How much data allowance do you really need? Calculations instead of guesswork

50 gigabytes. That's how much is included in many plans currently being advertised – and for a large share of customers, 40 of that goes unused every single month. How much data allowance you really need isn't a matter of belief, but simple arithmetic. And that's exactly what we're going to do together now, with real usage figures instead of gut feeling.

A confession up front: we, too, used to book plans by the motto "better too much than too little" for a long time. Until we actually looked at the usage display. Sobering.

What Actually Uses How Much? The Numbers

Before you can calculate, you need reference values. These vary depending on app settings and video quality, but you can work with the following rule-of-thumb figures:

Activity	Usage (approx.)
WhatsApp (text, a few pictures)	under 100 MB per month
Music streaming (Spotify, standard quality)	50–70 MB per hour
Podcasts	approx. 50 MB per hour
Google Maps navigation	5–10 MB per hour
Scrolling Instagram / TikTok	600 MB to 1 GB per hour
YouTube in HD	1–1.5 GB per hour
Video calling (FaceTime, WhatsApp calls)	300–700 MB per hour
Netflix in high quality	up to 3 GB per hour

Two things stand out immediately. First: navigation and messengers are practically rounding errors. Anyone who mainly uses their phone for WhatsApp, Maps and a bit of browsing gets by on surprisingly little. Second: video is the ultimate data hog. Not the videos you deliberately start – but the ones Instagram and TikTok automatically flush into your feed. Half an hour of Reels on the train, every workday, quickly adds up to 10 GB a month. Just from scrolling.

Three User Types, Three Calculations

The occasional user: 5 GB is more than enough

You're on Wi-Fi at home and at the office, and while out and about you send messages, check emails, occasionally use navigation, and listen to podcasts on your way to work. Let's calculate: 20 hours of podcasts (1 GB), messaging and emails (0.2 GB), navigation (0.1 GB), a bit of browsing and social media (1.5 GB). That comes to around 3 GB a month.

For this profile, plans like Lidl Connect Smart S with 5 GB for €4.99 or WinSIM from €4.99 are perfectly sufficient. We took a detailed look at what this price bracket has to offer back in winter in the article about unlimited calls plans under €10 broke it down. Short version: better than its reputation suggests.

The average user: 15 to 25 GB

This is the largest group. Wi-Fi at home is available, but quite a bit still happens on the go: daily social media, music instead of podcasts, occasionally a YouTube video during lunch break, and in summer perhaps an afternoon at the outdoor pool where your phone is the only entertainment. Realistic calculation: 15 hours of social media (12 GB), 20 hours of music (1.5 GB), 4 hours of YouTube (5 GB), the rest (1.5 GB). Around 20 GB.

Here the choice really opens up. Lycamobile offers 25 GB for €4.50 a month on the O2 network – as a promotional price for the first six months, after which the regular price applies. O2 Free S with 25 GB for €12.99 or Vodafone GigaMobil XS with 25 GB for €19.99 also fall into this data allowance class, with a correspondingly different network and price. You'll find the details on the Lycamobile packages in our Lycamobile comparison.

The heavy user: 50 GB and up – or being honest with yourself

No Wi-Fi at home, a hotspot for your laptop, watching series on the go, hours of video calls? Then you really are the kind of person 100+ GB plans are made for. Anyone who replaces their home internet connection entirely with mobile data will blow past 50 GB with ease – three hours of Netflix a day in high quality alone would be 270 GB a month.

But be honest with yourself: does that apply to you? Or do you just feel more comfortable with the bigger number? That feeling costs you real money. Jumping from 25 to 125 GB gets you nothing if your actual usage is 18 GB.

How to Find Out Your Real Usage

You don't have to guess at all. Your phone logs everything:

• iPhone: Settings → Mobile Data. Note: the statistics count from the last manual reset – not per month. Reset once, wait four weeks, then check.
• Android: Settings → Network & Internet → Data Usage. Here you can see usage per billing period and per app.
• Provider app: This shows the officially billed usage – the most reliable source.

Look at the last three months and take the highest figure. Then add a buffer of about 30 percent. Why 30, specifically? Because usage tends to grow every year – apps become more wasteful, videos higher-resolution – and because a holiday month or a month with a Wi-Fi outage shouldn't immediately result in throttling. What happens if your data allowance does run out, and why topping up is almost always a bad deal, we described in spring in the article about throttling and top-up cost traps described.

The Fallacy of the "Safety Buffer"

"I'll just get unlimited, then I never have to think about it." Sounds convenient. But with network operators it costs between €39.99 (O2 Free L) and €84.95 (Telekom MagentaMobil XL) a month. Anyone who uses 20 GB but pays €40 for an unlimited plan spends roughly €350 more a year than necessary – enough for a short holiday.

Conversely: calculating too tightly is also annoying. Anyone who's throttled and crawling through the network from the 25th of every month onward is saving in the wrong place. The art lies in the middle ground, and fortunately, in 2026 that middle ground has become cheap. Depending on provider and promotion, 25 GB is available for under €5, and 50 GB for under €10. That was unthinkable three years ago.

Bottom line

Measure your usage instead of guessing it. Take the highest month from the last three, add 30 percent, and book the next-largest package – not the one after that. For most people, the result lands between 10 and 25 GB, and that's exactly the range where the toughest price war is currently raging. In our plan comparison you can enter the result of your calculation directly and see what your desired data allowance costs right now. Usually less than you think.