Questions worth answering before you pay.

Everything the paid version does, on meshes up to 250,000 cells of fluids, or 100,000 nodes of solid. Same solvers, same meshing, same post-processing, same reports.

No time limit, no watermark, no account needed to download. The cap is on mesh size — not on capability, and not on commercial use.

For genuine two-dimensional work, comfortably. A 2D case is one cell thick, so it costs roughly a hundredth of the equivalent 3D mesh — the cylinder tutorial runs well inside it and produces a result you can check against known behaviour.

For small or simplified 3D geometry it is workable. For detailed external aerodynamics on a full vehicle it is not, and that is what the paid tiers are for.

Yes. No royalty, no obligation to credit us, and your results are entirely yours.

The only use-restricted licence is Education, which is for academic work rather than funded consultancy through an institution. See the licence agreement.

A 64-bit Windows machine. For meshing, RAM matters more than cores — roughly 1 GB per million cells is a workable rule, so 16 GB is a sensible minimum and 32 GB is comfortable.

A discrete GPU improves the 3D viewport but is not required and has no effect on solve time — the solver is CPU-bound.

No. It is a native Windows application with the solver bundled — nothing to compile, no WSL, no container, and no separate OpenFOAM installation to manage. That is most of the reason it exists; see OpenFOAM and the case for a GUI.

Only to validate a paid licence periodically, with a published offline grace period — a laptop on a plane or a machine on a restricted network keeps working.

The free tier needs no connection at all, and no account.

Because it is not yet code-signed. SmartScreen warns about any unsigned installer regardless of what it contains.

Verify the SHA-256 published beside the download against the file you received — that tells you it is the file we built. Signing is in progress; the key must sit on certified hardware, which makes it a lead-time problem rather than an oversight. Tracked openly on the security page.

A seat is one named person, not a concurrent slot. You can install on more than one of your own machines within the plan allowance, and deactivate a device from your account when you replace a machine. Seats can be reassigned permanently — when somebody leaves — but are not intended to rotate daily.

The application degrades to the free tier. It still starts, still opens your existing cases, and deletes and locks nothing. Losing access to your own work because a subscription lapsed is not an outcome we are prepared to ship — it is written into the licence agreement, not just promised here.

If it does not do what this site says it does, tell us within 30 days and we will refund you. UK and EU consumers also have the statutory 14-day right to cancel a distance purchase. Details in the terms of sale. The free tier exists so you can find out before paying anything.

Paddle is our merchant of record: the purchase contract and invoice are with them, and they collect and remit VAT or sales tax where you are. The software licence is with SHD Systems Ltd, and support comes from us. Prices are shown inclusive of tax — the figure on the pricing page is what leaves your card.

No. Cases run locally, and we receive no geometry, meshes, results or telemetry about what you model. The application sends a licence key and a machine fingerprint that is hashed on your machine before transmission. Set out in the privacy notice.

No. The case it writes is a normal OpenFOAM case on disk — you can run it from the command line, on any machine with OpenFOAM, with or without us. That is a deliberate property rather than an accident, and it is worth checking against any tool you evaluate; see how to choose.

Nine modules are available — fluids, structural, thermal, electromagnetics, acoustics, studies, multiphysics, shape optimisation and explicit dynamics. Fluids covers 26 analysis types including conjugate heat transfer and aeroacoustic sources; each module page names the analysis types and solver backends behind it.

See the roadmap for platform work still ahead, or the 87 analysis types the range covers.

Windows today, and Linux and macOS builds are coming. The solver stack already runs on all three — what is left is packaging, code signing and a release channel per platform, which is work rather than an open question.

No date, in keeping with the rest of the roadmap. Which platform lands first is decided by who asks for it, so if it is the thing standing between you and buying, tell us which one.

Not yet. Single sign-on means your staff reach SHD Sim with the company account they already have — Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Google Workspace — rather than a separate password here, and it is usually your IT department asking rather than the engineer. SAML is the protocol that most often carries it. The practical reasons organisations insist on it are that access is revoked centrally the day somebody leaves, your own MFA and conditional-access policy applies, and there is one list of who can sign in rather than two.

It is not built. Today an Enterprise licence is administered through the organisation dashboard: seats are assigned and removed by your own administrator, which covers the same ground manually. SSO is first on the list when an Enterprise customer names it as a requirement, so if that is you, say so — that is how it gets prioritised.