SIM cards in Bulgaria

50MB of data? That sounds tiny. Should that be 50GB?

(I'm signed up for Best of Bulgaria next year and I always use a local SIM.)

Thanks. I assumed it would be easy but I’ve never been to Bulgaria before so thought I’d double-check.

Hi bcerulo, did you buy a SIM card for your trip to Bulgaria? Did you buy it at the airport? Were you happy with it?

I recently signed up for Google Fi. Reviews in 2018 of its use in Bulgaria were not promising. While I hope it's much improved, I'd like to have a backup plan.

It looks like some entries from this thread have gone missing, so I can't tell what recommendations you may have received. I did read some other reviews:
https://www.traveltomtom.net/destinations/europe/bulgaria/best-prepaid-sim-card-in-bulgaria-for-tourists

Hi, Catherine, Yes, we purchased a sim card in Sofia. We were looking for it on a Saturday morning, so all the downtown locations were closed except for the phone stores at the Mall of Sofia. We just walked there from where we were staying not too far from Serdika Metro.
There are 3 phone stores there. We went to the Vivacom first but they said we'd have to come back on Monday since they didn't have any inhouse at the moment. They actually told us we might want to go next door to A1 (another phone company) to see if they had one. We did go to A1 and got a sim card. If I remember correctly, it was good for 30 days of phone calls within Bulgaria, 2GB of data, with the first 5 days of data not counting toward the 2GB. It worked fine for us - probably overkill since we only used the phone for calls to tour guides two or three times, but we did make use of the data. It cost a bit less than $10 US. All 3 major phone companies have stores in the Mall of Sofia, so you can comparison shop if you want. The store employees were super friendly.

I know that we need to start experimenting with eSims, but I need to talk with someone about how to do that correctly.

Those are perfect backup options. And cheap enough I may just get one as a backup for Google Fi coverage. I've located A1 and Vivacom stores on Vitosha Blvd, as I arrive mid-week.

Thank you!

I just use my regular TMobile

That's good news that T-Mobile works for you in Bulgaria, because if the Google Fi service doesn't "find" a network on its own, I have the instructions to explicitly set it to use T-Mobile.

TMobile worked in Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Ukraine, every place so far.