IIRC while on an internship at Broadcom, lots of EDA tools were utilized by sending a script to a (Sun Solaris?) grid compute cluster to save on license costs or due to licenses being billed per minute or cpu-minute. I do recall some internal "wall of shame" dashboard listing users with the most (idle?) minutes using an EDA tool.
It is more likely that the company has a fixed number of licenses for some product, and is using a grid to maximize the amount of work they get out of those licenses. That is the usual practice with expensive EDA software, to the extent that the vendors will help customers set it up.
Not the OP but our product falls into the 'specialty engineering software' category. We build an enterprise ready tool for teams working with Apache Kafka (https://kpow.io) and offer an hourly price.
The deliverable is a single docker container (not a desktop app!) and right from the start, nearly three years now, we've been selling on the AWS Marketplace for 0.16c/hr:
We have a couple of pricing models, but on the consumption based model we stick to that clear, transparent hourly price. It's good for customers that choose that model, and good for us because we're engineers and we don't care for opaque enterprise sales practices.
We do a fair number of enterprise sales too, they require a negotiation because metering usage at an enterprise level is rarely practical. Even then the price is some calculation of usage/value + support. Keeps it simple, lets us attack a big market as a small team and stay focused on technical delivery, shortens the sale/negotiation time, and our customers know they're basically paying the same price as anyone else.
I'd rather not, but it's a specialty design/construction calculation software for the building industry. Userbase is ~1000 and the development effort is in the order of several hundred man years.
