IBM Bob Pricing and Packages for IBM i
What IBM Bob actually costs for an IBM i shop: IBM's published plan prices, the $40 per month Premium Package for i add-on, the Bobcoin consumption model underneath the subscription, and the figures IBM still has not published.
IBM publishes Bob's plan prices, and the IBM i piece is an add-on rather than its own plan. As of September 2, 2026 the base plans are $20 per month for Pro, $60 for Pro+ and $200 for Ultra, and the Premium Package for i adds $40 per month on top of whichever plan you are on. So the working number for an IBM i developer seat is $60 per month at Pro, $100 at Pro+ and $240 at Ultra.
That is the whole answer to "what does Bob cost," and it is also the least interesting part of the bill. The subscription buys a monthly allowance of Bobcoins, and Bobcoins are what actually get consumed when Bob reads a 90,000-line program or runs a modernization workflow. Get the allowance wrong and the overage line is where the real money shows up.
IBM Bob published plan pricing
IBM Bob plans, as published by IBM on September 2, 2026
| Plan | Published price | Monthly Bobcoins | With Premium Package for i |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trial | Free, 30 days | 50 | Not applicable |
| Pro | $20 per month | 50 | $60 per month |
| Pro+ | $60 per month | 180 | $100 per month |
| Ultra | $200 per month | 1,000 | $240 per month |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Allocated to the organization | Not published |
Base prices and Bobcoin allowances read directly from IBM's Bob pricing page on 2026-09-02. IBM's own disclaimer on that page states prices are indicative, vary by country, exclude taxes and duties, and are subject to availability. The Premium column is the base price plus the published $40 IBM i package, not a separately published bundle price.
The Premium Package for i is a $40 add-on, not a plan
This trips up a lot of first-time buyers. There is no "Bob for IBM i" subscription to buy. You buy a normal Bob plan, then attach a premium package to it. IBM currently publishes three, and only two carry a public price.
IBM Bob premium packages
| Package | Published price | Availability |
|---|---|---|
| Premium Package for i | $40 per month | Add-on to Pro, Pro+ or Ultra |
| Java Modernization | $20 per month | Add-on to Pro, Pro+ or Ultra |
| IBM Z | Not published | Enterprise plans only, billed annually |
IBM's Bob premium package listing, read 2026-09-02. The IBM i package is the one that matters here; the Java and Z packages are listed only to show the shape of the add-on model and to explain the range you will see quoted in press coverage.
Reconciling IBM's prices against the launch coverage
Most of what has been written about Bob pricing traces back to one paragraph in IT Jungle's July 13, 2026 launch story: the Premium Package for i adds about $20 to $40 per month on top of the base version, and including the package, Pro runs $60 to $80 per month, Pro+ runs $100, and Ultra runs $240.
Check that against IBM's published figures today and two of the three lines land exactly. Pro+ at $60 base plus the $40 package is $100. Ultra at $200 plus $40 is $240. Both match to the dollar. The Pro line matches at the bottom of its range, $20 plus $40 is $60, but nothing in IBM's current published pricing produces $80 for Pro with the IBM i package attached.
The likely explanation is that the reported "$20 to $40" range was describing the two premium packages that carry prices, Java at $20 and IBM i at $40, rather than a price band for the IBM i package alone. If you are budgeting, plan on $60 for Pro with the IBM i package and treat $80 as a figure that no longer reconciles with what IBM publishes.
What is in each package
Base Bob, any plan
The agentic IDE itself, a fork of Visual Studio Code. Bob 2.0, generally available June 24, 2026, brought a 270,000-token context window, parallel tool calling, subagents that work with a clean context, task-level rollback, and three operating modes: agent, plan and ask.
Premium Package for i
About 40 IBM i skills and workflows and about 30 IBM i tools. Bob connects to a live system rather than working on source pulled down to a workstation: read and write QSYS and the IFS, run CL commands and SQL, launch a 5250 session, and manage library lists.
Developer Mode
The IBM i development side of the package: explaining RPG and COBOL, converting fixed-format RPG to free-format, refactoring, generating RPG, CL, COBOL and DDS, writing documentation and producing unit tests.
Db2 for i Database Mode
A separate mode aimed at query analysis, optimization and troubleshooting against Db2 for i, plus a retrieval workflow so Bob can ground its answers in your own code and data rather than general training.
Everything in the two IBM i cards above requires the Premium Package. A Pro plan without it is a general-purpose coding agent that happens to be able to read RPG text. The $40 is what buys the connection to the box.
Bobcoins: the part of the bill that is not the subscription
Bob is metered. Every action Bob takes, generating code, analyzing files, running commands, consumes Bobcoins in proportion to the compute it needed. The allowance resets monthly and does not roll over. IBM presents Bobcoins as one unified metric regardless of which underlying model answered, which is genuinely useful for forecasting, because you are not trying to predict a token bill across three model families.
