Discovery pricing plans
IBM Watson™ Discovery offers three plans -- Lite, Advanced, and Premium -- that provide different levels of resources and capabilities to suit your needs.
For more information about Premium plans that were created after 16 July 2020 or about Plus plans (including Plus Trial), see these docs.
Private data use cases have the following features, limits, and prices:
Lite
| Size | Number of Docs* | Price |
|---|---|---|
| N/A | 1,000 docs total | Free |
The Lite plan is a starter plan, so do not use it in your production environment. When you upgrade to a paid plan, you can keep all ingested documents. Lite plan instances are deleted after 30 days of inactivity.
Attributes:
- 1 environment
- Up to 2 collections
- Free NLU enrichments**
Additional options:
Custom Models:
One IBM Watson™ Knowledge Studio model included. Additional models: Not available
Element Classification***:
500 pages included per month. Additional pages: Not available
News Queries: 200 News queries included per month. Additional queries: Not available
Query Expansions:
500 query expansions with 1,000 total terms. Additional expansions: Not available
Document splitting: 250 segments per plan. Additional segments: Not available
For information about upgrading from Lite to Advanced, see Upgrading your service
For query performance information, see Query performance. Queries are limited based on plan. Estimated Average Query rates per Lite plan: 1 QPS for reranked queries with two top-level text fields.
The Element Classification enrichment is deprecated and will no longer be available, effective 10 July 2020.
Advanced
When choosing an Advanced Plan size, note that resources are required for both document storage and querying. Therefore, you might require a larger environment if you are close to the maximum document limit for a plan size and also have the following requirements:
- Higher query performance requirements (for example, using relevancy training)
- You anticipate a large number of concurrent users
- Complex query needs
For additional details on factors that influence query performance, see Query performance. Queries are limited based on plan. Estimated Average Query rates per Advanced (S, MS) plans: 10 QPS for reranked queries with two top-level text fields.
| Size | Number of Docs* | Price |
|---|---|---|
| X-Small**** | Up to 50,000 docs total | Starting at $500 per month |
| Small | Up to 1M docs total | Starting at $1,500 per month |
| Medium-Small | Up to 2M docs total | Starting at $3,000 per month |
| Medium | Up to 4M docs total | Starting at $5,000 per month |
| Medium-Large | Up to 8M docs total | Starting at $10,000 per month |
| Large | Up to 16M docs total | Starting at $15,000 per month |
| X-Large | Up to 32M docs total | Starting at $20,000 per month |
| XX-Large | Up to 64M docs total | Starting at $35,000 per month |
| XXX-Large | Up to 100M docs total | Starting at $45,000 per month |
X-Small is the smallest environment available, and is recommended for development and testing only.****
Moving from one level of Advanced to another does not require the creation of new instances. New instances are required if switching from an Advanced to a Premium plan. For information about upgrading from one tier of Advanced to another, see Moving from one Advanced tier to another.
****Attributes of X-Small plans:
- 1 environment
- Up to 4 collections
- Free NLU enrichments**
Attributes of all other Advanced plans:
- 1 environment
- Up to 100 collections
- Free NLU enrichments**
Additional options:
Custom Models:
One Knowledge Studio model included. Additional models: $800 each
Element Classification***:
500 pages included per month. Additional pages: $0.40 each
News Queries: 200 News queries included per month 10,000 additional queries (per month): $0.10 per query
10,001 - 100,000 additional queries (per month): $0.05 per query
Over 100,000 queries (per month): $0.03 per query
Query Expansions: 5,000 query expansions with 25,000 total terms
Document splitting: 1,000 segments per plan. Additional segments: Not available
The Element Classification enrichment is deprecated and will no longer be available, effective 10 July 2020.
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* The document limit assumes an average document size of 100KB on disk. Document size is calculated after it goes through conversion and enrichment, so document size might change significantly from the original input. You can view the
number of documents stored and the total amount of storage used by either using the Environments or Collections API, or by using
the tooling. If your documents are, on average, larger than 100KB on disk, you will hit the storage limit of a plan before the maximum document limit. If you perform document segmentation on your documents, each segment counts as a separate document.
** The IBM Watson™ Natural Language Understanding enrichments are: Entity Extraction, Sentiment Analysis, Category Classification, Concept Tagging, Keyword Extraction, Relation Extraction, Emotion Analysis, Element Classification, and Semantic Role Extraction. Only the first 50,000 characters of each document are enriched.
*** Element Classification is an enrichment that parses through governing documents to convert, identify, and classify elements of importance. It uses Natural Language Processing to extract the following elements from PDF documents: party (who it refers to), nature (type of element), and category (specific class).
To take advantage of the new string environment sizing values (LT, XS, S, MS, M, ML, L, XL, XXL, XXXL), use the
version date of 2018-08-01 or later in your API request when you create an environment. Before version 2018-08-01, the value was an integer.
Additional information
For information about calculating costs, see the IBM Cloud Pricing Calculator.
For additional pricing information, see the Discovery catalog.
Notes for Customers with Existing Plans
- Beginning 1 August 2018, your billing and usage is based on this pricing plan.
- The Lite plan is now reduced from 2,000 documents/400 Discovery News queries per month to 1,000 documents/200 Discovery News queries per month. If you already exceeded the new Lite plan limits, you cannot add any more documents. However, you can continue using it or upgrade to an Advanced or Premium plan.
- The Standard plan is retired and is no longer available to new users. If you are currently on an existing Standard plan, you can continue using it or upgrade to an Advanced or Premium plan.
- The Advanced and Premium plans are now based on document tiers. They are no longer based on document hours. Your monthly bill will not fluctuate, based on the number of documents, unless you switch between tiers.
- Premium customers, contact Sales for details on billing changes.