Bentley no longer using "Trust" Licensing? - outrageous overage charges now!

We received an invoice today from Bentley for over $2,000 because we had 2 MicroStation overages in the first quarter. 1 overage was for a single day, the other was 5 days. Turns out it was because I had a team of people evaluating CONNECT. Most of our users are on Bentley MAP PowerView and we have a ton of those licenses, however PowerView 64 (or CONNECT PowerView) is not available at this time so they had to install MicroStation CONNECT to test our software (and CONNECT in general).

Apparently "Trust" licensing has been abandoned by Bentley. I don't recall seeing a notice about this, maybe they just decided to change the definition of "Trust". At least we could have been sent a warning on our first overage that we would be charged for an additional license for this quarter so I could deal with it.

We are working my our butts off converting 15 years of in-house MDL software to 64bit c++ and need several departments to test it. I didn't grok that this would end up costing us so much money.

This is an outrageous charge for a few minutes of testing and without any warning. To top it off - most of my CONNECT related service tickets remain unanswered, were closed without a response, or just shunted to this forum to have regular users answer them (if they can with limited/incomplete documentation). If Bentley is going to charge this much money for us to beta test their software at least they could answer my fraken support requests.

I love MicroStation but my love for SELECT is quickly beginning to wane.

Parents
  • We were informed start of 2014 about the upcoming change. SELECT Basic Access or optional SELECT Open Access. Overusage and consequences wouldn't be discussed but charged as quarter rent automatically. In Open Access even for products that you never had a single license. You seem to have missed this change.

    Recently the "overuse" calculation was changed, that's the discussion Joshua referred to. Concurrent use was redefined (better), but now one single overuse of 10 minutes or more will generate a term invoice.

    Find several discussions here about all this policy.

Reply
  • We were informed start of 2014 about the upcoming change. SELECT Basic Access or optional SELECT Open Access. Overusage and consequences wouldn't be discussed but charged as quarter rent automatically. In Open Access even for products that you never had a single license. You seem to have missed this change.

    Recently the "overuse" calculation was changed, that's the discussion Joshua referred to. Concurrent use was redefined (better), but now one single overuse of 10 minutes or more will generate a term invoice.

    Find several discussions here about all this policy.

Children
  • Does anyone actually think one or two 10+ minute usages actually constitutes an overage? I'm just curious why this type of policy was agreed upon other than to make more money? My users all attempt to be diligent with product usage, we don't secretly use software, and yet one mistake gets charged the same amount as if a program was open for the entire quarter. Can't some type of time based pro-rate system be implemented? if say the overage is for 50% of the quarter you are charged the full SELECT OpenAccess QTL, but anything less is pro-rated?? Just spit balling here but one 15 minute overage now could cost someone hundreds or thousands of dollars......
  • Only install it for those who really need to be able to use it. Others get to use the free viewer.

    If you rent software, you're paying for the whole rental period. No software vendor is going to refund you over 95% of the renting price because you only used it for 2 days in the 3 month rental period.

    Same with a rented car, rent 3 months, pay 3 months, even if you don't drive it at all.

    If you don't want to pay for it, make sure you don't use it.

    Below a link to strategies to limit Usage.

    http://communities.bentley.com/products/licensing/w/licensing__wiki/20995.strategies-for-limiting-usage

  • Of course, this is the design of their plan, to profit as much as possible,