We just got our bill for Fluent for next year. And it contains a huge price increase. I waited for version 6 for three years and now when it comes out missing all kinds of features I was told would be in it (heat transfer with Eulerian 2 phase, general deforming mesh, etc.) and they hit me up with a price increase. Has this happened to anybody else? Do you think the "world leader in CFD" crap is getting taken a bit too seriously by them?

I heard that STAR-CD is offering competitive upgrade pricing for Fluent users. Does anybody else know about this?

Well,

to many Fluent 6 does appear a bit disappointing - as you mentioned it still doesn't replace Fluent 4.5 etc. I haven't used it much yet, but it doesn't appear to be the major upgrade that it was sold as. But this may depend on what features you use - certainly the Eulerian stuff is a bit of a mystery as to why its not doing heat transfer etc.

On pricing - I have no idea.

One wonders whether a gnu CFD package might one day emerge - certainly, with PCs and multiprocesor computers being so cheap and soon to be the norm in industry (if not already), then the cost of multi-license software such as Fluent is quite high.

If you need 20+ licenses and solve complex models, there could be an argument for re-developing the inhouse software team! The saving on say Fluent, CFX etc for such cases is about 20x25,000 $US or about 0.5 million - enough for several inhouse code developers for sure! For large runs 50+ processors the licensing costs are even higher....

Who knows!?

Greg