Yes, IBM Cloud Free Tier has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans. The free plan includes 40+ always-free products with Lite plans that never expire and never charge, Cloudant: 1 GB of data storage, and Continuous Delivery: 500 delivery pipeline jobs. FreeTier.co estimates the free tier at about $2.00/mo.
About
IBM Cloud Free Tier is an IBM Cloud account offering that includes access to more than 40 always-free products with Lite plans and no expiration date. The account is pay-as-you-go for billable usage beyond the free allowances, and IBM also includes a one-time USD 200 cloud credit for first-time pay-as-you-go accounts.
The free offering spans multiple IBM Cloud services rather than a single product. Examples on the page include storage, databases, messaging, DevOps, identity, observability, and Watson services, with limits such as 1 GB of Cloudant storage, 500 delivery pipeline jobs, 10,000 API calls per month for Watson Assistant, and 30 GB per day for SQL Query.
- 40+ always-free Lite plans
- USD 200 first-time cloud credit
- Monthly usage quotas on Lite services
- Pay-as-you-go account model
- IBM Cloud service catalog access
Free Tier Value
This free tier has real ongoing value because it includes always-free Lite access with concrete per-service quotas, but it is still tightly capped and only covers a subset of the catalog. The page also says a credit card is required to create the account, and the separate USD 200 signup credit is one-time rather than a monthly allowance, so the recurring free-tier value is best treated as a small but useful starter amount of about $2/month.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- 40+ always-free products with Lite plans that never expire and never charge.
- Cloudant: 1 GB of data storage.
- Continuous Delivery: 500 delivery pipeline jobs.
- Container Registry: 5 GB of pull data transfer per month.
- Watson Assistant: 10,000 API calls per month.
- Cloud SQL Query: scan up to 30 GB per day.
- API Connect: 50,000 API calls per month.
- USD 200 cloud credit for first-time Pay-As-You-Go accounts, available for 30 days.
See IBM Cloud Free Tier pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
IBM Cloud Lite
- instance per service
- 1
- plan expiration
- never
- charge
- $0
- Always-free access to selected IBM Cloud services
- One instance per Lite service
- No charges for Lite-plan usage
- No expiration while within Lite limits
Pricing extracted from IBM Cloud Free Tier's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is IBM Cloud Free Tier free forever?
Yes. IBM Cloud Free Tier has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.
What is IBM Cloud Free Tier's free tier worth?
IBM Cloud Free Tier's free tier is worth about $2.00 per month. That maps to an FTV score of 37/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
