Molecular modeling license costs, from the public record

OpenEye Scientific Software price: what an OpenEye software license costs, from 31 federal awards before and after Cadence

OpenEye publishes no commercial price, and Cadence did not change that. US federal procurement records are public, so here is what agencies actually paid for the applications and the toolkits, alongside a narrower antibacterial read-out you can price in one line.

From $149 a month

31 federal awards read directly
Applications and toolkits kept apart
No number we cannot source

The narrow answer, before you price the wide license

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

About $40,000 to $90,000 a year for applications, far more for toolkits

OpenEye does not publish a commercial price, before or after Cadence bought it. What it cannot withhold is what US federal agencies paid, because those awards are public. Thirty one contract awards to OpenEye Scientific Software appear in the federal spending record between 2007 and 2026, worth about $3.56 million in total, all but one of them at the Department of Health and Human Services and most at the National Institutes of Health.

Split them the way OpenEye itself splits its catalog and two bands appear. A year of the modeling applications, the ROCS, OMEGA, EON and OEDocking family, has cost NIH between $39,500 and $90,000 depending on the package, with a thirteen module non-profit bundle at $43,000 in 2023 and $47,250 in 2024. Toolkit maintenance for the programming libraries that other software is built on runs much higher: three year contracts of $439,055, $492,453 and $537,650, and $87,056 for a single year in 2026.

One caveat governs every number here. Those NIH packages are bought on a non-profit basis, so a commercial biotech is quoted from a different sheet. Read the tables as a floor and a shape, not a forecast of your own quote.

At a glance

Published price: None, OpenEye and Cadence quote on request
Public evidence: 31 US federal awards, 2007 to 2026, about $3.56m total
Applications: $39,500 to $90,000 a year on NIH awards
Priced here: $149 to $1,490 a month, on the page, no quote cycle

What agencies actually paid

OpenEye license cost for the applications, one year at a time

Only awards with a one year term are in this table, so each amount is what a year cost. Descriptions are shortened from the award record, and the module list is the one written into the 2024 award itself.

Award start	Agency	What it covers	Amount for the year
Jun 2026	NIH	OpenEye software annual licenses	$53,760
Mar 2024	NIH	Non-profit package: ROCS, OMEGA, EON, BROOD, FILTER, SZMAP, SiteHopper, SZYBKI, OEDocking, QUACPAC, Spruce, VIDA, OEChem TK	$47,250
Mar 2023	NIH	Non-profit package, same module list	$43,000
Nov 2021	NIH	Modeling and virtual screening software license	$39,500
Sep 2020	NIH	Molecular modeling software renewal	$90,000
Sep 2011	NIH	One year NIH-wide site license	$59,400
Jul 2011	Veterans Affairs	OpenEye scientific software	$29,700
Sep 2008	NIH	Non-profit annual lease package for chemoinformatics	$25,000

Source: public US federal contract awards to OpenEye Scientific Software, Inc. Unrelated awards that mention OpenEye security cameras, a different company with the same name, are excluded.

What the 2023 to 2024 package change says about renewals

The same NIH institute bought the same thirteen component non-profit package in March 2023 and again in March 2024. The module list in the award description is identical, word for word. The price went from $43,000 to $47,250, an increase of about 9.9 percent in one year, and that institute had paid $39,500 for a modeling and virtual screening license in late 2021. If your own renewal arrives with a similar increase and no change in scope, you are being priced in line with the public record rather than against it.

What renewals do

One NIH license, renewed six Septembers in a row

Most pricing questions in this category cannot be answered because no two purchases are alike. OpenEye is the exception. An NIH research computing group renewed its OpenEye licenses every September from 2015 to 2020, and every award names the same program office, five of the six with the same contact. That is the longest clean renewal series we have found for any vendor in this category.

The pattern is useful for anyone negotiating. The price did not only go up: it fell in 2017 and again in 2018 before a 9.2 percent step in 2019. Over five renewals it rose about 13.6 percent in total, roughly 2.6 percent a year. A renewal is a negotiation, and the record shows it moving both ways.

