Hawk Ridge Systems Pricing, Subscription Support Tiers & CAMWorks/Simulation Bundle Audit

01What a bundled quote from a SOLIDWORKS VAR typically includes

Hawk Ridge Systems is one of the regional resellers that sell SOLIDWORKS and related CAD, CAM and simulation products. Engineer Aid is independent of it and of every VAR. This page is a buyer's audit for bundled quotes sold through a VAR, written for the quote structure Hawk Ridge customers commonly describe.

A bundled renewal often combines five kinds of lines. CAD seats at Standard, Professional or Premium tier. Analysis add-ons, such as SOLIDWORKS Simulation or Flow Simulation, sold per seat or as floating licenses. CAM licenses, for example CAMWorks, which is a separate product sold alongside SOLIDWORKS by several resellers. Support plans above the standard subscription support, sometimes with faster response times, named contacts or training credits. Services, such as implementation days or post-processor work for CAM.

Bundles are convenient, and a bundle discount can be real. The audit question is whether every component is used by enough people to justify its share. A bundle price that is 10% below the sum of its parts is not a saving if 30% of the parts sit idle.

Ask for the bundle broken out: every product, its seat count, its unit price before and after the bundle discount, and its term dates. If the reseller can only quote the bundle as one figure, ask what the price would be with one component removed. That one answer tells you the real cost of each part.

02How to judge a paid support tier

Standard SOLIDWORKS subscription or maintenance already includes access to software updates and reseller technical support. A higher tier adds service on top. Before renewing one, measure what you used last year. Ask the reseller for your ticket history: number of cases, average time to first response, and how many were closed without escalation. Then divide the tier's price by the tickets. Also ask whether the tier is priced per seat or per account; a per-seat tier grows every time you add a license, even if your ticket volume stays flat, so a team that doubles its seats can double its support spend without needing any more help.

If a team logged six tickets last year, a support tier priced at several thousand dollars works out to hundreds of dollars per ticket. That can still be worth it for a team that cannot afford downtime, but it should be a deliberate choice.

03Red flags to raise as questions

• Who uses Premium features? Premium adds tools such as routing and higher analysis capability. Ask which named users have opened those tools in the past six months. Buyers frequently find Premium assigned by default to every new hire.
• Is the simulation add-on duplicating what Premium already includes? Ask the reseller to list, for each user, which analysis features come from the Premium seat and which from the add-on.
• Are CAM seats matched to machinists or programmers who post code? A CAM seat for a design engineer who never posts toolpaths is a common leftover from a pilot.
• Could analysis or CAM seats float? A floating license, shared through the SolidNetWork License (SNL) server, carries about a 24% premium per seat but serves several occasional users.
• Does dropping one bundle part change the others' prices? Get it in writing. If removing a support tier raises the CAD seat price, the bundle discount was funding the tier.
• Do post-processor or training services renew automatically? Service lines should be one-off unless you asked for a recurring plan.

04Worked example: 12 Premium seats re-tiered

A machinery maker has 12 SOLIDWORKS Premium term seats at the $5,100 benchmark: 12 x $5,100 = $61,200 a year. Feature-use logs show only 4 engineers use routing or the higher analysis features. The other 8 model parts and make drawings.

Step 1, re-tier. Keep 4 Premium seats: 4 x $5,100 = $20,400. Move 8 to Professional: 8 x $3,800 = $30,400. New total $50,800. Saving: $61,200 - $50,800 = $10,400 a year, or 17%.

Step 2, CAM seats. The bundle also contains 3 CAM seats. Use an illustrative $4,000 per seat per year here, not a quoted price; replace it with the figure on your quote. Two programmers post code; the third seat belongs to a design engineer who tried it once. Removing it saves $4,000.

Step 3, support tier. The enhanced support line in this example is $9,000 a year. Last year the team logged 14 tickets, so each cost $9,000 / 14 = $643. The team decides standard support is enough and drops the tier.

Total change: $10,400 + $4,000 + $9,000 = $23,400 a year. The quoted bundle was $61,200 + $12,000 + $9,000 = $82,200; the audited figure is $50,800 + $8,000 = $58,800 with no enhanced tier, a 28.5% reduction.

Always recompute the total from the lines yourself. Bundle totals on a quote can include rounding, prorated co-term charges or a discount applied to only some lines, and the only way to see that is to add the lines and compare.

05Testing a floating pool for analysis and CAM

Floating licenses suit tools that many people use occasionally. The test is peak concurrency: the highest number of seats in use at the same moment. Your SolidNetWork License server records checkouts in its logs, so you can measure this rather than guess.

A well-sized pool runs at 72% to 85% peak concurrency, which usually means 2.4 to 3.2 engineers per floating seat. A pool running below 35% at peak has more seats than it needs. Apply the 24% floating premium to see the trade-off. If six engineers each run analysis a few hours a week, six named Premium seats cost 6 x $5,100 = $30,600. A pool of three floating Premium seats at $5,100 x 1.24 = $6,324 each costs $18,972, a saving of $11,628, provided the logs show no more than three users at once.

Do not convert on a guess. Ask for at least 90 days of checkout logs, look at month-end and release weeks, and check how many denials (a user asking for a seat when none was free) occurred.

06Step-by-step bundle and support audit

1. Ask for the bundle itemized by product, seat count, unit price, discount and term dates.
2. Export 90 days of license checkout logs and feature-use data for Premium, analysis and CAM.
3. List every user with their tier and the features they used. Mark Premium seats used only for modeling.
4. Request your support ticket history and compute cost per ticket for any paid tier.
5. Ask the price of the bundle with each component removed in turn.
6. Model floating seats for occasional users from the peak concurrency in the logs.
7. Collect one comparable written quote from another SOLIDWORKS reseller; the three-VAR comparison lists what to keep identical.
8. Check the final order form: tier counts, cap on next year's uplift, and that dropped services are gone.

Run the seat mix through the license audit calculator before the call so the numbers in front of you are your own.

07Run the numbers: cAD, PLM and simulation software license audit calculator

The same benchmarks as this sheet, with your inputs. Share link and printable brief open the full calculator page.