provider:ibm-open

IBM Quantum — Open Plan

IBM Heron r2 / Eagle systems · superconducting · 156 physical qubits · 99.70% 2Q fidelity

verified primary

Pricing model

Free tier with hard cap. Up to 10 minutes of QPU runtime per month, as published on IBM's pricing page. The structural constraint is the cap, not the unit price.

1.Representative workload costs

Concrete circuit costs for common workload sizes. Where the pricing model is non-linear (per-program minimums, per-month subscriptions), the table surfaces the floor and break-even points.

Table 1 — Workload cost reference

Workload	Cost (USD)	Note
100-shot pilot circuit (1-2 seconds)	$0	Fits comfortably within free-tier budget.
Sustained research over 28 days at 10 min/day	Quota exhausted in 1 day	Open Plan is a one-shot-per-month resource, not a research engine.
180 min promo allocation over 12 months	$0	One-time March 2026 bump for any user who has run at least 20 minutes in the prior 12 months.

2.Structural hardware advantage

Access to IBM Heron r2 (156-qubit superconducting) with production fidelities (99.7% 2Q gate) via a no-credit-card free entry path. Lower-cost on-ramp than AWS Braket free credits.

3.Position in the 2026 stack

Production hardware, free tier. The most generous free-quantum-access offering in 2026 by a meaningful margin — no other major provider gives 10 minutes of real QPU time per month with no contract.

4.Best-fit workloads

Education and coursework
Algorithm validation against known small circuits
Hardware-aware compilation testing
Hackathon / workshop access

5.Pricing trap

Watch for: The 10-minute allowance is monthly, so burning it in week 1 means waiting for the next month's refresh. Plan workloads across the month rather than in one batch.

Verification note. 10 min QPU runtime per 28-day rolling window. One-time Mar 2026 promo: 180 min over 12 months for any user who has run at least 20 min in the prior year.

6.Source

https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/open-plan-updates · verified 2026-08-14