IBM Offers Special Promotion to Open Plan Users
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IBM Offers Special Promotion to Open Plan Users For many years IBM has offered an Open Plan that provides free quantum computing time to beginning users who want to try out programming one of IBM’s quantum processors. This plan has typically provided access to some of IBM’s older and smaller processors and included limits on how many minutes a user could use per month. It is intended for students and beginners to run small circuits and try out algorithms. The limits for the free time has been 10 minutes of runtime every 28 days. For users who required more time IBM overs a Pay-as-You-Go plan with pricing of $96/minutes and other more advanced paid plans with lower prices for users who require more computing minutes. An overview of IBM’s various plans can be seen here. Now, IBM has made a special one-time offer to Open Plan users who have used at least 20 minutes within a 12 month period. These users are now eligible to receive 180 minutes of free runtime over the next 12 months. In addition, the limit is imposed on a yearly basis rather than a monthly basis and may be a better fit for those users who need to use many of the minutes on a near term basis for a particular project. In addition, IBM has also made available to all Open Plan users its more advanced iBM_kingston quantum processor which is part of the Heron r2 family. This is one of IBM’s more powerful processors that contains 156 qubits, 340k circuit layer operations per second (CLOPS) and median two‑qubit error rates of 2.03×10⁻³. IBM is providing this enhanced Open Plan in an effort to expand the user base who may potentially graduate to one of the paid plans. An allocation of 180 minutes does allow a user to execute more of the IBM quantum computing tutorials as well as replicate IBM’s 2023 quantum utility experiment and more. Additional details about this special offer are available in a blog posted on IBM’s website here. March 20, 2026 dougfinke2026-03-20T20:33:47-07:00 Leave A Comment Cancel replyComment Type in the text displayed above Δ This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.