NIH annual renewal, same program

2015	$79,200	Baseline year
2016	$83,160	Up 5.0 percent
2017	$82,800	Down 0.4 percent
2018	$80,200	Down 3.1 percent
2019	$87,600	Up 9.2 percent
2020	$90,000	Up 2.7 percent

The bigger line

OpenEye toolkits cost more than the applications, by a wide margin

One HHS office has maintained OpenEye programming toolkits on a July renewal cycle since 2011. These are multi year awards, so the last column is the total divided by the term. It is shown for scale only and is not an annual price anyone was quoted.

Term	What it covers	Award total	Per year, for scale
Jul 2011 to Jul 2014	Toolkit maintenance, molecular modeling and cheminformatics	$439,055	about $146,000
Jul 2014 to Jul 2017	Toolkit maintenance, same scope	$492,453	about $164,000
Jul 2017 to Jul 2020	LexichemTK maintenance	$537,650	about $179,000
Dec 2020 to Jul 2023	OpenEye cheminformatics toolkits	$204,793	about $80,000
Jul 2023 to Jul 2026	Term renewal: LexichemTK, OEChem TK and QUACPAC	$237,074	about $79,000
Jul 2026 to Jul 2027	Toolkit maintenance	$87,056	$87,056

Do not read the 2020 drop as a price cut. The earlier awards describe maintenance for the whole family of molecular modeling and cheminformatics toolkits, while the 2023 award names three of them, LexichemTK, OEChem TK and QUACPAC. Scope narrowed, and the price followed it. The honest lesson is the same one the applications table teaches: the list of components on the order form moves the number more than anything else, so it pays to license the libraries your code actually calls and nothing more.

What moves your number

Four things decide where an OpenEye Cadence quote lands

01

Applications or toolkits

OpenEye sells two different things under one name. The applications (ROCS, OMEGA, EON, FRED and the rest) are what a modeler runs. The toolkits (OEChem TK, LexichemTK, QUACPAC and friends) are programming libraries a software team builds into its own pipelines. On the public record the toolkit contracts are the larger ones by a wide margin, because they are licensed for embedding and redistribution inside other systems rather than for one group's desk.

02

Non-profit, academic or commercial

Every NIH package in the table is bought on a non-profit basis, and OpenEye runs a separate academic program with a paid package for small groups plus two no-cost licenses for public domain research and teaching. A commercial biotech sits on a third sheet. Treat the federal numbers as a floor for commercial work, never as a forecast of your own quote.

03

Desktop licenses or Orion

Since Cadence closed the acquisition in September 2022, the cloud platform Orion has been the growth product. Orion is sold as software as a service and priced on usage and scale, which is a different shape from an annual lease of on premise applications. Ask which one you are being quoted for, because a quote that mixes both is hard to compare with anything else.

04

Which modules, and how many seats

The 2023 and 2024 NIH packages list thirteen named components. A group that only needs conformer generation and shape screening (OMEGA plus ROCS) is buying a much narrower thing, and the price should reflect it. Naming the two or three tools you will actually run, before the vendor proposes a bundle, is the cheapest negotiation move available.

Honest comparison

When OpenEye is the right buy, and when the question is narrower

Buy OpenEye when

Shape and electrostatics based virtual screening is central, and ROCS and EON are the tools you would reach for anyway.
You need fast, well validated conformer generation at library scale, which is what OMEGA is known for.
Your software team wants production grade cheminformatics libraries to build its own pipelines on.
You want cloud scale screening without running your own cluster, which is the case for Orion.
Someone on the team models full time and will keep the license busy all year.

Price a narrower tool when

The recurring question is which compounds deserve plate time against which organisms.
Shape similarity to a known antibiotic tells you little, because whole cell potency depends on getting in and staying in.
Nobody on the team models full time, so an annual license 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 an OpenEye replacement, and pitching it as one would be dishonest. OpenEye does shape screening, conformer generation and toolkit work we do not attempt. What it does not do is return an antibacterial answer without a model. Finding compounds that look like a known antibiotic is one thing; knowing whether they will inhibit Pseudomonas aeruginosa through its outer membrane and efflux pumps is another, and in OpenEye that still means building and validating something 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 comparing suites rather than deciding between a suite and a narrow tool, the vendors most often quoted alongside OpenEye are priced from the same kind of evidence in MOE software price, 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 plan is to screen a purchased library rather than design against a structure, compound library screening software covers that job directly.

