Bobcoins
The unit IBM meters IBM Bob in, so an IBM i shop can work out in advance what its AI coding work will cost. IBM defines a Bobcoin as a resource unit that measures consumption of Bob's AI capabilities; plans include 50 to 1,000 a month, going past that costs $0.50 a Bobcoin, and the Premium Package for i is a separate charge starting at USD 40.
What is a Bobcoin?
A Bobcoin is how IBM counts what you use when you work with Bob, its AI coding agent for IBM i. IBM's documentation puts it plainly: Bobcoins are resource units that measure your consumption of Bob's AI capabilities. Think of a bucket of tokens at an arcade. Every game costs some tokens, bigger games cost more, and when the bucket is empty you either stop or buy more.
What spends them is ordinary work. IBM says each action you complete with Bob, such as generating code, analyzing files or running commands, consumes a number of Bobcoins based on the computational resources required. So asking Bob to read a long program and rewrite it costs more than asking it a quick question. IBM uses one count like this so you do not have to track the different models underneath.
How many do you get, and what do they cost?
IBM Bob plans and the Bobcoins each one includes
| Plan | Price a month | Bobcoins included |
|---|---|---|
| Trial | Free, 30 days | 50 |
| Pro | $20.00 USD per instance | 50 |
| Pro+ | $60.00 USD per instance | 180 |
| Ultra | $200.00 USD per instance | 1,000 |
| Enterprise | Contact IBM sales | Pooled across the team |
Read from IBM's Bob pricing page on 23 October 2026. IBM raised these allowances on 24 September 2026 at no extra cost: Trial and Pro went from 40 to 50, Pro+ from 160 to 180, and Ultra from 500 to 1,000. Older write-ups still quote the smaller numbers.
The sticker price is not the whole story. What matters is what one Bobcoin works out to on each plan, because the bigger plans hand you far more for each dollar.
What one Bobcoin effectively costs you, in US cents
Worked out by dividing each plan price by the Bobcoins it includes, using IBM's own figures read on 23 October 2026, rounded to the nearest cent. The last bar is IBM's published overage rate of $0.50 USD per Bobcoin. Running over on Pro costs you 25 percent more for each Bobcoin than staying inside the plan.
Nothing banks. IBM's documentation says your Bobcoin allowance resets at the start of each billing cycle, so anything you did not spend this month is gone next month.
What does this cost an IBM i shop?
Bob on its own is a general coding agent. The IBM i part is a separate add-on called the Premium Package for i, and IBM's pricing page lists it starting at USD 40 a month on top of Pro, Pro+ or Ultra, with Enterprise buyers told to contact sales. So the smallest IBM i setup at IBM's list price is $20.00 USD for Pro plus USD 40 for the package, for one person.
There is a discount running right now. IBM's pricing page carries an offer of the first month free on the Java Modernization and IBM i premium packages, for new subscribers only, available until 31 December 2026.
Check the add-on before you budget on it. IBM lists Bobcoin allowances against the base plans only, Trial, Pro, Pro+ and Ultra, and does not publish a separate allowance for the Premium Package for i. Ask IBM to confirm how your IBM i work is counted before you size a team on these numbers.
How do you keep the bill predictable?
Three ways to see what you are spending
- Watch the gaugeIBM's documentation says you hover your cursor over the gauge in the top right corner of the Bob panel to see your balance. Settings shows the same thing.
- Read BobalyticsBobalytics is the reporting view. It shows Bobcoin spend, the total consumed in the period you pick, as a number and as a share of your budget, and you can scope it to the whole organization, one team, or one person.
- Decide about overage earlyOverage is the switch that lets you keep working past your allowance at $0.50 USD a Bobcoin. IBM says once you turn it on you cannot turn it off until the month ends, and it resets to off at the start of each new month.
From IBM's own Bob documentation, read on 23 October 2026.
Packs are a different thing from your monthly allowance. IBM sells Enterprise Bobcoin packs at $500 USD for 1,000 Bobcoins, with overage packs 10 percent dearer at $550 USD, and those pack Bobcoins expire one year after the purchase date.
Related Terms
IBM Bob (Project Bob)
IBM's generally available AI coding agent for IBM i, built as a fork of Visual Studio Code and tuned for RPG, CL, DDS, and SQL. Reached GA on March 24, 2026; Bob 2.0 and the IBM i-specific Bob Premium Package for i shipped June 24, 2026.
Bob Premium Package for i
The IBM i-specific add-on to IBM Bob, generally available June 24, 2026. It gives Bob about 40 skills and workflows and about 30 tools that work directly against QSYS, the IFS, CL, SQL and Db2 for i on a live system.
Build with Bob
An option added to watsonx Orchestrate's Create an agent dialog in the August 2026 release, listed by IBM as a preview, that launches IBM Bob into a workspace wired to your Orchestrate tenant to generate agents, tools and workflows from natural language.
GitHub Copilot
GitHub Copilot is a general-purpose AI coding assistant that suggests code as you type, answers questions about a codebase, reviews changes and runs multi-step work on its own. It runs inside Visual Studio Code, the same editor an IBM i shop already uses for Code for IBM i, but GitHub trains it on public code and says suggestion quality depends on how much of a language sits in public repositories, which is the gap IBM filled by training its own models on RPG.
RPG
Report Program Generator, the primary business application programming language on IBM i and its AS/400 predecessors, still running the majority of production logic in most IBM i shops.