Do paid Pay-As-You-Go minutes count toward the 20 minutes needed for IBM's 180-minute Open Plan promotion?

Quantum Computing is part of Stack Overflow’s open communities: specialist spaces where curiosity is welcome, knowledge is shared freely, and the best answers rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams is now called Stack Internal. Bring the best of human thought and AI automation together at your work. Bring the best of human thought and AI automation together at your work. Learn more Bring the best of human thought and AI automation together at your work. I recently opened an IBM Quantum account and have now used up my 10 free minutes on the Open Plan. I then found out about the promotion IBM announced in March 2026: log 20 minutes of runtime within any 12-month period and you can opt in to 180 minutes for the next 12 months. So I'm 10 minutes short. My question is whether I can buy those 10 minutes instead of waiting. If I create a Pay-As-You-Go instance and run 10 minutes of paid workloads on it, does that count toward the 20-minute threshold? Or does the promotion require both 10-minute blocks to be free Open Plan runtime on the same instance, which would mean waiting for my allowance to reset? I can't tell from the documentation. Usage seems to be tracked per instance and per plan, and each plan needs its own instance, which suggests the paid minutes would land on a different meter. But the promotion is worded in terms of users rather than instances, which points the other way. Has anyone tried this, or knows the answer for certain? At $96 a minute I'd rather not find out by spending the money. Thanks for contributing an answer to Quantum Computing Stack Exchange! Use MathJax to format equations. MathJax reference. To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers. By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy. To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. This comment attacks a person or group. Learn more in our Abusive behavior policy. This comment is rude or condescending. Learn more in our Code of Conduct. A problem not listed above. Try to be as specific as possible. You'll need to complete a few actions and gain 15 reputation points before being able to upvote. Upvoting indicates when questions and answers are useful. What's reputation and how do I get it? Instead, you can save this post to reference later. Site design / logo © 2026 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA . rev 2026.9.3.