Who this page is for

Six moments when the OpenEye price matters

You are budgeting a modeling seat

Put a sourced number in the grant or the board deck before the quote arrives, and know which product line it belongs to.

You are facing a renewal

Hold an increase up against six consecutive years of the same NIH renewal and a 2023 to 2024 package change.

You are deciding on toolkits

See why embedding OEChem TK or LexichemTK in your own code is a different order of spend from licensing the applications.

You are weighing Orion

Separate the cloud platform from the on premise applications so the two quotes compare on the same basis.

You are shortlisting vendors

Read this next to MOE, Schrodinger and StarDrop, all priced from the same kind of evidence.

You only need the antibacterial answer

If the question is which compounds deserve plate time against which organisms, a shape screening suite is a wide purchase for a narrow job.

Questions people ask before buying

OpenEye software pricing, answered plainly

How much does OpenEye Scientific Software cost?

OpenEye publishes no commercial price, but US federal award records show what agencies paid. Single year application licenses at NIH run from $39,500 to $90,000, with a thirteen module non-profit package at $43,000 in 2023 and $47,250 in 2024. Multi year toolkit maintenance contracts are larger, from $204,793 to $537,650 over roughly three years.

Does OpenEye publish pricing?

No. The OpenEye website lists its applications, toolkits and the Orion platform with contact and evaluation routes, and has no pricing page or price list. The only prices it describes are for its academic program, where two license types cost nothing and one is a paid package. Commercial numbers come from a quote or from public procurement records.

Is OpenEye software free for academics?

Partly. OpenEye offers a free Public Domain Research License and a free Teaching License to people employed at accredited degree granting universities, both with no support and no intellectual property rights. There is also a paid Academic Package for research groups under ten members that includes support and lets the group keep its IP. None of these cover commercial work.

Who owns OpenEye Scientific Software now?

Cadence Design Systems. Cadence completed the acquisition of OpenEye Scientific Software on September 1, 2022, for aggregate consideration of about $500 million, and OpenEye now operates within Cadence Molecular Sciences. Federal awards after that date are still recorded to OpenEye Scientific Software Inc, including toolkit maintenance and annual licenses awarded in 2026.

Did prices change after the Cadence acquisition?

Not dramatically on the public record. The NIH non-profit package rose from $43,000 in 2023 to $47,250 in 2024, about 9.9 percent, and an annual license award in June 2026 is $53,760. Toolkit maintenance renewed at $87,056 for one year in July 2026, about 10 percent above the per year rate of the previous three year term.

What is the difference between OpenEye applications and toolkits?

Applications such as ROCS, OMEGA, EON and FRED are programs a modeler runs directly for shape screening, conformer generation, electrostatics comparison and docking. Toolkits such as OEChem TK, LexichemTK and QUACPAC are programming libraries a development team builds into its own software. They are licensed and priced separately, and toolkit contracts are usually the bigger line.

Is OpenEye cheaper than Schrodinger or MOE?

On the federal record OpenEye application licenses sit between the two. MOE runs roughly $7,250 to $11,070 per token per year, so a three token purchase lands near $28,750. OpenEye packages at NIH run $39,500 to $90,000 a year. Schrodinger small molecule suite awards run around $194,000 to $206,000 a year. Module lists differ, so compare configurations, not brands.

Do I need OpenEye to predict antibacterial activity?

Not for the triage question. OpenEye is a strong choice for shape based virtual screening, conformer generation and embedding cheminformatics in your own pipelines. It does not return a predicted MIC per organism without a model you build and validate yourself. A pre-trained antibacterial read-out answers which compounds are worth plating in about ten seconds, at a monthly price.

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. The smallest OpenEye package on the federal record costs more for one year than several years of Lab, which is a fair comparison only when the narrow antibacterial 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 suite

Paste a compound you already know the MIC for, read the panel, then decide how wide a license 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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