Support plans

IBM Cloud offers Basic, Advanced, and Premium support plans to meet your business needs. The support plan that you select determines the severity levels that you can assign to support cases, your response time objectives, and your access to Support Center tools. To upgrade your support plan, contact IBM Cloud Sales.

Initial response Service Level Objectives (SLO) do not apply to billing, invoice, sales, or account-related cases.

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.

Support plan comparison
This table has row and column headers. The row headers identify the aspects of support. The column headers identify the support plan.
	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 Severity 2: Less than 2 hours Severity 3: Less than 4 hours Severity 4: Less than 8 hours	Severity 1: Less than 15 minutes Severity 2: Less than 1 hour Severity 3: Less than 2 hours Severity 4: Less than 4 hours
Additional support	None	None	Technical Account Manager Quarterly business reviews Access to experts 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 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 Enterprise Savings Plan: 10% of consumption. For more information, see Viewing your support costs.

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 a IBM Cloud Sales representative.

Premium support

The Premium support plan is for mission-critical environments that have a strategic dependency on IBM Cloud. The additional features of Premium support provide you the comfort in knowing that IBM Cloud 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 IBM Cloud 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 for 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.

Advanced 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.

Basic 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:
- IBM Cloud documentation
- AI assistant for technical questions
- Community forums (IBM Cloud Community and Stack Overflow)

Basic support does not include technical support for product issues or access to case severity rankings and response time objectives.

Support for Lite and Trial accounts

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 and enterprises

The level of support that is assigned to an IBM Cloud enterprise defaults to the highest support plan within the enterprise. All child accounts within the enterprise also default to the highest support plan.

Technical support team

The IBM Cloud support team, also known as the Client Service Delivery team, provides 24 x 7 support from strategic IBM 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.