Pricing
Pay for the physics you use. Run all of it either way.
One workbench, nine physics modules, and a price that is the platform plus what you licence. Every module you have not bought still runs — at the free limits, in the same case, beside the one you did. What you pay for is scale, support, seats and paid-tier cloud compute, never access to physics.
Not on sale yet
Every price and limit below is final, and the tier comparison is complete — but SHD Sim is still in final testing, so there is nothing to buy today. Tell us where to write and we will let you know the day it goes on sale.
Tell me when it is released
One email when it ships. Confirm the address first — we will not add you without it.
1. Choose your physics
Everything you do not licence still runs, up to the free limits — in the same case, beside the modules you did buy.
2. Choose how you are supported
Every tier below runs the physics you picked above, identically. What changes is seats, support and activation — never what the solver will do.
Free
Every module, up to a real limit. No account needed.
No card, no sign-up.
- All nine modules, with free-tier limits
- 250,000 cells of fluids; 100,000 nodes of mesh-based modules
- Single-core solve, one job at a time
- No SHD Cloud compute
- Watermarked export
- Community support and docs
Basic
For the individual engineer doing real work.
- No mesh, node or core limits on what you licence
- Every analysis type, unwatermarked
- Remote and multi-core solving
- 2,500 SHD Compute Hours/year included
- One named seat, up to 2 devices
- Docs and community support
Enterprise
Same software, with support that answers.
- Everything in Basic
- 10,000 SHD Compute Hours/year included
- Lower PAYG cloud rate after allowance
- Support under a published SLA, and onboarding
- Offline and air-gapped activation
- Organisation and seat management
Enterprise floating
A pool of concurrent seats, shared across a team.
Need more than 20? Talk to us.
- Everything in Enterprise
- Seats shared by concurrent use, not by person
- 5,000 SHD Compute Hours/seat/year, pooled
- Lowest PAYG cloud rate after allowance
- Cheaper per engineer than named seats
- A seat carries the whole module set
Education
Every module, for verified academic use.
Verification first, then the discounted seat.
- All nine modules, unlimited — the suite, not a selection
- A tenth of the commercial price
- 1,000 SHD Compute Hours/year included
- Exports marked "Academic licence — not for commercial use"
- Requires academic verification
- Re-verified annually
Prices include VAT or GST.
SHD Cloud
Cloud compute is included on paid tiers.
Free remains a useful local evaluation tier, but it does not use SHD infrastructure. Basic, Enterprise and Education accounts can send eligible mesh and solve jobs to SHD Cloud, see usage in the app and account dashboard, and continue on PAYG after the included allowance.
One SHD Compute Hour is one reserved CPU core for one hour. A 32-core job that runs for one hour uses 32 SHD Compute Hours.
| Tier | Included | Overage |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 | Not available |
| Basic | 2,500 SHD Compute Hours / year | GBP 0.40 / SHD Compute Hour |
| Enterprise | 10,000 SHD Compute Hours / year | GBP 0.30 / SHD Compute Hour |
| Enterprise floating | 5,000 SHD Compute Hours / floating seat / year, pooled | GBP 0.25 / SHD Compute Hour |
| Education | 1,000 SHD Compute Hours / year | GBP 0.25 / SHD Compute Hour |
Every tier, side by side
Two axes, and they do different jobs. Modules decide which physics runs without a scale cap. The tier decides how you are supported and how seats work. Nothing in the software is gated between the paid tiers — Basic, Enterprise and Education do exactly the same simulations.
Free is not limited on physics either. All nine modules are in it, with the available analysis types, turbulence models and boundary conditions. What Free limits is scale — how big the mesh, how many cores, whether you can restart a solve or send it to another machine — and it marks what you export.
| Feature | Free | Basic | Enterprise | Education |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physics modules | ||||
| Which modules runEvery module is in every build. Nothing is ever missing from the interface | All nine | All nine | All nine | All nine |
| Which run without a scale capThis is what a module price buys, and the only thing it buys | None — all nine capped | The ones you licence | The ones you licence | All nine |
| Unlicensed modulesA module you have not bought is a live demo, not a locked door | Run at free limits | Run at free limits | Run at free limits | — |
| Scale | ||||
| Fluids meshCells — the finite-volume unit | 250,000 cells | No limit | No limit | No limit |
| Solid and optimisation meshNodes, not elements: element order changes the node count without changing the element count, and it is nodes that carry the degrees of freedom | 100,000 nodes | No limit | No limit | No limit |
| Solver cores | 1 core | No limit | No limit | No limit |
| Concurrent jobs | 1 | No limit | No limit | No limit |
| Acoustic frequency points | 1 | No limit | No limit | No limit |
| Explicit event duration | 10 ms | No limit | No limit | No limit |
| Study design points | 5 | No limit | No limit | No limit |
| Shape optimisation iterations | 5 | No limit | No limit | No limit |
| Multiphysics coupling windows | 3 | No limit | No limit | No limit |
| Remote executionSolve on a machine that is not the one you are sitting at | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| SHD Cloud computePaid-customer remote meshing and solving on SHD-managed compute | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Included SHD Compute HoursAnnual allowance before PAYG cloud usage is charged | 0 | 2,500 SHD Compute Hours / year | 10,000 SHD Compute Hours / year | 1,000 SHD Compute Hours / year |
| Cloud overageOnly applies after the included allowance is used | Not available | GBP 0.40 / SHD Compute Hour | GBP 0.30 / SHD Compute Hour | GBP 0.25 / SHD Compute Hour |
| Restart from a resultContinue a solve rather than starting it again | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| Headless and scripted runs | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| What each module can do | ||||
| Fluids analysis typesOn OpenFOAM | All 26 | All 26 | All 26 | All 26 |
| Structural analysis typesLinear static, modal and buckling, on code_aster — plus thermal stress | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 |
| Thermal analysis typesSteady and transient conduction, on Elmer — plus electro-thermal | All 2 | All 2 | All 2 | All 2 |
| Electromagnetic analysis typesElectrostatics, DC conduction and magnetostatics, on Elmer | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 |
