provider:ibm-payg

IBM Quantum — Pay-As-You-Go

IBM Heron r2 / r3 (156Q), Nighthawk r1 (120Q) · superconducting · 156 physical qubits · 99.70% 2Q fidelity

verified primary

Pricing model

Per-minute billing, no contract minimum. $96/min for Heron r2 / r3 access. Smallest billing increment is per-second.

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
10-shot circuit (sub-second execution)	Sub-$1	Per-second granularity means short circuits are cheap.
10,000-shot characterisation run (~60 sec)	$96	1 minute at the headline rate.
Full VQE optimisation, 200k shots (~30 min QPU)	$2,880	30 minutes at $96/min. Compare to Rigetti Cepheus via Braket at $145 for the same shot budget.

2.Structural hardware advantage

Per-second granularity is friendlier to short / interactive workloads than Azure's per-program minimum. Heron r2 / r3 fidelity (99.7% 2Q) is the strongest superconducting production hardware in 2026.

3.Position in the 2026 stack

Production hardware, on-demand. PAYG was launched mid-2024 to compete with AWS Braket's per-shot model. Flex Plan ($72/min against a 400-minute annual minimum, a $28,800 floor) sits below for committed buyers.

4.Best-fit workloads

Production workloads with bursty demand
Workloads requiring deep circuit fidelity that justifies superconducting at premium per-minute
Interactive research where short-burst execution matters

5.Pricing trap

Watch for: PAYG's $96/min carries no commitment, but for sustained work the Flex plan is cheaper above about 300 QPU-minutes a year: 400 minutes at $72 costs the same $28,800 as 300 minutes at $96. Do that crossover arithmetic before defaulting to PAYG. Rate read directly from ibm.com/quantum/pricing on 2026-09-07 (re-confirmed 2026-09-15).

Verification note. Read directly from IBM's own pricing page on 2026-09-07: $96 USD per minute with a 1-second minimum purchase and no annual commitment.

6.Source

https://www.ibm.com/quantum/pricing · verified 2026-09-07