Nobody in simulation software publishes a price. We checked.

If you have tried to find out what simulation software costs, you already know the answer to this article. We checked anyway, because “everyone quote gates” is the sort of thing people repeat without anyone having looked.

They do. Almost without exception.

What we did

We went to each product’s own website and looked for a number. Not a range, not a starting price behind a form, not a figure in an analyst report: a price, published by the company that sells the product, visible without giving them your email address.

We are still working through the full set. Of the products we have assessed so far, two publish a price, and they arrive there differently: one is free, so its price is public in the only way a free product’s can be, and one publishes actual figures for a paid product. The standing index carries the current count, scored and recomputed on every build, and supersedes the numbers in this piece as the set grows.

What we found

AnyLogic publishes an editions page describing three editions, and directs commercial buyers to a sales contact. No figure. Training is separately chargeable per person, which is itself only visible on third party listings.

Simul8 publishes no price and requires a quote request. Third party listings carry figures, and they disagree with each other by a factor that matters.

Bizagi Modeler is free, and says so plainly. That counts, and it is the only clean answer we have found so far. The automation platform it leads into is another matter and is not priced publicly either.

The pattern holds beyond the products we have assessed. Across the discrete event tools and the enterprise process platforms alike, the quote request is the industry norm rather than an exception at the top end.

Why the industry works this way

There are honest reasons and there are less honest ones. Separate them.

The honest one is that these products genuinely are sold in configurations. Named user against floating, perpetual against subscription, which libraries, how many cores, whether training and support renewal are bundled. A single number would be wrong for most buyers and the vendor would spend its life explaining exceptions.

The less honest one is that a quote request is a lead, and a price is not. Once you have asked, you are in a pipeline, and the number you are eventually given can be tuned to what your organization looks like it can pay. That is not a conspiracy, it is just how enterprise sales works, and it works better for the seller than for you.

What it costs you

Three things, and the third is the expensive one.

You cannot build a shortlist. Comparing five products on capability is work you can do in an afternoon. Comparing them on cost requires five sales conversations, each of which takes weeks and each of which puts you in a funnel. Most people do not do this. They talk to two, and the shortlist is decided by who returned the call.

You cannot budget before you commit. Finance wants a number in the plan. Without one you either guess, which makes you wrong later, or you start a procurement process for something you have not decided to buy.

You cannot walk away cheaply. By the time you know the price, you have spent weeks with the vendor, sat through a demo, possibly built a pilot model. That investment is exactly what the process is designed to accumulate before the number appears. Deciding it is too expensive at that point feels like waste, and people talk themselves past prices they should have refused.

What to do about it

Ask for the price in the first message. Not after the demo. If a vendor will not indicate a range before a discovery call, that tells you something about how the rest of the relationship will go.

Ask what is not in the number. Training, support renewal, additional libraries, cloud runs, and what happens to your models if you stop paying. The last one matters most and is asked least.

Use the free editions to shortlist on capability first, so cost is the last variable rather than the first. But read the license: at least one free edition in this category permits teaching and self education only, and prohibits commercial use outright, which makes it useless for evaluating the work you actually intend to do.

Treat a published price as a data point about the company, not only about the cost. A vendor willing to put a number on its own website is telling you it expects to win on the product.

Our position

We will keep this updated as we assess more products, and we will say plainly which ones publish and which do not.

Where a third party figure circulates, we will name who reported it, link them, and say we have not confirmed it. We will not print an unconfirmed number as though it were a price, because the absence of a published price is the verifiable fact here, and it is the one that actually affects a buyer.