Cresset publishes no commercial price for Flare. The product pages offer an evaluation, a demo or a discussion, the academic pages describe student and teaching licenses you apply for, and the free Flare Visualizer has a download button. What a company pays for Flare Designer, Flare Pro+ or Flare FEP is not written anywhere Cresset controls.
The search results do not fill the gap either. One directory page lists a product called Flare from $49.99 a month, but it never names Cresset and describes nothing about molecular design, so do not carry that figure into a budget. The numbers that do exist are in the US federal award record: seven awards to Cresset Biomolecular Discovery or naming a Cresset product, all at the NIH, from 2015 to 2026.
The short answer
A five user Flare Designer group license cost $15,575 for one year at NCATS in 2021, which is about $3,115 per user per year. Earlier NIDA licenses ran $26,000 to $31,000 a year, and a three year license came to $82,823.54, about $27,600 a year. At the top end, a 2025 bundle of Flare FEP on up to 10 GPUs, Flare Pro+ and five user groups of Flare Designer and Spark cost $162,948.39 for one year. These are government terms, so read them as a floor for a commercial quote rather than a forecast.
Every Cresset award in the public record
All seven are below, oldest first, with the description each award carries. Where the description does not name a product we have not guessed one.
| Term | Buyer | How the award describes it | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 2015 to Sep 2016 | NIH, NIDA | No description beyond a contract code | $30,785 |
| May 2016 to Sep 2017 | NIH, NIDA | Cresset Biomolecular Discovery license | $25,999 |
| Sep 2017 to Sep 2018 | NIH, NIDA | Cresset Biomolecular Discovery license | $26,393 |
| Feb 2019 to Feb 2022 | NIH, for NCATS | Software license, three year term | $82,823.54 |
| Mar 2021 to Mar 2022 | NIH, NCATS | Flare Designer 5 user group license, one year | $15,575 |
| Mar 2022 to Mar 2023 | NIH, NIDA | Cresset Biomolecular Discovery license | $45,585 |
| Sep 2025 to Sep 2026 | NIH, NCATS, through a reseller | Flare FEP up to 10 GPU license with Cresset Engine Broker, Flare Pro+, and Flare Designer, Spark in Flare and Engine Broker as 5 user group licenses, customer hosted, with warranty and service | $162,948.39 |
The seven add up to about $390,000. That is small next to the $2m to $3.6m trails that MOE, OpenEye or Simulations Plus leave in the same record, and it matches Cresset's position as a specialist vendor that sells to discovery chemistry groups rather than to whole agencies.
What does Flare Designer cost per user?
About $3,115 a year on the one award that states both a product and a seat count. NCATS bought a Flare Designer five user group license for the year from March 30, 2021 to March 29, 2022 at $15,575. Flare Designer is the tier medicinal chemists use for ligand and structure based design without running heavy simulation, so it is the closest public figure to what a small biotech chemistry team would buy first.
The group structure matters. Cresset sells group licenses in fixed blocks, and a five user group priced as one line is not the same as five named seats priced one at a time. If a quote gives you a per seat figure, ask what the five user group price would be, because the NCATS award shows the block exists and what it cost.
One NIDA license, renewed every September 27
The first three NIDA awards all end on September 27: 2016, 2017 and 2018. That shared anniversary marks them as one continuing license rather than three separate purchases, and the prices read as a renewal series. The first year was $30,785, the second $25,999, down 15.5 percent, and the third $26,393, up 1.5 percent. The award text does not say why the second year fell, but a first year that includes setup, training or an extra module is the usual explanation, and it is a question worth asking of any Cresset quote whose first year is higher than the renewals.
The three year license that followed, February 2019 to February 2022, cost $82,823.54, or about $27,600 a year. That is within 5 percent of the 2017 renewal, so a multi year term here bought price stability rather than a visible discount.
Why did the next award nearly triple?
The NIDA award for March 2022 to March 2023 came to $45,585, and its term ends on March 29, the same anniversary as the NCATS Flare Designer group license, which was due to expire eighteen days after it began. If it is the same agreement carried over, the scope grew, because nearly three times the money does not come from a renewal uplift. The record does not list the products, so we cannot say which modules were added. The lesson for a buyer is the familiar one: when a Cresset renewal moves by a multiple, ask for the line items before you compare it with last year.
What does Flare FEP cost?
The only public figure is a bundle. In September 2025 NCATS signed $162,948.39 for one year covering a Flare FEP license for up to 10 GPUs with the Cresset Engine Broker, a Flare Pro+ license, and five user group licenses of Flare Designer and Spark in the Flare interface, all customer hosted, with warranty and service. Free energy perturbation is the expensive part of any modeling stack because it is priced by compute, here as a GPU count.
Two details in that award change how you budget. First, it went through a reseller, TVAR Solutions, not to Cresset directly, so reseller margin and terms sit inside the figure. If your company routes software through a formal procurement software workflow, a reseller quote and a direct quote for the same bundle are both legitimate and will not match. Second, customer hosted means the GPUs are yours. The license covers the right to run FEP on up to ten of them, not the hardware or cloud time underneath, which is a separate and often larger line.
Is Cresset Flare free for academics?
Parts of it. Flare Visualizer is a free download for viewing and analysis. Cresset also offers student licenses for anyone enrolled on a defined degree course working wholly for academic purposes, and teaching licenses, both by application. Academic research groups get flexible licensing terms on request. None of this applies to a company, and none of the federal figures above came off the academic sheet.
What moves a Flare quote
- Tier. Flare Designer for design work, Flare Pro+ for the full method set, Flare FEP for binding free energy. The 2025 award lists all three on separate lines, which is how a quote should read.
- Group size. Five user group licenses appear twice in the record. Ask for the block price as well as the per seat price.
- GPU count for FEP. Up to 10 GPUs is the only size in the public record. A smaller GPU allowance should cost less, and the hardware is extra either way.
- Spark. Cresset's scaffold hopping tool appears inside the Flare interface on the 2025 award. Check whether your quote includes it or prices it separately.
- Direct or reseller. Government buyers used both, and the terms differ.
Where Flare fits in an antibacterial project
Flare is strong where you have a target structure and a series worth optimizing: electrostatic field comparisons, 3D SAR, docking, and FEP for ranking close analogs. Cresset lists F2G, an antifungal company, among the customers quoted on its site, so the anti-infective use is real. For a team that already knows its actives, the license is money well spent.
What Flare does not answer is the question most antibacterial programs get stuck on first: whether a compound inhibits the organism at all, and at what concentration. A binding affinity prediction against an enzyme says nothing about getting through a Gram-negative outer membrane or surviving efflux, which is where most whole cell activity is lost. That is a potency question, and it is cheaper to answer before any FEP run.
Our MIC prediction software returns a predicted MIC band per strain for a pasted structure, with the mechanism class and the closest published analogs. The Lab plan is $149 a month, or $1,788 a year, so the 2021 five user Flare Designer license would cover about 8.7 years of it. Discovery, at $499 a month, adds the antibacterial screening API so predictions can land next to each compound in the same pipeline that feeds Flare.
Compare it with the rest of the shortlist
Flare usually sits on a shortlist next to MOE and OpenEye, and structural chemists often run it beside the Cambridge Structural Database, whose CSD license price the government record puts at $15,000 to $15,727 a year for a campus. The MOE software price page covers per token rates of roughly $7,000 to $11,000 a year, and the drug discovery software cost overview sets every suite we have priced side by side.