CAE license cost allocator for project-based billing

An engineering manager at a 20-person consultancy needs to bill simulation software costs back to specific client projects, but their CAE licenses are purchased as annual lump sums with no usage tracking per project or per engineer. At the end of the month they either eat the cost as overhead or guess at an allocation. Users noted that 'prices are creeping up and the license term isn't as flexible as once was' and that 'every tool requires a license, making it very expensive' — but the downstream problem is that nobody can see whether that expensive license is being used productively or sitting idle.

Vendors have no incentive to build this because it would make underutilization visible and give customers ammunition to downgrade their contract. The buyer (finance, operations) and the user (engineer) are different people — finance signed the contract and doesn't track daily usage, engineers run jobs but don't think about cost allocation. Nobody owns the gap.

What teams actually do today: they run a spreadsheet where engineers manually log hours against projects, then multiply by a rough $/hour estimate for the software. This is inaccurate, inconsistent, and nobody does it reliably. There's no automated connection between 'this engineer ran a job at 2pm for 3 hours' and 'this job should be charged to Project X.'

This is a business because it recurs every billing cycle. The inaccuracy costs real money: undercharging clients for simulation costs means margin leakage on every project, and not knowing which projects are simulation-heavy makes it impossible to price future work accurately. As CAE license costs climb, the pressure to recover those costs precisely grows.

What to build

Build a Windows service that reads job submission logs from common CAE solvers (starting with Ansys and Altair), matches job timestamps to a project code the engineer tags at submission, and generates a monthly cost allocation report exportable to CSV showing license cost per project based on actual compute time consumed.

Where to start

Start with Ansys Mechanical users at consultancies who already use a project management tool like Jira or Monday, where project codes already exist and can be pulled in to make tagging a one-click dropdown rather than a freetext field.

The hard part

Getting engineers to tag jobs with a project code at submission requires changing their workflow, and any friction here kills data quality — the first hard trade-off is whether to intercept the solver launch (reliable but requires IT access) or ask for manual tagging after the fact (low friction but incomplete).

How it makes money

Per-seat annual subscription charged to the engineering operations or finance team (e.g., $40-60/engineer/month), with pricing anchored to the cost recovery it enables rather than the headcount.