.
What about a whole month working from Canggu?
30 GB is a comfortable figure for a digital nomad for 30 days. 20 GB is tight but doable if your villa or coworking space has a good connection. Below 15 GB, you'll run short if you have two weeks of video calls.
Is 3 GB enough for a week?
Yes, if you're a light user. Maps, messaging, occasional searches, and photos uploaded via Wi-Fi fit easily within 3 GB for seven days. What doesn't fit is watching videos or scrolling for an hour a day with data: that alone is 700 MB daily.
Do Gojek and Grab use a lot of data?
Between 50 and 120 MB per day if you use them constantly. It's little per trip, but opening them many times adds up to 2-4 GB in a month. They count more than people think, though they're still peanuts compared to video.
Do I need data in the Gili Islands and Komodo?
Yes, and more than in Bali. Accommodation Wi-Fi there is weak, so you'll rely on your gigabytes for everything. However, there's no signal on boat trips and within Komodo National Park, so those hours won't consume any data.
Is it worth buying an unlimited package?
Only if you upload professional video or rely on your laptop for tethering. For everyone else, a 10-20 GB package covers the trip with plenty of margin and is considerably cheaper. Be honest with yourself about how much video you actually upload.
Can I share my data with my partner or family?
Yes, with your phone's hotspot. It works well in Indonesia and is convenient for hotels or cars. Keep in mind that usage adds up, so if two people are connected all day, estimate an extra 60% to 80% more gigabytes.
How do I know how many GB I've used during the trip?
By checking your phone's counter every two or three days. In Settings, you'll find data usage for the period. Divide what you've spent by the number of days passed and project it to the total trip: you'll quickly know if you have plenty or if you need to top up.
Conclusion
To summarize directly. Two-week tourist based in Bali: 10 GB. If your usage is light and you only need maps and messaging, 5 GB is more than enough and you won't need more. One-month digital nomad: 30 GB. Content creator uploading video daily: 50 GB, and even then you won't have plenty if you don't save heavy material for coworking Wi-Fi.
The difference between a tourist and a nomad isn't just a few gigabytes: it's three times more, and that's why it doesn't make sense to buy the same package for both. Locate yourself in the profile table, compare it with your actual usage last month, subtract the hours on the volcano and boat, and buy a fitted amount. It's much better to top up halfway through your trip than to pay for gigabytes that will go unused.
Once you've decided, here are the data packages for Indonesia with the durations and sizes from this guide, activatable before leaving home and expandable from your phone if you run short in Canggu.
