IBM Bob's IBM i free trial: pay $20 for month one, not $60

The IBM Bob Premium Package for i costs USD 40 per authorized user per month, on top of a base Bob subscription. For a new subscriber it is free for the first month. That puts a full month of the IBM i features at $20 rather than $60, and almost nobody in the IBM i community knows it, because IBM publishes the two halves of that sentence on two different pages that appear to contradict each other.

The IBM Bob free trial does not cover any of this, which is where most of the confusion starts. The first-month waiver is a separate offer, and it runs until December 31, 2026.

The arithmetic, before anything else

Here is what a single seat costs, assuming you are a new subscriber taking IBM up on the waiver.

	Base plan	IBM i package	Total
Month one, Pro	$20	$0	$20
Month one, Pro+	$60	$0	$60
Month two onward, Pro	$20	$40	$60
Month two onward, Pro+	$60	$40	$100

The two rows that matter are the first two. They deliver identical premium features. One costs three times the other, and the difference is which base plan you happened to click.

Why everyone thinks there is no free trial for the IBM i package

IBM’s pricing page carries this line under the premium packages block: prices are indicative, vary by country, exclude taxes and duties, and subject to availability, and a subscription is required to trial a premium package.

IBM’s purchase page for the IBM i package says something that reads like the opposite: if you are an existing Bob customer, you can buy a premium package by updating your subscription, and if you are a new customer, pick a plan that works for you and get your premium package free for the first month.

Both statements are true. The base subscription is not free, which is what the footnote is telling you. The $40 add-on is waived for month one, which is what the purchase page is telling you. Read either page alone and you get half the picture, which is how the IBM i community landed on “there is no trial for the premium package” and stopped looking.

The 30-day free trial is a separate thing again. It gives you 50 Bobcoins on base Bob, and IBM’s own trial page says that when it ends you upgrade to Pro, Pro+, or Ultra to keep using Bob. Premium packages are not mentioned on it at all. Base Bob is the version that cannot read source members out of QSYS, which was the dealbreaker for traditional shops from the start. Trialing base Bob to evaluate the IBM i features tells you almost nothing.

The exact path

Do not start at the free trial page. It leads to base Bob and it does not lead here.
Go to IBM’s purchase page for the package, at bob.ibm.com/premium?package=ibmI.
Find the “New customer” block. It offers Pro, Pro+, and Ultra.
Check which plan is selected before you click Buy now. In the page as served on September 7, the buy link carries the tier ID that IBM’s pricing page attaches to Pro+, the $60 plan, not Pro at $20. Selecting Pro is what makes month one cost $20.
Complete checkout. The premium package attaches as an add-on at $0 for the first month.
Put a reminder in your calendar for day 25. On day 31 the add-on starts billing at $40 and a Pro seat becomes $60.

One thing IBM does not spell out anywhere: the offer says new subscribers only, and the purchase page sorts people into “existing Bob customer” and “new customer” without saying which one you are if you burned a 30-day trial back in July and never paid. If that is you, confirm eligibility before you count on the waiver.

What the waived $40 actually buys

The package is not a discount on base Bob with a different label. It is the IBM i product.

A native connection to the box over SSH, using the same plumbing as the Code for IBM i extension, so Bob reads, writes, compiles, and tests against real source members. If you already run VS Code against your IBM i, this is the piece that slots into a stack you have.
Pre-built skills for explain, document, refactor, code, transform, and test.
Guided workflows for the conversions shops actually queue up: fixed-form to free-form RPG, RPG II and III to ILE, monolithic to modular, embedded SQL modernization, DDS to DDL.
An IBM i database mode with SQL and DDS query analysis, an index strategy advisor, and entity relationship diagrams.
Retrieval grounding on IBM i-specific material, including RPG Café content and knowledge from IBM’s compiler team, which is the part that stops a general-purpose model from inventing plausible-looking RPG.

IT Jungle’s launch reporting put the package at roughly 40 skills and workflows and around 30 tools. Whether the generated code holds up on your codebase is exactly the question $20 answers.

The catch: your free month is metered

The premium package ships zero Bobcoins. Every task still draws on the base plan’s monthly allowance, so on a Pro plan your entire evaluation runs on 50 coins.

