provider:ibm-premium

IBM Quantum — Premium

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

industry reported

Pricing model

Enterprise annual subscription, quote-only. Reported effective per-minute rate $48 against committed spend.

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
Annual contract minimum	Quote-only	Not publicly disclosed. Moor Insights indicates this is in the multi-hundred-thousand range for typical contracts.
Single VQE (~30 min)	$1,440 effective	Effective rate against the committed annual spend.

2.Structural hardware advantage

Lowest per-minute effective rate in IBM's tier structure (~50% under PAYG). Includes priority queue scheduling and direct IBM support — useful for production workloads where queue wait time matters.

3.Position in the 2026 stack

Enterprise tier, production. Designed for buyers who need both dedicated capacity and the priority scheduling SLAs.

4.Best-fit workloads

Production quantum-machine-learning workloads
Frontier-industry buyers (pharma, finance) with dedicated quantum teams
Hardware-priority requirements (e.g. algorithm benchmark scheduled on specific hardware)

5.Pricing trap

Watch for: Public pricing not disclosed. Quoted contracts often include hardware-specific allocations that limit flexibility — read the contract carefully on which Heron / Nighthawk system the contract guarantees access to.

Verification note. Quote-only annual contract; per-minute rate is effective against committed spend, not a published list.

6.Source

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