Does the Ryoko Pro really need a subscription or can I just use my own SIM?

Im pretty sure you can swap in your own SIM, the slot is there. I used a local one in Japan last spring and it worked fine after a restart. The catch is you lose the app features like the ad blocking when you go that route.

I’d still go with their plan personally. The roaming stuff just works when you land, and I don’t have to hunt down a shop or mess with APN settings after a long flight. Half the time the local SIM ends up costing more anyway once you add whatever tourist markup they tack on.

I ran mine on a local SIM for two weeks in Portugal and it worked fine. Their plan isn’t required at all, the slot is unlocked. I never touched the app either, just popped the card in and it connected.

Everyone keeps saying the slot is unlocked and you can just grab a local SIM. That was not my experience. I bought one for a work trip and threw in a prepaid card from a carrier I’ve used for years. The thing would connect, then drop every few minutes, and sometimes it flat out refused to register on the network at all. Same SIM in my old hotspot worked without any drama, so it wasn’t the card.

Maybe I got a bad unit, but the whole point of buying a hotspot is to avoid being locked into someone’s plan. If it only behaves reliably on their own data, that’s not really a hotspot, that’s a subscription with extra steps. I’d ask around for people who actually ran it on a third party SIM for more than a couple days before assuming it’s fine. Two weeks of “worked fine” doesn’t tell you much.

The SIM slot isn’t the whole story though. Their plan is baked into how the thing connects, so you’re not really avoiding the subscription just by swapping cards. I’d check what you’re actually paying for before assuming it’s a clean workaround.

The subscription isn’t actually required if you have your own SIM. I used mine with a local card in Japan for a week and it connected right away, no app login needed. The whole point for me was not adding another monthly bill, so I just topped up when I needed data. Battery held up fine too, which mattered more to me than anything else.

The subscription is the part that bugs me. The hardware price is one thing, but if it needs their plan to function normally then the SIM slot is just decoration. I’d want to see that confirmed before buying.