Pricing

Natural Language Understanding has two pricing plans: Lite and Standard.

This page contains pricing information in USD. To view pricing information in your local currency, see the Natural Language Understanding page in the IBM Cloud® catalog.

Lite

The Lite plan is free for users who are looking to try out Natural Language Understanding or build a proof-of-concept.

Pricing

Free 30,000 NLU items/month

Custom Model

1 free custom model

Standard

A "pay-as-you-go" plan that is recommended once you are ready to move your application from proof-of-concept to production.

Pricing (billed monthly)

Tier 1: $0.003/NLU item for the first 1-250,000 NLU items
Tier 2: $0.001/NLU item for 250,001 to 5,000,000 NLU items
Tier 3: $0.0002/NLU item for additional NLU items past 5,000,000

Custom Entities and Relations Models ($/custom model/month)

$800 for all tiers

Custom Classification Model ($/custom classification model/month)

$25 for all tiers

What is an NLU item?

API usage is measured in NLU items. One NLU item is one text unit (up to 10,000 characters of text) that is analyzed for one feature, such as sentiment.

To keep track of the number of NLU items in your request, you can examine the usage object in the response. For example, analyzing 15,000 characters of text for sentiment, emotion, and keywords will return the following usage information.

"usage": {
  "text_units": 2,
  "text_characters": 15000,
  "features": 3
}

There are 2 text units and 3 features in the request, so there are 2 × 3 = 6 NLU items.

Text units are counted seperately for each request. If one request analyzes 15,000 characters and another request analyzes 3,000 characters, that counts as 3 text units total. The first request has 2 text units and the second request has 1 text unit.

FAQ

I want to understand sentiment across 20,000 tweets. How can I estimate what I will pay on the Standard plan?

Step 1: Calculate the number of text units per request
As of November 2018, the maximum number of characters allowed in a tweet are 280.
That translates to one text unit per request.
Step 2: Calculate the number of features per request
One feature, sentiment, is enabled in each request.
Step 3: Calculate the number of NLU items per request
NLU items = (Number of text units) × (Number of features)
NLU items = 1 text unit × 1 feature = 1 NLU item
Step 4: Calculate total number of NLU items
Total number of NLU items = (Number of requests) × (Number of NLU items per request)
Total number of NLU items = 20,000 requests × 1 NLU item per request = 20,000 total NLU items
Step 5: Estimate the price for total number of NLU items
For the Standard pricing plan, the first 250,000 NLU items are charged at $0.003 per item
Estimated price = (Number of NLU items) × (Price per NLU item)
Estimated price = 20,000 NLU items × $0.003 = $60

Total cost = $60

I want to extract Entities, Keywords and Categories for 50,000 documents with an average of 12,000 characters per document. What will be my estimated price on the Standard plan?

Step 1: Calculate number of text units per request
Text units = Number of groups of 10,000 characters or less
12,000 characters per request = 2 text units per request
Step 2: Calculate the number of features per request
Entities, Keywords, Categories = 3 features
Step 3: Calculate number of NLU items per request
NLU items = (Number of text unit) × (Number of features)
NLU items = 2 data units × 3 enrichments = 6 NLU items
Step 4: Calculate total number of NLU items
Total number of NLU items = (Number of requests or documents) × (Number of NLU items)
Total number of NLU items = 50,000 requests × 6 NLU items = 300,000 NLU items
Step 5: Estimate the price for the total number of NLU items
The first 250,000 NLU items are charged at $0.003 per item
Additional NLU items until the 5,000,000th NLU item are charged at $0.001 per item
Estimated price = (250,000 NLU items × $0.003) + (50,000 NLU items × $0.001)
Estimated price = $750 + $50

Total cost = $800

How do I calculate the Standard Plan price for 15,000 NLU items?

Since the first 250,000 NLU items are priced at $0.003/item - your 15,000 NLU items are charged at $0.003 per item (Tier 1). Your estimated price would be $45.

How do I calculate the Standard Plan price for 6,000,000 NLU items?

Since you have more than 5,000,000 NLU items, your first 250,000 NLU items are charged at $0.003 per item (Tier 1), your next 4,750,000 NLU items are charged at $0.001 per item (Tier 2), and your remaining 1,000,000 NLU items are charged at $0.0002 per item (Tier 3). Your estimated price would be $5,700.