The small volume is a good reason most simulation software takes the high price licensing. That isn't the only route though. You could look into the "leverage o

The small volume is a good reason most simulation software takes the high price licensing. That isn't the only route though. You could look into the "leverage open source, sell training/consulting/more usable packages" approach as done by companies like enthought (they work on scipy, and sell courses/etc). I'm a big fan of the enthought approach, my biggest gripe about the matlab/mathematica approach is that I usually couldn't package/optimize/distribute my code. The exception to that is labview, but they're more hardware-centric. In the semiconductor industry, I have watched another german company called plexim start in the past few years offering cross-platform mixed-signal tools. The other competitors seem pretty small and usually pursue turn-key consulting agreements instead of licensing underlying libraries so the end customer can make a more integrated experience. Cliff Notes: perhaps see if you can find a market to sell distributable easy scientific APIs for you end customers so they can prototype/package/distribute things without too many headaches.