Molecular modelling licence costs, from the public record

MOE software price: what Chemical Computing Group charges for a Molecular Operating Environment license

Chemical Computing Group publishes no price. US federal procurement records are public, so here is what agencies actually paid, per token and per year, alongside a narrower antibacterial read-out you can price in one line.

From $149 a month

60 federal awards read directly
Per token, not per guess
No number we cannot source

The narrow answer, before you price the wide licence

of 3 left

Compound, by name or SMILES

Strain panel

S. aureus (MRSA) E. coli K. pneumoniae (CRE) A. baumannii P. aeruginosa E. faecium (VRE)

Read-out

Include closest published analogs

No account needed. 3 screens per session.

What comes back

Rows: One per strain in the panel
Per row: MIC band, S I R call, mechanism
Support: Confidence 1 to 4 and analogs
Typical run: About ten seconds

Sample output Ciprofloxacin Fluoroquinolone

Worked example, replaced when you run

Strain	MIC (µg/mL)	Call	Resistance risk
S. aureus (MRSA)	0.5->32	R Resistant	target mutation, grlA and gyrA Fluoroquinolone resistance is widespread in methicillin resistant lineages.
E. coli	<=0.015-0.06	S Susceptible	efflux, AcrAB-TolC in resistant isolates Potent against wild type; qnr carriage and gyrA changes shift the band sharply.
K. pneumoniae (CRE)	0.5->64	R Resistant	gyrA mutation with plasmid qnr Carbapenemase producing isolates almost always carry quinolone resistance too.
A. baumannii	8->64	R Resistant	efflux, AdeABC Constitutive efflux plus target changes leave little room at achievable exposure.
P. aeruginosa	0.25-2	I Intermediate	efflux, MexAB-OprM Borderline: active on many isolates, lost quickly once efflux is derepressed.
E. faecium (VRE)	4->32	R Resistant	target mutation, parC Enterococci are intrinsically poor fluoroquinolone targets.

Why

Ciprofloxacin is a well characterised fluoroquinolone, so the Gram-negative bands are strongly supported by published activity data. The deciding factor across this panel is not target affinity but exposure: efflux in P. aeruginosa and A. baumannii, and acquired target mutation everywhere resistance is already common. Against a modern ESKAPE panel it reads as a Gram-negative agent with two reliable losses.

Closest published analogs

Levofloxacin Broadly similar Gram-negative bands, better Gram-positive coverage
Delafloxacin Retains activity against many ciprofloxacin resistant staphylococci

Strain	MIC (µg/mL)	Call	Resistance risk	Conf.

Why

Closest published analogs

Want the rest of your series? Batch runs are on the paid tiers. screen left in this session. This session is used up.

Computational prediction from published literature. Research use only, not a lab measurement and not clinical guidance.

The short answer

Roughly $7,250 to $11,070 per token per year, on the public record

Chemical Computing Group does not publish a price for MOE, and it never has. What it cannot withhold is what US federal agencies paid for it, because those awards are public. Sixty contract awards to Chemical Computing Group appear in the federal spending record between 2007 and 2026, worth about $2.2 million in total, and many of them name the exact number of licence tokens bought.

Divide those awards by their token counts and a consistent band appears: annual MOE licences run somewhere between about $7,250 and $11,070 per token per year. Three tokens is the most common purchase in the record and has repeatedly landed at $28,750 for the year. A single small renewal can be $8,500, while the largest award, six tokens on a multi year Department of Defense contract, is $167,630.

Two honest caveats before you use those numbers. These are government awards under the MOE-GOV-A catalogue code, and the record also shows a separate MOE-IND-A industrial code, so a commercial biotech should read this table as a floor rather than a forecast. And a licence bought "without scientific support", which several NIH awards specify, is a materially cheaper and materially different product from one bought with it.

At a glance

Published price: None, Chemical Computing Group quotes on request
Public evidence: 60 US federal awards, 2007 to 2026, about $2.2m total
Government rate: Roughly $7,000 to $11,000 per token a year
Priced here: $149 to $1,490 a month, on the page, no quote cycle

What agencies actually paid

MOE license cost per token, from US federal award records

Only awards whose own contract description names a token count and calls the licence annual are included, so the last column is a real yearly rate rather than an average smeared across option years. Amounts are the award value as recorded. Nothing here is estimated.

