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| lastupdated | 2026-05-19 | ||
| keywords | IBM Cloud support plans, basic support, advanced support, premium support, cloud support, IBM Cloud sales, technical support, response time | ||
| subcollection | support |
{{site.data.keyword.attribute-definition-list}}
{: #support-plans}
Discover IBM Cloud's support plans, including Basic, Advanced, and Premium options, designed to meet your business needs with varying levels of technical support and response times. {: shortdesc}
Initial response Service Level Objectives (SLO) do not apply to billing, invoice, sales, or account-related cases. {: important}
{: #support-plan-comparison}
The following table compares the support plans available for Pay-As-You-Go accounts, Subscription accounts, and the Enterprise Savings Plan billing model. For more information, see Account types.
| Basic | Advanced | Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Basic business protection included with Pay-As-You-Go or Subscription accounts | Prioritized case handling aligned with business needs for your Pay-As-You-Go account, Subscription account, or Enterprise Savings Plan billing model | Client engagement aligned with business outcomes to accelerate time-to-value for your Pay-As-You-Go account, Subscription account, or Enterprise Savings Plan billing model |
| Availability | Access to documentation, AI Assistant, and community forums | 24 x 7 access to technical support through cases, phone, and chat | 24 x 7 access to technical support through cases, phone, and chat |
| Case severity | Not available | All severity levels available | All severity levels available |
| Initial response time objectives | No SLO for response time | Severity 1: Less than 1 hour \n Severity 2: Less than 2 hours \n Severity 3: Less than 4 hours \n Severity 4: Less than 8 hours | Severity 1: Less than 15 minutes \n Severity 2: Less than 1 hour \n Severity 3: Less than 2 hours \n Severity 4: Less than 4 hours |
| Additional support | None | None | Technical Account Manager \n Quarterly business reviews \n Access to experts \n Event management support |
| Pricing | Included with cloud entitlement | Pay-As-You-Go and Subscription: Starting at USD 200 per month or 10% of consumption if it exceeds the monthly starting price \n Enterprise Savings Plan: 10% of consumption | Pay-As-You-Go and Subscription: Starting at USD 10,000 per month or 10% of consumption if it exceeds the monthly starting price \n Enterprise Savings Plan: 10% of consumption. For more information, see Viewing your support costs. |
| {: row-headers} | |||
| {: class="comparison-table"} | |||
| {: caption="Support plan comparison" caption-side="bottom"} | |||
| {: summary="This table has row and column headers. The row headers identify the aspects of support. The column headers identify the support plan."} |
For Enterprise Savings Plans, there is a minimum commitment for Advanced and Premium support. If you don't spend the total committed amount by the end of the commitment term, you are invoiced for the amount that you didn't consume, and any amount used over the commitment is also charged. For more information, contact an {{site.data.keyword.cloud_notm}} Sales{: external} representative. {: note}
{: #premium-support}
The Premium support plan is for mission-critical environments that have a strategic dependency on {{site.data.keyword.cloud_notm}}. The additional features of Premium support provide you the comfort in knowing that {{site.data.keyword.cloud_notm}} has you covered in any situation. With your Premium support plan you get a technical account manager that advises you on processes, policies, and best practices related to the platform or infrastructure services. In addition, your technical account manager assists you with:
- Issue management. Your technical account manager works with the {{site.data.keyword.cloud_notm}} Support team to reduce time-to-resolution.
- Onboarding assistance. Your technical account manager helps with cloud onboarding and serves as your advocate, aligning resources to meet your needs.
- Platform and infrastructure maintenance. Your technical account manager alerts you about maintenance events or service end of life that might impact your environment.
- Event management. The technical account manager can arrange architectural support on scaling and high availability for critical customer events such as maintenance, promotions, or holiday events.
- Seminars and events. Your technical account manager ensures that your teams are engaged in IBM events and conferences.
- Quarterly business reviews. Your technical account manager provides periodic business reviews of cloud usage, support case activity, escalations, upcoming planned maintenance, upcoming EOL/EOS dates and how to plan for those, and reviews of your users and permissions.
{: #premium-support-events}
On a case-by-case basis, your technical account manager can provide and help coordinate additional support for large-scale, customer-initiated events. The following details describe the event support.
Time critical actions, including:
- Meet with the event team to review the details of the event.
- Review critical functions and services that are required.
- Highlight key dates and times for actions.
- Assemble the team to ensure that plans are understood and actions are defined.
- A support plan with crisis management, including:
- Review the plan from previous years' event and post feedback actions.
- Revise the plan to ensure that roles and responsibilities are understood.
- Ensure that all service teams are aware of the event and ready for any activity that requires quick assistance or resolution.
- Ensure that any maintenance activity is known and understood.
- A create and practice plan. Actions include:
- A dry run of plan and expected or probable issue management.
- Test that the alert notifications are working as expected.
- Post an event review.
- An event postmortem review and retrospective, including:
- A postmortem with service teams to highlight any areas for improvement.
- Documenting and updating the plan for future events.
{: #standard-support}
The Advanced support plan is designed for environments with a limited number of business-critical applications. With Advanced support, you receive:
- 24 x 7 access to the technical support team through cases, phone, and chat
- Prioritized case handling with defined response time objectives
- Access to all case severity levels
- Support for technical product issues
Advanced support is ideal for organizations that need faster response times and technical assistance beyond self-service resources.
{: #free-support}
The Basic support plan is included with all Pay-As-You-Go and Subscription accounts at no additional cost. With Basic support, you can:
- Create support cases for nontechnical issues, including:
- Access management
- Billing and usage
- Account management
- Invoice inquiries
- Sales inquiries
- Access self-service resources:
- {{site.data.keyword.cloud_notm}} documentation
- AI assistant for technical questions
- Community forums ({{site.data.keyword.cloud_notm}} Community and Stack Overflow)
Basic support does not include technical support for product issues or access to case severity rankings and response time objectives. {: note}
{: #lite-trial-support}
Lite and Trial accounts receive the same support as Basic support. You can create support cases for nontechnical issues and access self-service resources, but technical support for product issues is not available.
{: #support_level_enterprise}
The level of support that is assigned to an {{site.data.keyword.cloud_notm}} enterprise defaults to the highest support plan within the enterprise. All child accounts within the enterprise also default to the highest support plan.
{: #tech-support-team}
The {{site.data.keyword.cloud_notm}} support team, also known as the Client Service Delivery team, provides 24 x 7 support from strategic {{site.data.keyword.IBM_notm}} locations worldwide. The team consists of technical engineers with domain expertise to triage and troubleshoot issues quickly and effectively.
Support engineers are organized by technology domains, including:
- Compute
- Network
- Security
- Storage
- VPC
- Kubernetes service
- Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud
- Satellite
- Databases
- App development
- Cognitive solutions
The team maintains their skills and technical knowledge through specialized training on cloud services. Support engineers are equipped to go deep on issues and resolve most without any additional support from backend teams. Collaboration across cloud service teams ensures continuous knowledge transfer and skills development.