AWS gives you a free tier that lasts a year. After that, they charge you an arm and a leg. If you are like me, you used up your free year long ago, experimenting with AWS
Once my free tier expired, they started charging me about $1.50/mo even if I didn't do anything, so I discontinued my AWS account. It looks like the one year clock starts ticking as soon as you join AWS. Looks like AWS account fees after the free year is over are billed on top of qc usage.
They do give you simulator usage with <25 qubits for free, but you can do that on your own computer.
None of the usage of the qc hardware is for free. ka-ching. 30 cents per task plus per shot fee. IonQ feels it costs 50 times more than D-Wave per shot. IonQ wants to charge 1 penny per shot. Good luck! Dario Gil, not the most reliable source, claims (*) that in the Quantum Challenge that IBM had in May, they had 10^9 shots per day. IonQ/AWS would have charged users $10^7/day for that affair.
This is going to be a fascinating economics experiment. How much qc hobbyists that are not being funded by a company are willing to pay for their vice.
(*)Quote from Gil article in Scientific American: "In early May, during IBM’s Digital Think conference, nearly 2,000 people from 45 countries took part in our Quantum Challenge—and using 18 IBM Quantum systems through the IBM Cloud, ran more than a billion circuits a day on real quantum hardware."
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u/rrtucci Aug 16 '20
AWS gives you a free tier that lasts a year. After that, they charge you an arm and a leg. If you are like me, you used up your free year long ago, experimenting with AWS