Subscription Entitlement Ideas

Bentley needs to include a way to limit not only owned (perpetual) licenses, but term licenses as well. I am in a small company with 5 users in 3 different offices. Three of the users are 80% of the time. We use our 2 OpenRoads licenses (perpetual licenses), and generally hit a 3 licenses as a term license. Trying to manage all 5 to not hit a fourth license (a second TL) is what I am trying to achieve. Can't imagine how difficult it is for more users than that in a larger outfit. Needs to be set up to allow a company to limit all license types, by number, by the administrator.

I'm not surprised at all that the count is to 207. I've been complaining about this for years including an hour long discussion with a VP years ago who admitted it is not the industry norm and is not a good solution for the engineering software we use (RAM products).

We use Softrack to eliminate the overages. It is well worth the small cost since it makes the licensing work the way virtually all other network licensing works - you set the license limit and it prevents the users from opening an overuse. The guys there are very helpful and will even assist you in setting it all up after initial purchase. Since we installed the software Bentley tried on two occasions to bill us for overages they claimed we had. The guys at Softrack helped us provide logs that proved Bentley's accounting was wrong and we had not overused licenses. We sent that info to Bentley and never heard about it again. One wonders how many times their overages were wrong when I didn't have proof we didn't overuse.

I am very surprised that Bentley has received feedback from 206 companies with a clear mandate to change the unsatisfactory situation, but has not yet offered a solution.

License must not issue without Admin Approval. User acknowledgement should forwarded to admin for approval.

We have resorted to using a 3rd party product called Softrack to manage our Concept use. It requires that "agents" get installed on PC's where users could potentially use the product, and a manager on the server keeps track of whether a seat is available. Seems to work pretty slick once setup. It costs, but not as much as the Bentley fees...

In my company we have impossible alerts for license usage limits. We have 3 perpetual licenses, 3 users and it warns us that we are going to exceed the use of licenses..... The answer is let's look at web analytics. Thank you

We have a system of dedicated computers set up to remote into to restrict usage, but with the 10 minute usage interval there are occasions where overages will occur based on the number of licenses we have. A setting to now allow term license usage would be the most effective way to prevent the quarterly term license invoices.

Yes please!! Our company has been struggling with open access Bentley licensing policies for years. We require all of our users to check-out licenses on an internally managed spreadsheet and immediately close the software when alerted of a potential overage, but we still somehow generate the occasional quarterly invoice. The overage is almost always some brief interval of less than an hour. Very frustrating!

Bentley licensing policies are an administrative burden on our accounting department, our software administrator, and our engineering staff. Administrators should be the only people authorized to generate purchases for the business. A simple administrator approval requirement would solve these problems.

There is a fix. Bentley just doesn't promote it at all. The fix is far from hard but it also substantially less intuitive. You will not stumble upon it accidentally. But, once implemented correctly, it works. BE SURE AND NOT ALLOW OFFLINE USAGE. Or, you guessed it, you will be charged.

As a small to mid-sized business, we appreciate the flexibility that open licensing provides however we are very averse to unplanned costs. We would like the flexibility to have many more users installed with Bentley software but when the concurrent total is hit, we would also like the ability to deny additional users access. The current notification system does not allow us to create this kind of wall. I understand that some businesses need to take advantage of the term license model but for those of us who do not want that, Bentley should allow us to place a block.

with so many votes one must wonder if the monetary gain of this practice outweights the loss of trust and reputation that comes with all those suprise bills

Dear Bentley Support,

I'm really sad to read those all of comments below. Is it really so difficult to add a tool/option for administrator to decide who or whether could open application with exceed usage?

This practice needs to be stopped with a simple lockout without a secondary Admin authorization when licenses are not available. This is a very unfair practice to subject your client to.

Having a switch in the system that do NOT allow users to go beyond the license is a must for proper resources management and it should be very easy to implement. Being in a public organization where everything has to be budgeted and approved, the surprise billings will cause issues.

This seems to be the most logical approach.

The end user should not be permitted to make company financial decisions.

Present us with the choice to lock out completely, or administrator password to accept the over-usage.

The lack of being able to restrict users from exceeding licenses is an extremely predatory practice. The majority of our users do not and should not have the authority to, in essence, purchase a license for a quarter for use for 10 minutes.

I just got a bill for $783 for ONE overage day. I had to spend hours with support/billing to get the fee waived. AND, it wasn't even our fault - we had everything set correctly to notify us if we are attempting to open the software and therer are no licenses left. Our notification history was empty. So, the software let someone open it even though we had it set to give the notification. AWFUL policy.

this post has been since 2020 and there has been no solution till now, it's not normal to issue invoices overused for unused licenses and managing large companies isn't easy, all other software providers have restrictions not opening the app if the users number is exceeded

Agree 110%. There software model is horrible for companies. We have practically no control. Why not just give us the simple option to limit the licenses to what we purchased like every other software platform!

We have been tracking our overages, and they do not align with the Bentley counts. So we keep receiving bills to pay for Term Licences. I have requested the ability to lock it, and have not received any real feedback except for "Our large clients like the abiltiy to go over their license allocation to meet deadlines". I can tell you the two hours work we apparently go over per quarter is not worth $500/hour. It is very frustrating.