Award start	Agency	Tokens	Award amount	Per token, per year
Jan 2024	Environmental Protection Agency	5	$55,350	$11,070
Dec 2021	Environmental Protection Agency	4	$40,400	$10,100
Nov 2020	Environmental Protection Agency	3	$29,650	$9,883
Dec 2019	Environmental Protection Agency	3	$28,750	$9,583
Sep 2019	Department of Agriculture	3	$28,750	$9,583
Feb 2021	Environmental Protection Agency	3	$23,250	$7,750
May 2014	Environmental Protection Agency	2	$16,700	$8,350
Jun 2013	Environmental Protection Agency	2	$16,400	$8,200
Oct 2012	Environmental Protection Agency	2	$14,500	$7,250

Source: public US federal contract awards to Chemical Computing Group ULC. Awards without a stated token count, and awards covering multiple option years, are discussed below rather than averaged into this table.

The multi year awards tell a different story

Two awards in the record buy time as well as tokens, and both come out cheaper per year. A Department of Defense contract for six tokens runs from September 2022 to September 2026 at $167,630, which works out near $41,900 a year, or roughly $6,985 per token. A Department of Agriculture award from September 2025 covers three tokens as a base year plus four option years at $62,800. If every option is exercised that is about $12,560 a year for three tokens, well under half the single year rate.

The lesson is not that anyone gets MOE for $4,000 a token. It is that term length is negotiable and it moves the annual number more than almost anything else on the quote. If you know you will still be modelling in three years, say so before the first renewal rather than after it.

What renewals do

The same licence, repriced three years running

Most pricing questions in this category are impossible to answer because no two purchases are comparable. There is one exception in the public record. The same National Institutes of Health line item for an annual MOE licence without scientific support was renewed in three consecutive calendar years, and the amount is recorded each time.

That gives a rare clean read on escalation: about 4.4 percent, then about 2.9 percent. If your own renewal quote arrives with a double digit increase and no change in tokens or modules, this is the comparison to put in the email.

NIH annual renewal, same line item

2023	$14,650	Baseline year in the public record
2024	$15,300	Up 4.4 percent on the year before
2025	$15,750	Up 2.9 percent on the year before

What moves your number

Four things decide where a Molecular Operating Environment quote lands

01

How many tokens, not how many people

MOE is licensed in concurrent tokens rather than named users. A token is consumed while a session is open and released when it closes, so a group of eight chemists who never all model at once can run on three or four tokens. Sizing the token pool honestly is the single largest lever on the number, and it is the one most buyers get wrong in the first year by buying seats they do not use simultaneously.

02

Whether scientific support is inside the price

Several of the NIH awards specify a licence "without scientific support" and they sit far below the awards that do not carry that qualifier. Support in this category means access to CCG scientists for method questions, not a helpdesk, and it is priced accordingly. Strip it out and the number drops a long way, but so does the reason many groups buy a full environment instead of assembling open tools.

03

Government, academic or industrial

The award descriptions use distinct catalogue codes, MOE-GOV-A for the government annual licence and MOE-IND-A for the industrial one. That confirms what buyers usually suspect: a commercial biotech is not quoted from the same sheet as a federal lab, and a university is quoted from a third. Figures in this table are what agencies paid, so treat them as a floor for commercial work rather than a prediction of your own quote.

04

Term length and how many option years

A one year licence and a five year award with four option years look nothing alike on paper even when the annual rate is identical. One 2025 award to the Department of Agriculture covers three tokens as a base year plus four option years at $62,800 in total, which is a far lower annual rate than any single year award in the table. Longer commitments get cheaper per year, as they do everywhere.

Honest comparison

When MOE is worth every dollar, and when it is a wide purchase for a narrow job

Buy MOE when

You need docking, molecular dynamics, homology modelling and QSAR in one environment rather than four.
Structure based work is central: you have protein structures and you are designing against them.
Peptides and biologics sit alongside small molecules in the same programme.
Somebody on the team models for a living and will keep the licence busy all year.
You want SVL scripting so in house methods can live inside the same environment.

Price a narrower tool when

The recurring question is which compounds deserve plate time against which organisms.
There is no protein structure for half the targets you care about, which is normal in AMR.
Nobody on the team models full time, so a token would sit idle most of the year.
The budget is a grant line that cannot absorb a five figure annual commitment.
You need an answer this week, not after a quote cycle and a purchase order.

This site is not a MOE replacement and it would be dishonest to pitch it as one. MOE does a dozen things we do not attempt. What it does not do is hand you an antibacterial answer without a model: predicting whether a compound will inhibit Acinetobacter baumannii in MOE still means building and validating something first, on data most AMR groups do not have. That gap is what this engine fills. Paste a structure or a peptide sequence, and a predicted MIC band comes back for each organism in a 6 strain panel, with an S, I or R call, the resistance mechanism expected to limit it, and a confidence level on every row.

