IBM i Software Pricing FAQ

IBM i software is licensed by per-core performance tier: P05 (entry), P10 (small business), P20 Standard Edition, P30 Enterprise Edition, P40 (retired), and P50 (enterprise, priced the same as P30). The tier -- not raw core count -- is what drives IBM i software pricing. See our full IBM i Tier Economics breakdown for real dollar figures at each tier.

P05 and P10 have been subscription-only for new purchases and license transfers since May 7, 2024 -- no new perpetual licenses are sold at those tiers. P20 and P30 are offered as bundled subscription editions (Standard and Enterprise), though perpetual OTC pricing for those tiers is still referenced in IBM's announcement letters. Existing perpetual licenses at any tier remain valid under SWMA.

You lose current-release entitlement and technical support. To reinstate coverage, IBM charges an After License Fee (ALF) that runs roughly 2 to 3 times the annual SWMA rate -- not prorated for how long the lapse lasted. A lapsed P10 SWMA contract, for example, can cost roughly $10,500 to reinstate. Letting SWMA lapse to save money almost never pays off once reinstatement is priced in.

IBM does not publish a full price list. The most concrete public data points: a base license starting around $4,495, SMB implementation typically $5,000-$20,000, and enterprise implementations $50,000 or more depending on customization, data migration, and training. Metered cloud capacity runs $0.336-$0.528 per instance-hour for burst or temporary DR use.

The main third-party logical replication vendors are Maxava (Maxava HA / Maxava Cloud), Rocket iCluster, and the legacy iTera/Vision Solutions/MIMIX lineage. None of these publish list pricing -- Maxava, for example, licenses by the source machine's software tier (P-group) rather than a fixed rate. Budget for a quote against your specific configuration rather than assuming a published number.

Published enterprise IBM i RPG/COBOL modernization benchmarks range from roughly $5 million to $20 million or more over 12-24 months for large scopes, with smaller cross-industry modernization efforts reported in the $2.2-4 million range with a 12-24 month breakeven. Scoping to the roughly 70% of the codebase that actually delivers business value, rather than rewriting everything, is the single biggest cost lever.

It depends on your current maintenance spend and how much custom business logic you'd need to replace. A commonly cited rule of thumb: migration typically only pays for itself when current annual maintenance and support costs already exceed roughly $300,000/year. Below that, the migration project cost and business disruption usually outweigh the savings -- and most AS/400 shops run customized logic that a generic ERP can't match without expensive gap-fit work.

Starting July 15, 2025, IBM began bundling additional software entitlements into the P20 and P30 subscription tiers for a modest premium over the standalone IBM i-only subscription: $16,000/core/year for P20 (vs. $14,500 unbundled) and $24,500/core/year for P30 (vs. $21,900 unbundled). IBM claims the bundled entitlements are worth over $19,000/core/year at P20 and over $52,000/core/year at P30.

It's a ratio of IBM's own claimed bundle value divided by the price you pay, normalized to a 0-100 scale against the highest ratio observed. It's built by AS/400 Software Pricing, not IBM, and only scores tiers where IBM has published both a bundle price and a claimed value figure (currently P20, P30, and P50). See the Software Value Index page for the full scoring table and methodology.

It varies by tier: roughly 50+ users at P05 and roughly 200+ users at P10, based on IT Jungle's published crossover analysis. P20 and P30 don't have per-user fees at all, so the comparison doesn't apply at those tiers.

It depends heavily on scope. PowerHA implementations alone run $5,000-$20,000 for SMB and $50,000+ for enterprise. For a broader ERP-scale implementation on any platform, industry data shows SMB implementations starting around $20,000, enterprise implementations exceeding $100,000, and multi-business-unit global rollouts reaching $2-5 million or more. Implementation labor (not software licensing) is typically 50-70% of that first-year total.

SWMA is the ongoing annual maintenance fee that keeps a perpetual license entitled to support and upgrades. ALF is the one-time penalty charged to reinstate SWMA after it has lapsed -- typically 2-3 times the annual SWMA rate, not prorated for the lapse period. Example: a $1,500/year SWMA contract can cost roughly $3,000 to reinstate after a lapse; a $3,500/year contract roughly $7,000.