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

industry reported

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 $85 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, $30K minimum pre-purchase) 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: Headline pricing is industry-reported (Moor Insights research note) because IBM's pricing page returns HTTP 403 to automated fetch tooling. Verify with an authenticated IBM Cloud account before committing budget.

Verification note. IBM's public pricing page returned 403; rate confirmed by Moor Insights and Quantum Computing Report. No minimum, billed per second of QPU time.

6.Source

https://moorinsightsstrategy.com/research-notes/ibms-new-flex-plan-fills-a-big-gap-in-quantum-access-pricing/ · verified 2026-06-03