What It Costs to Rent a Quantum Computer

You can rent time on a quantum computer this afternoon, from a laptop, with no contract and no sales call. What follows is what it costs. Every figure is a provider list price, taken from the table our own billing code charges against rather than from a marketing page.

One correction to the premise first, because everything downstream depends on it. With a single exception below, you do not rent a quantum computer by the hour. You rent a task, and inside that task a number of shots. A shot is one execution of your circuit followed by one measurement. Your task queues, runs, returns its counts, and then the machine belongs to somebody else. Nobody hands you the machine, and at retail nobody sells you an hour of one.

If the question you actually have is what one of these machines costs to buy or build rather than to use for an afternoon, that is a different article and the answer is in quantum computing cost in 2026, which also carries the receipts from real billed runs on this service. This page is only about access: the per-device price list, the shot bounds, and the things no price covers.

What a single run costs

Six machines from five manufacturers, all reachable without an enterprise agreement. The last column is a complete 1,000-shot experiment, which is a normal size for a result you would actually publish.

device                      modality          qubits  per task   per shot   1,000 shots
Rigetti Cepheus-1-108Q      superconducting      108     $0.30    $0.000425      $0.725
IQM Garnet                  superconducting       20     $0.30    $0.00145        $1.75
IQM Emerald                 superconducting       54     $0.30    $0.0016         $1.90
AQT IBEX Q1                 trapped ion           12     $0.30    $0.0235        $23.80
IonQ Forte Enterprise 1     trapped ion           36     $0.30    $0.08          $80.30
Pasqal FRESNEL              neutral atom           -     billed by the clock, see below

The task fee is a flat thirty cents on every Braket device, whatever the machine and whatever the circuit. Everything that varies lives in the shot column.

A note on where these five sit relative to us: we resell them at list with zero markup, so the numbers above are what the provider charges and what you pay. Pasqal is in the table as market context rather than as something we currently resell, and it is flagged as such below.

Why one machine costs 110 times another

The identical 1,000-shot experiment is $0.725 on Rigetti and $80.30 on IonQ. That is not a pricing strategy, it is two different physical technologies with a per-shot ratio of 188 to 1.

A superconducting processor is a circuit on a chip. It is driven with microwave pulses, reset, and driven again, and the cycle is fast enough that a thousand repetitions is a rounding error of machine time. A trapped-ion processor holds individual atoms in an electromagnetic trap and addresses them with lasers one interaction at a time. Every shot is slower by orders of magnitude, and the price follows the clock. What you buy for the higher price is gate fidelity and full connectivity, which is a real thing to want. The full comparison of the two is here.

Pasqal bills by the clock instead

Neutral-atom machines are the exception to the per-shot rule. Pasqal's pay-as-you-go tier 1 rate is EUR 500 per hour of machine time, and the contract fixes an effective circuit repetition rate of 0.25 Hz. That is four seconds per shot, so a shot costs roughly EUR 0.56.

Put that in the same terms as the table and a 1,000-shot run is about four thousand seconds of machine time, or approximately EUR 556. Against $0.725 for the same shot count on Rigetti. These are two currencies and not a like-for-like conversion, but no exchange rate closes a gap of that shape.

This is not a criticism of the machine, it is a statement about what it is for. You do not run a thousand shots of a gate circuit on a neutral-atom device, because it does not run gate circuits. It runs analog dynamics: a register of atoms driven by laser pulses, evolving continuously under a Rydberg Hamiltonian, with the answer read from where the atoms end up. That is a different experiment with different shot economics, and we have measured what it produces. Why neutral-atom machines are not gate-based covers the architecture behind that split, including why they reach more qubits than anything else on public cloud.

The free tier that nobody advertises

Pasqal's cloud carries a device called EMU_FREE that is explicitly free and consumes no credits. Their paid emulators (EMU_MPS, EMU_SV, EMU_TN) bill against your contract; EMU_FREE does not. If you want to develop a neutral-atom sequence rather than execute a final one, that is the entry point, and it costs nothing.