Scope accordingly. Fifty coins is enough to point Bob at your library list, have it read a real program, ask it to explain the flow and extract the business rules, and grade the answer against what you already know. It is not enough to convert a subsystem, and any plan that starts with “we’ll modernize the order entry module” runs dry in week two and teaches you nothing except that you ran out.

Pick one program you understand well enough to catch a confident wrong answer. That is the whole test.

IBM Bob premium package pricing, and how Bobcoins moved since June

The allowances have shifted since the package shipped in June, and nobody has reported it.

Plan	Price	Bobcoins at launch (June)	Bobcoins now	Cost per coin now
Trial	free, 30 days	40	50	n/a
Pro	$20/mo	40	50	$0.40
Pro+	$60/mo	160	180	$0.33
Ultra	$200/mo	500	1000	$0.20

Ultra doubled its allowance at the same price, which halved its effective rate and makes it the cheapest coin on the menu rather than the most expensive. If you are budgeting a team rollout past the free month, that inverts the usual advice to start small and add seats.

One number to verify yourself at checkout: at launch IT Jungle reported monthly support fees of $3 on Pro, $9 on Pro+, and $30 on Ultra. Those fees do not appear anywhere on IBM’s public pricing page today. That could mean they were folded in, or it could mean they surface during checkout. Look at the total before you agree to it, and treat any figure written before June, including the $60-a-month seat estimate in our own earlier coverage, as a snapshot rather than a quote.

A correction to what we published on August 17

Our article on IBM Dev Day and the Bob in Action sessions, published August 17, has the facts right and the emphasis wrong. Every number in it is correct, the waiver included, and one of its FAQ answers gives the $20 path plainly. What surrounds them is the problem. The waiver arrives two paragraphs after the line telling readers they will start a trial that evening and find none of the IBM i features in it, the FAQ answer directly above it says only that the trial does not cover the package, and the section closes by telling you to budget $60 per developer per month. Skim that page and you come away with $60, which is right for month two and wrong for month one.

The Bobcoin figures are a plain error rather than a question of emphasis. That article, the Premium Package review, and the modernization guide all quote June’s allowances: 40 on the trial and on Pro, 160 on Pro+, 500 on Ultra. IBM now lists 50, 50, 180, and 1000. The same articles state the launch support fees as current, and those fees are not on IBM’s pricing page today. Treat any Bob pricing paragraph on this site dated before September as a June snapshot until it carries a newer date.

Bottom line

If you write RPG or DB2 for i and you have been waiting to find out whether Bob is real, $20 is the price of finding out on your own code instead of on IBM’s demo data. Take the Pro plan, check the selected plan before you pay, and do it before December 31.

Have your access sorted before the clock starts. SSH to the box, a library list you can point at, one program you know cold, and a decision date inside the 30 days. Shops that buy the month and then spend three weeks waiting on a firewall change get nothing for their money.

Go in knowing which programs matter and what a good answer looks like, and a metered month is plenty. That preparation is most of the work, and it is what the IBM i AI Field Guide is built to do, whichever tool you end up pointing at your code. If you are still deciding where Bob fits against the rest of the tooling, the wider IBM i modernization picture has not changed, only the entry price has.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the IBM Bob free trial include the IBM i premium package?

No. The 30-day free trial gives you 50 Bobcoins on base Bob, and IBM’s pricing page states that a subscription is required to trial a premium package. The separate offer that does get you the IBM i package for nothing is the first-month waiver on the $40 add-on, which requires a paid base plan starting at $20.

How much does the IBM Bob premium package for i cost?

USD 40 per authorized user per month on the individual plan, on top of a base Bob subscription. New subscribers get that $40 waived for their first month until December 31, 2026, so month one on a Pro plan is $20 and month two is $60.

How many Bobcoins do you need to evaluate the IBM i package?

The premium package ships no Bobcoins of its own, so your allowance comes entirely from the base plan. A Pro plan gives you 50 for the month. That is enough to test the native connection against real source members and grade the output on a program you know well, and not enough to modernize a subsystem.

When does the free first month offer end?

IBM’s IBM i modernization page states the offer runs until December 31, 2026, for new subscribers only, and applies to both the IBM i and Java Modernization premium packages. Nothing on the page commits IBM to renewing it.