In June 2026, we're making a move we've considered (and discussed with customers) for many months: We're offering a monthly license subscription alternative, in addition to our customary annual license subscriptions, for each version of Analytic Solver for Excel, including plug-in large-scale Solver Engines used with Analytic Solver. We're doing this to help align our license terms and prices with project-based use of Analytic Solver.
Most customers start using Analytic Solver to address a specific business problem, usually with an optimization model or a simulation / risk analysis model. That business problem may arise one-time, or "once in a great while" (for example, where to locate a new manufacturing plant). Or the problem may arise repeatedly but on an irregular basis -- or it may arise regularly, every month or every week, calling for re-solves of the model with new data.
Our annual license subscriptions work well for the last two cases, where the need to run a given model arises regularly (every month or week), or irregularly but repeatedly. We have many customers doing exactly this. But some customers use our software to tackle one-time or "once in a great while" problems.
There are often multiple problems in the same company or business unit, where our software can be used for a real payoff. But the timing of these projects may or may not align with the time of renewal of an annual subscription. If your last intensive use of our software concluded, even very successfully, some months ago, you might find it harder to justify an annual renewal at that moment.
We've considered various subscription and pricing options to deal with this common situation, including Analytic Solver version downgrades and upgrades (which are available, and can be attractive), fees based on usage such as "Solves" (a possible future option), and more. But after much discussion internally and with customers, we've found that the simplest, most familiar and readily understood option is monthly license subscriptions and pricing.
Since we normally incur the same costs in sales, up-front technical support, and customer success, whether our software is used for a few months or many months at a time, we've settled on a very simple rule, that we hope will pay off for everyone: Our monthly subscription prices are 15% of the annual subscription price. This is more "per month" than some other SaaS products, but we believe it will align well with our customers' realization of value.
What does this mean for you? That one consistent 15% figure makes it easy to calculate or estimate: If you are re-running your model regularly for most of an annual period, you're (significantly) better off with an annual subscription. If your project lasts 3, 4 or 5 months (and you're sure it will end by that time), you're better off with a monthly subscription. Between 6 and 7 months, the cost of a monthly subscription reaches 6 * 15% = 90% and 7 * 15% = 105% of an annual subscription -- so if your usage is likely to come close to this time frame -- whether via one project or more than one -- you're better off with an annual subscription. (You can see that an annual subscription is 44% cheaper than a monthly subscription kept for 12 months.)
You can switch from a monthly to an annual subscription at any time (getting credit for a partially used month), and from an annual to a monthly subscription at any time -- though this normally makes sense at the time of an annual renewal, not before.
There are further benefits of an annual subscription -- continuous access to the software, ongoing technical support, the ability to revisit models at any time, and to enhance your own modeling skills -- so we encourage you to weigh these factors. Our most successful customers achieve the highest ROIs (highest payoffs, lowest costs) with their annual subscriptions.
Important: A monthly subscription is only available with a credit card on file, and with acceptance of our Standard Terms and Conditions. If your company requires use of a P.O. with any custom terms or with Net 30 billing, or chooses to buy through a software reseller such as SHI, only annual subscriptions are available. Also: Unlike our practice for annual subscriptions, monthly subscriptions renew automatically each month, though you can cancel a monthly subscription at the end of any month, either by contacting us, or by visiting the unique Billing Portal link that we send you when you subscribe.
If you have questions about this new alternative, please do contact us. We've worked hard to create a new subscription option that can work for you and for us (while keeping all our existing options). We look forward to working with you!
One more note: As part of this move, we are keeping all our annual subscription prices unchanged. To be candid, we're feeling the same inflationary pressures as everyone else, and we can't promise that our prices (annual or monthly) will stay the same over longer time periods. But to be fair and to give time for everyone (including us!) to adjust to this new monthly subscription option, our annual prices are staying the same (as they have been, for corporate customers, since early 2022!).