Your free IBM Cloud account grants you access to over 40 products that have Lite pricing plans. This means that the plan is always free. You’ll never be charged, and the plan will never expire. 

• You can provision one instance of any service with a Lite plan.
• After 10 days of no development activity, your apps go to sleep. You can wake up your apps by continuing to work on them.
• After 30 days of no development activity, your service instances with Lite plans are deleted.

To start building on IBM Cloud, you’ll need to create an account using an email address first (email address must not be associated with an existing account).

Payment details are required up-front, but you won’t be charged until you consume a billable service; however, there’ll be a nominal hold placed on your card to verify its authenticity.

A confirmation message will display the charge on your screen after you input credit card information. The amount is determined by the merchant but is typically around USD 1.00. 

Having this information on file helps to create a seamless transition into a Pay-As-You-Go plan, if you choose.

Lite plans will never incur charges; however, to consume non-Lite plans on the free tier, an upgrade to a Pay-As-You-Go plan is required. When you consume beyond the free tier threshold for the service, you're billed monthly for your resource usage. 

You can set separate spending thresholds for the account, container, runtime, all services and specific services. You automatically receive notifications when your monthly spending reaches 80%, 90% and 100% of those thresholds. To set spending notifications, click Manage > Billing and usage and select Spending notifications. For more information, see Setting spending notifications.

Always-free–These are products with a Lite plan that will never expire. These are designed so you can work on your projects worry free and help prevent generating an accidental bill. The Lite plan quotas are usage based, never expire and renew on a monthly basis or on a one-off usage basis. See all Lite plan products.

Free trial–Think of these as premium trials; however, they require a Pay-As-You-Go or subscription account. Depending on the product, the quota might operate for a specific time period, usage basis or never expire. Some products will start to incur charges should you consume beyond the free tier. See all Free plan products.

Reaching any quota limit for Lite plan instances suspends the service for that month. Quota limits are per org, not per instance. New instances that are created in the same org reflect any usage from previous instances. The quota limits reset on the first of every month.

You can check your usage by going to Manage > Billing and usage in the console and selecting Usage. For more information, see Viewing your usage.

To receive the USD 200 credit, you first need to upgrade to a Pay-As-You-Go account. If you've already done so, go to the usage page in the IBM Cloud console to see the USD 200 credit. You can also go to the account settings page to view your active promotions. Your promotional credit of USD 200 is automatically applied but might take a few hours to appear in your account. The credit is available for first-time Pay-As-You-Go accounts only and cannot be used with third-party offerings.

IBM Cloud trial accounts are available for faculty and students at accredited academic institutions. To qualify for a trial account, go to Harness the Power of IBM and validate your institution credentials. Trial accounts expire after 30 days.

When you add a credit card to your trial account, your account is upgraded to a Pay-As-You-Go account; and it can't be converted back to a trial account.

In additional, educational feature codes can't be used in a Pay-As-You-Go account. For more information about educational trial accounts, see the IBM Academic Initiative FAQs.

Go to the billing and promotions page and enter your promo code, review the promotional details and then click “Apply.”

Please note you must have a credit card on file to apply promotional codes for authentication purposes.

You can use the cost estimator to estimate the cost of IBM Cloud® products by customizing plans for your needs. Explore the catalog to find offerings to add to an estimate.

You'll get free technical support through Stack Overflow. You can open cases that are related to access management, accounts, and billing and usage.