Hourly CAE compute brokerage for independent engineers

A freelance simulation engineer gets a project that requires LS-DYNA or Fluent for two weeks. They don't have a license, can't justify a $50k annual seat, and their client won't fund it. This is the moment nobody has solved cleanly: the user literally said 'I would like to have the possibility to buy just hours of calculus sometimes on the cloud.'

The gap persists because the CAE vendors themselves have every incentive to push annual enterprise contracts — that's where their revenue is. Hourly or burst access cannibalizes their core pricing model. They have no structural reason to build it well, and their enterprise sales teams would actively resist it. The user and the buyer are the same person here — the independent engineer — who has no budget approval process to escalate through, so complaints die in forums rather than procurement meetings.

What exists falls short in a specific way: cloud HPC offerings from the major vendors require you to already hold a license — you're renting compute, not renting the solver. You still need to own or lease the software license separately. That's the precise gap: no one sells solver-hours to people who own neither the software nor a corporate contract.

This is a business because the need recurs every time a freelancer or small firm wins a project that requires a tool they don't own. The cost of not having this is either losing the project, asking the client to buy a license (which kills deals), or piracy. Each of those outcomes is painful and concrete. The buyer base grows as more engineers go independent and as per-project simulation work becomes more common in hardware startups.

What to build

Build a web-based job submission portal where engineers upload a model file, select a solver (starting with one — LS-DYNA or Fluent), pay per CPU-hour, and receive results files — by negotiating a reseller or burst-license agreement with a CAE vendor or a licensed HPC partner who already holds floating licenses.

Where to start

Start with a single solver popular in crash/impact (LS-DYNA) where freelance demand is high in automotive supply chain consulting and where floating license holders at HPC centers already exist and sometimes have underutilized capacity they'd trade for margin.

The hard part

The hardest thing is getting a solver vendor or licensed HPC reseller to structure a contract that allows per-hour resale without requiring the end user to hold their own license — most vendor agreements explicitly prohibit this, so the legal and commercial negotiation is the real blocker before a single line of code.

How it makes money

Charge per CPU-hour at a markup over cost (e.g., 30-50%), with a small job setup fee to cover file validation; no subscription required.