The same logic applies to us. Our analog engine runs the identical Pulser sequences exactly, up to 14 atoms, on a CPU at ten cents an hour, and it applies the same validation rules the real hardware applies. A sequence that this engine accepts is one the hardware would accept, which is a much better moment to discover a problem than after paying for the task.

What the shot ceilings actually mean

Every device has a floor and a ceiling on shots per task, and those bounds cap what a single run can cost you.

device                     min shots   max shots   most one task can cost
Rigetti Cepheus-1-108Q             1      10,000                    $4.55
IQM Garnet                         1      20,000                   $29.30
IQM Emerald                        1      20,000                   $32.30
AQT IBEX Q1                        1       2,000                   $47.30
IonQ Forte Enterprise 1          100       5,000                  $400.30

Two things fall out of that table. Rigetti will accept a single shot, so you can confirm a circuit compiles and runs on real hardware for thirty cents and a fraction of a cent. IonQ will not: its 100-shot minimum means the cheapest possible interaction with that machine, even one intended purely to check that your circuit is accepted, is $8.30.

The far column is the more useful one for anyone setting a budget. A single task cannot run away from you. The worst case on the most expensive device in the list is $400.30, and on the cheapest it is $4.55.

You probably do not need the hardware

This is the part a vendor page will not tell you. For most of what people want a quantum computer for, renting one is the wrong purchase, because a simulator returns the same answer and costs a rounding error.

engine                      what it does                        rate
CPU (all engines)           exact, stabilizer, tensor network,  $0.10 / hour
                            Pauli propagation, analog
GPU                         exact statevector to 30 qubits      $3.00 / hour
GPU (31-32 qubits)          exact statevector, large card       $8.00 / hour
minimum charge per job                                          $0.001

At ten cents an hour, a CPU job has to run for a full thirty-six seconds before it costs more than the one-tenth-of-a-cent floor. The overwhelming majority do not, which means the overwhelming majority of simulation jobs cost exactly $0.001.

The dividing line is not really price, it is what you are asking. If you want the right answer to a circuit under about 30 qubits, a simulator gives it to you exactly, for a tenth of a cent, with no queue. If you want to know what today's hardware does to that circuit, no simulator can tell you, and the $0.725 is worth paying. Renting hardware to obtain a correct answer is the expensive way to get a wrong one.

Two companion articles go further on this. CPU, GPU or QPU: when to use which is the decision procedure with the crossover points marked, and quantum emulator vs simulator settles what those two words mean, since vendors use them interchangeably and they do not return the same thing.

What you cannot rent at any price

Exclusive machine time. Dedicated device reservations exist, but they are enterprise contracts negotiated with the manufacturer, not something on the per-task price list. If you have arrived here expecting to book a quantum computer for an afternoon, that product exists and it is not priced in dollars per shot.

A predictable finish time. Tasks are scheduled against a shared queue, and several devices only accept work during published availability windows. A task submitted on a Friday evening may return on Monday. Price and latency are unrelated on these machines.

A correct answer. This is the one that costs people real money. A hardware run returns a distribution shaped by gate errors, readout errors and decoherence, and none of that is marked in the output. The counts look exactly like the counts a perfect machine would give you.

Knowing whether the run was worth the money

Which is the reason this service exists. Every hardware run here can be certified against an exact reference of the same circuit, reporting a Hellinger fidelity between what the machine returned and what it should have returned. The certificate is a public URL that anybody can fetch without an account, and an open-source checker recomputes the number without calling us.

That converts a $0.725 experiment from a pile of counts into a result with a stated distance from the truth. It is also the only honest way to compare two machines: a cheap shot on a noisy device and an expensive shot on an accurate one are not the same purchase, and the fidelity number is where that difference becomes visible instead of remaining a marketing claim.

How to actually rent one

Install the client, submit a circuit, name a device. There is no procurement step.

pip install qsim-sdk

Ask for a free estimate before you commit, which returns the exact charge for the run you are about to make. Then submit with the engine named, and read the counts and the certificate when the task returns. The documentation has the full sequence, and the worked circuits each link to the certificate from the run that produced them, on the machine that produced it.

If you want to spend nothing at all first, the browser sandbox builds and runs a small circuit in the page with no account and nothing submitted anywhere.