If you are shortlisting suites rather than deciding between a suite and a narrow tool, the two other vendors most often quoted alongside MOE are broken down the same way, in Schrodinger software cost and StarDrop pricing. The category wide view, including which vendors publish anything at all, is on drug discovery software cost. If the modelling question behind the purchase is really a model building question, read QSAR software first, because MOE is one of the packages compared there.

Who this page is for

Six moments when the MOE price matters

You are writing a budget line

Put a defensible number in the grant or the board deck instead of waiting three weeks for a quote to arrive.

You are renewing

Check the escalation you are being asked to absorb against what the public record shows on comparable renewals.

You are sizing a token pool

Work out whether the concurrency you actually need is three tokens or six before the vendor sizes it for you.

You only need the antibacterial answer

If the modelling question is really which compounds are worth a plate against which pathogens, a full environment is a wide purchase for a narrow job.

You are comparing suites

Read this next to the Schrodinger and StarDrop breakdowns so the shortlist is priced on the same basis.

You are justifying a decision

Cite award numbers rather than a forum estimate when somebody asks where the figure came from.

Questions people ask before buying

MOE software price, answered plainly

How much does MOE software cost?

Chemical Computing Group publishes no price, but US federal award records show what agencies paid. Annual MOE licences that name a token count cluster between roughly $7,250 and $11,070 per token per year, with three token awards commonly landing near $28,750. Total awards in the public record run from about $8,500 for a small renewal to $167,630 for a six token multi year contract.

Does Chemical Computing Group publish MOE pricing?

No. The company website lists MOE, MOEsaic and PSILO with a trial request on each product, and carries no pricing page, no price list and no published range. Every commercial number for MOE therefore comes either from a quote you request directly or from public procurement records, which is why this page is built on the second of those.

What is a MOE token and how many do I need?

A token is a concurrent use licence. It is held while a MOE session runs and released when the session closes, so the pool has to cover peak simultaneous use rather than headcount. Federal awards in the record buy two, three, four, five, six, nine and twelve tokens, and three is by far the most common size. A group where modelling is one person's main job and a sideline for two others usually fits in two or three.

Is MOE software free?

No. MOE is a commercial licence and the only no-cost route from the vendor is a time limited trial you request through the site. Some universities fund a shared campus licence and recharge departments from it, which is why students often meet MOE without seeing a price, but there is no free edition and no perpetual community version.

What is MOE software used for?

MOE is a full molecular modelling environment covering small molecules, peptides and biologics in one package: visualization, docking, molecular dynamics, homology modelling, pharmacophore work, QSAR and QSPR model building, and protein engineering. Chemical Computing Group sells two companions alongside it, MOEsaic for SAR data analysis and PSILO for protein structure data management.

How much is a MOE academic license?

Academic pricing exists and is well below commercial, but it is genuinely not public. University pages that list MOE either say to contact the vendor or put their rate sheet behind a campus login, and we will not repeat a figure we cannot read at its source. If you are at a US institution, ask your research computing office first, because a campus licence may already cover you.

Is MOE cheaper than Schrodinger?

On the public record MOE awards are smaller, though the products are not the same shape. Federal awards to Chemical Computing Group top out at $167,630 and mostly sit in the $15,000 to $60,000 band, while awards to Schrodinger for its small molecule discovery suite run around $198,000 to $209,000 a year and reach $683,974 on one NIH contract. Both are quote driven, so a like for like comparison depends entirely on modules and token counts.

Do I need MOE to predict antibacterial activity?

Not for the triage question. MOE is the right instrument if you need docking, dynamics, homology models and protein engineering in one environment. If the recurring question is which compounds in a series are worth plate time against which organisms, a pre-trained antibacterial read-out answers it in about ten seconds with no model to build, at a monthly price rather than an annual licence.

Pricing

Published, monthly, and on this page

Full plan comparison

Lab is $149 a month for 250 screens with batches up to 50 compounds, which is $1,788 across a year. Discovery is $499 for 2,000 screens, batches up to 1,000, and adds the API. Program is $1,490 for 10,000 screens with batches up to 10,000. A single MOE token on the federal record costs more for a year than a year of Lab, which is the comparison worth making only if the narrow answer is the one you need.

Yearly billing is two months cheaper, charged once a year.

Lab

$124 /mo

$1,488 charged once a year

250 screens a month against the standard panels, with CSV export.

Get started

Academic AMR lab, 1 to 2 chemists

Discovery

Get the antibacterial answer before you price the environment

Paste a compound you already know the MIC for, read the panel, then decide how wide a licence the work really needs.

Run a screen first

What you are agreeing to

Your compounds stay yours
Never used for model training
Deletable on request
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