Bobcoin allowances and overage rates
| Item | Published figure |
|---|---|
| Trial and Pro monthly allowance | 50 Bobcoins |
| Pro+ monthly allowance | 180 Bobcoins |
| Ultra monthly allowance | 1,000 Bobcoins |
| Pay-as-you-go overage, individual plans | $0.50 per Bobcoin |
| Enterprise prepaid pack | $500 per 1,000 Bobcoins |
| Enterprise overage pack | $550 per 1,000 Bobcoins, a 10 percent premium |
From IBM's Bob documentation on Bobcoins, read 2026-09-02. Allowances reset monthly. Note that the prepaid Enterprise pack works out to the same $0.50 per Bobcoin as individual overage, so the discount is in the commitment terms, not the unit rate.
That $0.50 per Bobcoin figure is the number to hold onto, because it turns the plan choice into arithmetic instead of a guess. Ultra costs $180 per month more than Pro and includes 950 more Bobcoins. At the overage rate those 950 coins would cost $475. If a developer is reliably burning past the Pro allowance, the larger plan is not close to a discretionary upgrade.
IBM does not publish how many Bobcoins a typical IBM i task consumes, and consumption scales with the work rather than the number of prompts. Explaining one 90,000-line program is not the same load as generating a display file. Run the free 30-day trial against your own worst legacy program before you pick a plan tier for a team.
The cost against a developer hour
There is no useful competitor price list to compare Bob against for RPG work, so the honest comparison is against the hour of the developer sitting in front of it. Fill in your own fully loaded IBM i developer cost and the break-even is trivial arithmetic: how many hours does the tool have to save each month before it has paid for itself.
Hours the tool must save per month to break even
| Seat | Monthly cost | At $50/hr | At $75/hr | At $100/hr | At $150/hr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pro with Premium for i | $60 | 1.2 hours | 0.8 hours | 0.6 hours | 0.4 hours |
| Pro+ with Premium for i | $100 | 2.0 hours | 1.3 hours | 1.0 hours | 0.7 hours |
| Ultra with Premium for i | $240 | 4.8 hours | 3.2 hours | 2.4 hours | 1.6 hours |
The rate columns are placeholders for your own fully loaded internal or contract cost, not published market rates for IBM i developers, which nobody publishes reliably. Break-even excludes Bobcoin overage; add expected overage to the monthly cost column before you use this to justify anything.
For context on what "saved" looks like, the only productivity figures on the record come from IBM's own launch materials and its customers, not from independent testing. Heartland Co-Op estimates 60 percent faster time for new-to-platform developers to understand complex applications using the Premium Package for i. A VP at M.R. Williams described an investigation and documentation task dropping from six hours to twenty minutes. Those are vendor-published customer estimates on selected tasks. They are a reason to run a trial, not a benchmark you can put in a business case.
What IBM has not published
This site's rule is to say plainly where a real number does not exist publicly rather than guess one. For Bob, the published price list is unusually good by IBM standards, and these are the gaps that remain as of September 2, 2026.
Worth stating clearly, because it surprises people: IBM's own announcement page for the Bob Premium Package for i contains no pricing at all. The prices on this page come from IBM's Bob product pricing page and documentation, not from an announcement letter of the kind IBM publishes for IBM i tier licensing.
Questions to ask IBM or your Business Partner
Is the plan price per user or per subscription?
Ask for the charge metric in the quote, not on the web page. A $60 seat and a $60 subscription for a five-developer team are very different budgets.
What does an annual commitment change?
Ask whether an annual or multi-year term exists at all for the IBM i package, and what it does to the monthly rate and the Bobcoin allowance.
How is Bobcoin consumption reported?
Ask what usage reporting a team lead gets, whether spend caps or overage alerts exist, and whether overage bills automatically or blocks work.
Where does the code go?
The Premium Package reads and writes QSYS and the IFS on a live system. Get the data handling, retention and residency terms in the contract before it touches production libraries.
What IBM i release is required?
Confirm the minimum release and Technology Refresh level for the live-system tools against the systems you actually run, not against the newest one you own.
Who owns the seat when someone leaves?
Ask about reassignment and mid-term cancellation. Monthly subscriptions are easy to start and easy to forget about.
Where this sits in your software budget
Bob is a rounding error next to IBM i licensing and it is worth keeping that proportion in view. A single Pro seat with the Premium Package for i costs $720 a year. A P20 Standard Edition IBM i subscription runs $14,500 a year before anything else in the stack. Bob belongs in the modernization project line, next to developer tooling and services, not in the tier licensing conversation. That also means it does not need the same procurement ceremony: one seat, one month, one real legacy program is a cheap test.
Related reading
- IBM Bob listing on AI for AS/400 Software ... the product profile, capabilities and vendor detail.
- IBM Bob pricing and packages, software-side companion ... which package fits which shop size, and what changed from Bob 1.0 to 2.0.
- IBM i Tier Economics ... the licensing tiers Bob sits alongside in your budget.
- IBM i Modernization Cost ... the project this tooling is bought to accelerate.
Sources: https://bob.ibm.com/pricing, https://bob.ibm.com/docs/ide/account/bobcoins, https://www.itjungle.com/2026/07/13/big-blue-ships-bob-2-0-and-premium-package-for-ibm-i/, https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/introducing-the-ibm-bob-premium-package-for-i, https://newsroom.ibm.com/2026-07-15-ibm-launches-new-power-systems-and-software-built-for-enterprises-to-address-risk,-productivity,-and-flexibility