Hacker News Reader

SOLIDWORKS comes to mind. It's roughly $5,000 a seat per year. CATIA is also from the same company (3DS) and is $8,000/yr.

There's also Photoshop, Resolume, and TouchDesigner, which are expensive, but nowhere near "the most".

View on HN

As CAD tools go SW is on the lower end of the scale. Though the price increases have been feeling pretty abusive in the recent years.

Creo has come down relative to it's ProE days and is priced similarly to SW(?), and I believe NX still starts at double to triple per seat.

ANSYS (specifically Fluent) and similar simulation tools have eyewatering per-seat prices, though I'm a little out of date to know if they're less horrible about multicore licences etc.

Ansys can also be very expensive. Although it also seems very variable. I've heard of smaller shops paying between $7k and $30k/year.

I've seen fully loaded Ansys go for over $30k but yearly maintenance would have been maybe $15k, however this was over 10 years ago.

... And let's not forget the the $30k workstation needed to run it too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com