What does a minute of quantum computing cost today?

As of October 7, 2026, only one list price answers this question in its own unit: IBM sells on-demand quantum runtime at $96 per minute (Quantum Computing Report, March 20, 2026). Everyone else sells other currencies. Per-shot prices on AWS Braket span $0.000425 (Rigetti Cepheus) to $0.08 (IonQ Forte) — a 188× spread, our arithmetic — plus a flat $0.30 per task; Azure Quantum bills IonQ by gate-shots with per-job minimums up to $168.20, Pasqal at €3,000 per QPU-hour and Rigetti at $0.02 per 10 milliseconds; Quantinuum sells circuit-shaped credits from $125,000 per month; D-Wave publishes no unit price at all. Rosetta Quantum read the public price pages today and prints the catalog below with a source and a date on every row.

Status as of: October 7, 2026. Prices are list prices read on this date; every number carries its source.

Who actually sells a minute of quantum computing?

Three routes sell raw machine time, and only one of them quotes the price in the unit of this question. IBM sells on-demand runtime at $96 per minute (Quantum Computing Report, March 20, 2026), pre-purchased minutes from $30,000 on the Flex Plan it launched in May 2025 (Constellation Research, May 5, 2025), and a free Open Plan of 10 minutes of runtime every 28 days. Rigetti’s Cepheus-1-108Q also bills by time on Azure Quantum, but in 10-millisecond slices at $0.02 each — about $120 per minute if you multiply it out (our arithmetic, declared). Pasqal’s Orion Fresnel bills €3,000 per QPU-hour on Azure Quantum — €50 per minute, same declared arithmetic. And on AWS Braket, whole machines rent by the hour as reservations: from $2,500 per hour (QuEra Aquila) to $7,000 per hour (IonQ Forte), which is roughly $42 to $117 per minute of exclusive access. Everyone else on the public boards sells something that is not time — shots, tasks, gate-executions or credits. The finding of our provider post stands unchanged: the billing units do not convert into each other, so any cross-vendor «price per minute» beyond the rows above is an assumption, not a price.

What does one shot cost on the public price boards?

Between $0.000425 and $0.08 — a 188× spread for the same accounting unit (our arithmetic on AWS Braket’s price page, read October 7, 2026), before any claim about what a shot buys you on each machine. Braket adds a flat $0.30 per task on every device, so a small job’s bill is often mostly task fee — the worked example of how fees dominate small workloads is in our cost post. The board now includes an analog row: QuEra’s Aquila at $0.01 per shot, the entry that was missing from our last read of this page. Minimums matter more than the sticker: on Azure Quantum, an IonQ job with error mitigation on carries a minimum of $97.50 (Aria 1) or $168.195 (Forte 1), against $12.4166 and $25.7899 with it off — the mechanics of why mitigation multiplies shot counts are in our error-mitigation post.

What does the catalog look like, vendor by vendor?

One row per published offer, with the billing unit printed next to the price — because the unit is the real information:

Two structural notes on this table. Quantinuum’s HQC is a formula, not a clock: HQC = 5 + C(N₁q + 10·N₂q + 5·Nm)/5000, so the price of a job depends on its gate composition and shot count — at full use of the Standard plan, $125,000 for 10,000 HQCs works out to $12.50 per HQC (our arithmetic); the pay-as-you-go per-HQC rate is not published on the page. And the euro row stays in euros: Rosetta does not convert currencies in a price catalog, because the exchange-rate assumption would be ours, not the vendor’s.

What do you actually buy with that money?

Machine time and shots — not solutions, and not advantage. The $0 route first, because it is wide and real: AWS Braket includes 1 hour of on-demand simulator per month for the first 12 months; IBM’s Open Plan gives 10 minutes of QPU runtime every 28 days, plus a promotion of «180 minutes of free runtime over the next 12 months» running since March 16, 2026 (Quantum Computing Report, March 20, 2026); D-Wave’s self-signup trial gives 1 minute of free solver access per month (D-Wave support, read October 7, 2026). The free tier covers everything a first project needs before a paid shot makes sense — our programming post maps that $0 path end to end. On the paid side, the question a decision-maker should ask is not «what does a minute cost» but «what does the minute buy against my best classical baseline» — the ratio R that our margin-unit post defined on October 5. On that measure the public record has not moved: commercial workloads with independently verified quantum advantage behind them, 0 (our usage map, October 6, 2026). A minute of QPU is a research input today. Rosetta Quantum prices it here so that nobody has to price it from a press release.

What we don’t know

We don’t know what anyone actually pays: these are list prices, and enterprise contracts are negotiated — the published number is a ceiling for some buyers and a floor for others, and no vendor publishes its discount schedule. We don’t know Quantinuum’s pay-as-you-go per-HQC rate or D-Wave’s paid rates — both sit behind sales calls, so two of the industry’s most-cited machines cannot be priced from public pages at all. We don’t know the per-device reservation prices between Braket’s published endpoints ($2,500–$7,000/hour); today’s read gives the range, not every row. We don’t know how long any of these numbers will hold — no vendor commits to a validity window, which is why every price above carries today’s date and why this catalog will be re-read and re-published quarterly under the same URL. And one sourcing note: IBM’s own pricing page was not reachable from this run, so the $96/minute figure carries its secondary source and that source’s date (Quantum Computing Report, March 20, 2026), not a same-day read of IBM’s page.

Sources

• AWS Braket pricing (accessed 2026-10-07)
• Azure Quantum provider pricing (accessed 2026-10-07)
• Quantum Computing Report — IBM Open Plan promotion and $96/min pay-as-you-go (2026-03-20)
• Constellation Research — IBM launches Flex Plan (2025-05-05)
• D-Wave Leap support — trial plan, 1 free solver-minute per month (accessed 2026-10-07)
• Rosetta Quantum — How to choose a quantum cloud provider without getting locked in
• Rosetta Quantum — What does it cost to run a problem on a real quantum computer?
• Rosetta Quantum — What is error mitigation and why does it make runs more expensive?
• Rosetta Quantum — How do you program a quantum computer today?
• Rosetta Quantum — By how much does the winner win?
• Rosetta Quantum — What is quantum computing used for today?

Rosetta Quantum publishes verdicts with raw, reproducible data. This is educational content, not a product claim.