Upgrade from the Open Plan

This guide is for entities who want to upgrade from the IBM Quantum® Open Plan to an IBM Cloud® Standard (Pay-As-You-Go) Plan. For instructions to set up a cloud account, set up a service instance, and work with users, follow these steps.

If you are an individual setting up the service for the first time or if you have been invited to an instance by an administrator, follow the steps in Install Qiskit instead.

Before you begin

If necessary, follow the steps in the Set up to use IBM Cloud section to complete the following:

• Sign up for an IBM Cloud account.
• Create an IBM Quantum instance.

Upgrade your IBM Cloud account

Skip this if you already have an IBM Cloud Pay-as-you-go account. All new IBM Cloud accounts are set up as Pay-as-you-go.

You must upgrade your IBM Cloud account in the following circumstances:

• You have a Trial account.
• You have a Lite account (deprecated) that you created before 25 October 2021.

After you upgrade, you can continue to use any instances that you created with your Lite account. To upgrade to a Pay-As-You-Go account, complete the following steps:

1. Go to Manage > Account in the IBM Cloud console.
2. Select Account settings, and click Add credit card.
3. Enter your payment information and click Next to submit your information.
4. After your payment information is processed, your account is upgraded.
   Note

   You will not be charged unless you create a Standard Plan instance and use it to send workloads to QPUs.

Access your Standard Plan

To use your IBM Cloud Standard Plan, create a new instance and assign it to the Standard Plan. All jobs sent to QPUs by specifying this instance will incur a cost. To use QPUs without incurring a cost, you must use an instance assigned to the Open plan or other free plan, if you have one.

It is recommended that you set up a cost limit on the instance and learn about other ways to manage your cost when using the Standard plan.

Next steps