| Acoustics analysis typesVibro-acoustics, duct and cavity acoustics, and aeroacoustic sources | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 |
| Explicit dynamics analysis typesImpact and crash, drop test, and blast and shock | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 |
| Shape optimisation analysis typesAdjoint shape optimisation, aero/hydro design and sensitivity maps | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 |
| Studies analysis typesParameter sweeps, design of experiments and derivative-free optimisation | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 |
| Multiphysics analysis typesOne-way load mapping, wall heat-flux transfer and fluid plus rigid body | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 | All 3 |
| Turbulence modelsFluids only. RANS, LES and DES families, on every tier | All | All | All | All |
| Boundary conditions | All | All | All | All |
| Cell zonesFluids only. MRF, AMI, overset, porous media and sources | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Output | ||||
| Report exportEvery module produces one | Watermarked | Clean | Clean | Marked academic |
| Field and surface export | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Licensing | ||||
| Account required | No account at all | Included | Included | Included |
| Devices per seat | — | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Offline and air-gapped activation | Not included | Not included | Included | Not included |
| Organisation and seat management | Not included | Not included | Included | Not included |
| Floating poolSeats shared by concurrent use rather than by person — sold as Enterprise floating, minimum five. A seat carries the whole module set | Not included | Not included | Included | Not included |
| Support | ||||
| Documentation and community | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Contractual SLA, with service credits | Not included | Not included | Included | Not included |
| Onboarding | Not included | Not included | Included | Not included |
Enterprise floating is not a separate column because it is Enterprise, sold as a pool of concurrent seats rather than named ones. It carries a pooled allowance of 5,000 SHD Compute Hours per floating seat per year, with overage at GBP 0.25 / SHD Compute Hour.
Compared with not paying
The honest competitor is an open-source solver in a terminal, which is free and which a lot of this audience already uses. The case for paying is not that the solver is better — it is the same solver. OpenFOAM, code_aster and Elmer are what run underneath, and we say so.
It is that the hours spent hand-writing dictionaries, rediscovering which fields a boundary condition needs, converting a mesh between two solvers and wiring up post-processing are hours you are presumably paid for. And that the geometry, the mesh and the materials are already there when you ask the second question about the same part.
That case is stronger for some modules than others, and the prices reflect it rather than pretending otherwise. Raw OpenFOAM is genuinely painful, and simFlow charges around €8,000 a year to spare you it. PrePoMax is free, good, and does structural analysis well — so structural costs a third of what fluids does here, and what it is really selling is that it is in the same case as the flow solution.
For a commercial comparison at the top end: Ansys and COMSOL both sell a base package plus priced add-on modules, and both are quote-only in the five figures.
Questions
- What happens when a subscription ends?
- The application degrades to the free tier. It never refuses to start, never opens your existing cases read-only, and never deletes anything. Cancel the structural module and every structural case you built stays openable, at the free limits. Losing access to your own case files over a lapsed subscription would be a legal problem, not a UX one.
- What happens to a module I do not buy?
- It runs. Every module is in the binary and every analysis type in it is available, licensed or not — what an unlicensed module gives you is a scale limit rather than a locked door. So you can set up a structural study on the geometry you just ran CFD on, solve it small, and see whether it is worth paying for before you do.
- Is anything held back from the free tier?
- No physics is. Every module, every analysis type, every turbulence model and every boundary condition is in the free build. What the free tier limits is scale — 250,000 cells of fluids, 100,000 nodes of solid, a single core, one job at a time, no remote execution — and it watermarks exports.
- Does Free include SHD Cloud?
- No. Free is local-only and cannot start SHD Cloud jobs. Cloud compute is a paid-customer feature, with an included annual allowance on Basic, Enterprise and Education accounts and PAYG usage after the allowance.
- What is the difference between Basic and Enterprise?
- Seats and support, not capability. Enterprise adds support under a published service level agreement — same-working-day first response with service credits if we miss — plus onboarding, offline and air-gapped activation, and organisation and seat management. It is a flat addition per seat, the same whether you licence one module or all of them, because the cost of answering a ticket does not scale with how much physics you bought.
- Is there feature gating inside a module?
- No. A module is a family of physics and owning it means owning all of it — every analysis type, every solver, every model. The only things a price changes are scale, output and support. That rule is why the free tier can afford to run everything.
- When is the suite worth it?
- When you want three or more modules, roughly. The suite is one line item that replaces the platform line and every module line, and it covers all nine modules at a lower total than buying the full catalogue à la carte. The page tells you when your selection has passed it.
- How do floating seats work?
- A pool of concurrent seats shared across a team rather than assigned to named people. A seat carries the whole module set the organisation licensed, so nobody checks out a seat and finds it missing the physics they came for. Cheaper per engineer than named seats if your engineers work in bursts, and the portal shows who currently holds one.
- Can I use it offline?
- Yes. The licence is verified from a signed file the application holds, so it keeps working without a network for a 14-day grace period, and re-validates whenever it next has one. Enterprise adds fully offline activation for air-gapped machines.
- Do you take purchase orders?
- For Enterprise, yes — talk to us. Self-serve checkout takes cards and the usual wallets through Paddle.