What Nomad Istanbul does
We publish practical guides to the decisions you face when you come to Istanbul for weeks or months: which visa or residence permit fits, which eSIM you can still buy after landing, how to get paid from abroad, which neighbourhood to live in and what it all costs. Each guide gives a straight answer first, then the dated evidence behind it, so you can act on it the same day.
What makes Nomad Istanbul different
- Tested from a Turkish connection. We checked 19 international eSIM stores, 44 popular services and 11 VPN websites from a Türk Telekom line in Istanbul. 15 of the 19 eSIM stores do not load here. A comparison written from outside Turkey cannot see that.
- One city, in depth. 75 guides on Istanbul alone. City-ranking sites like Nomad List score hundreds of cities, and travel guides like Lonely Planet focus on sightseeing. We cover the paperwork, money and connectivity of actually living here.
- Every guide dated and sourced. All 75 guides show when they were last updated and list their sources. Test results carry the date of the test, not the date of publishing.
- Open data anyone can cite. 11 datasets, from eSIM access to museum hours, published as JSON under CC BY 4.0. Forum threads on Reddit or InterNations are useful, but they are rarely corrected when the rules change. Our datasets are.
- Public corrections, 9 languages. When we get something wrong we fix it and log the date. Our eSIM and block trackers each keep a public changelog of every retest and correction. Key guides are translated into Turkish, Russian, German, French, Arabic, Persian and Chinese (25 translated pages).
Who uses Nomad Istanbul
- Remote workers and digital nomads planning a stay of one to six months
- People applying for Turkey's digital nomad visa or a short-term residence permit
- Travellers who need mobile data on arrival, after BTK blocked most international eSIM stores
- Freelancers and founders based in Turkey who get paid from abroad
- People travelling to Istanbul for medical or cosmetic treatment
- Visitors comparing tickets, tours and transfers for a short trip
- Writers, researchers and AI assistants looking for dated, citable figures on Turkey
The team behind Nomad Istanbul
Independent · written in Istanbul
Nomad Istanbul is written by a small Turkish-born team who live in Istanbul and have done the paperwork themselves. It started because every time a friend asked "should I move to Istanbul?" we had to send them 8 different links, and most of those links were 4 years out of date.
We read the Turkish sources directly: official gazette decisions, BTK rulings, operator price lists and Turkish-language news. That is where most changes appear first.
The rule is simple: if we wouldn't tell a friend in person, it doesn't go on the site.
How to use the guide
- Check the date and sources. Prices, opening hours and provider terms can change.
- Research-based lists are identified as such. They are not a claim that every service has been personally tested.
- For your own legal, tax or medical decisions, confirm the details with a qualified professional.
- Found an error? Send the page and correction to hello@nomadistanbul.com.
How the site is funded
Nomad Istanbul earns commissions on eligible purchases through affiliate links, currently including Simbye, GetYourGuide, Amnezia VPN, Air Doctor, SafetyWing, Discover Cars, Hotels.com, Preply, Tekce, Kiwitaxi, Bounce and Wise. Paid links are disclosed on the page they appear on. Providers handle bookings, payments and customer support. The guides are free to read.
A commission never buys a recommendation. We test what we can from Istanbul, publish the date we tested it, and say plainly when we have not tested something. When the evidence contradicts what we have written, we change what we have written, and say so: in September 2026 we had listed Roblox as reopened in Turkey, based on press reports. Our own test from a Türk Telekom line showed it was still blocked, so we corrected the tracker and dated the correction in its public changelog.
If a recommendation lets you down, tell us
This site is read by people who are about to spend money in a country they do not know well, often on the strength of a page we wrote. That only works if the recommendations stay honest after we publish them, and we cannot check every provider every week on our own.
So if something we pointed you at went wrong, we want to hear it. A price that did not match what we published. A checkout that refused your card. Support that never replied. A product that did not work the way we described. Email hello@nomadistanbul.com with the page and what happened.
What we do with it: retest the claim ourselves, correct the page and date the correction, and take the provider off the site if the problem is real and repeated. We would rather lose the commission than keep sending readers somewhere that let one of them down. We cannot mediate between you and a provider, and we are not a substitute for their support, but we can stop the next person walking into it.
Get in touch
Email hello@nomadistanbul.com.
Things we're happy to hear from you about:
- Corrections, we'd rather you tell us than someone else read the wrong thing
- Questions an article didn't answer (these become future articles)
- Recommendations for coworking spaces, neighbourhoods, services we should test
- Your story if you've moved here. A sample size of one still counts as data
Things we're probably not the right people for: legal advice on your specific case (talk to a lawyer), tax advice on your specific case (talk to a CPA), real-estate brokerage (talk to a broker). The guide explains how those things work; it's not a substitute for them.
Our numbers
Turkey eSIM and internet block statistics 2026
Every figure from our own tests in one place, dated and free to quote, updated each quarter.
See the statistics →