OpenGround Pricing: A Deadline Without a Number

Bentley owns the ground beneath most large infrastructure projects, at least in data terms. It also owns gINT, the desktop tool geotechnical teams have run for the better part of two decades, and it has told every one of those customers to move.

The dates are published. New gINT licences can be bought until 31 December 2027. Support runs to the end of 2028. From 2029 a paid-up perpetual licence still opens, for one person, on one machine.

That is close to the strongest position a software company can hold. A captive base, a hard date, a replacement already built, and a competitor set that is smaller than you are.

Then you go looking for the price.

01 The Deadline Is Real

Most B2B companies spend their entire marketing budget trying to manufacture what Bentley has been handed by its own product roadmap: a reason to act this quarter.

Deadlines are the rarest thing in enterprise software. Nobody replaces a working tool because a landing page asked them to. They replace it when staying still starts to cost something, and Bentley has made staying still cost something specific and dated. A firm running gINT in 2029 is running a single-seat tool in a market where the client wants a shared data platform.

So the demand exists, and it is already moving. The question every one of those firms now has is small and completely practical.

What does the new thing cost us?

A deadline converts only if the next step is obvious. Urgency plus clarity is a purchase. Urgency plus ambiguity is a research project, and a research project is where competitors live.

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02 Three Prices, One Product

Here is what a buyer finds.

On Bentley’s own OpenGround page, the product is sold in two parts that are bought together. A cloud service subscription: OpenGround i3 Band 1 at 2,420 US dollars, Band 2 at 4,840, Band 3 at 7,860, then i5 Band 1 at 12,830. And separately, user application subscriptions: Base at 245 dollars, Advanced at 710.

On Seequent’s OpenGround page, which describes itself as part of the same company, the identical bundles are listed at 233 dollars for Base and 673 for Advanced.

On the UK government’s G-Cloud marketplace, the same service is listed at 26,046 pounds an instance a year.

None of those numbers is wrong. Bands differ, contracts differ, public-sector listings bundle things a list price does not. But look at the position the buyer is in. They are not choosing between vendors yet. They are trying to write one figure on an internal form so they can ask for the money.

To do that they need three things the pages do not give them: which band a team of their size falls into, how many Base seats versus Advanced seats they need, and whether the number they are reading is the one their region will actually be quoted. Nothing on either page answers the first question at all. There is no team size next to a band, no worked example, no calculator.

So the buyer does what buyers do when the arithmetic is not on the page. They book a call with an account manager. Which is exactly what the CTAs ask for, and which feels like a working funnel right up until you count what it costs.

Every one of those calls is a deal that could have qualified itself. Worse, the gap between reading the page and getting a number is the window in which a firm with a deadline and no answer starts typing alternatives into a search box.

Ambiguity does not slow a forced migration down. It redirects it.

03 The Objection They Wrote For Their Competitor

Bentley’s migration page is honest in a way most vendor pages are not. It says, plainly, that some of the functions a customer uses in gINT might not yet be available in OpenGround, and that the team is actively developing.

Honesty is the right instinct. The execution gives away the deal.

Read that sentence as a buyer holding a deadline. You are being asked to leave a tool that does the job for one that might not do all of it yet, on a schedule you did not choose, at a price you cannot calculate. The reply offered to that concern is a roadmap.

A roadmap is the weakest available answer to a missing feature, because it asks the buyer to carry the risk on the vendor’s behalf and offers nothing in return. The stronger move is a bridge: name the gaps, publish which ones close when, and price the transition so the customer is not paying full freight for a product that is not yet whole for them. Bentley’s own migration material mentions trade-in discounts, but only as something an account manager can discuss. The concession exists. It is just not doing any work where the doubt is being felt.

Meanwhile the sentence is already being quoted back. EarthSoft, which sells the competing EQuIS platform, published a piece aimed directly at gINT users arguing that the vendor allowed an industry standard to become unrecoverable and is now, in its words, forcing the investment. It cites significant deficiencies in the platform from a prior evaluation. That is not a fair fight, but nobody promised one. When you force a migration, every gap you admit becomes a competitor’s headline, and every gap you hide becomes a refund request.

What makes this one sting is that the proof exists. Bentley’s own case studies carry the kind of numbers most B2B companies would build an entire campaign on: a 75 percent reduction in reporting time, one organisation managing 200,000 boreholes and seventy years of ground data, another collaborating remotely across 3,500. Those are excellent, specific, checkable claims.

They sit three scrolls below the price, in a section a buyer reaches only after they have already decided to keep reading. The doubt is at the number. The evidence is at the bottom of the page. They never meet.

04 What To Take From It

You are probably not selling geotechnical data software. The pattern is not about geology.

A deadline is an asset you can only spend once. Bentley has one, publicly dated, hitting an entire installed base at the same moment. That base is going to evaluate something in the next twenty-four months whether or not Bentley makes it easy. The only variable left is how many of them evaluate somebody else on the way through.

Ambiguity in pricing is not caution, it is a handoff. Every unanswered question about cost moves the decision from your page to a procurement process you do not control, or to a search result you do not own. If a buyer cannot build a defensible number in one sitting, they will go and find one somewhere else, and the number they come back with will be a competitor’s.

Put the proof where the doubt is. A 75 percent reduction in reporting time is a strong claim. Next to a price nobody can calculate, it is worth more than it is next to a customer logo. Proof belongs at the point of hesitation, not in the section reserved for people who have already been persuaded.

Answer a gap with a bridge, not a roadmap. If your product does not yet do everything the thing you are replacing does, the honest disclosure is correct and the roadmap is not enough. Name the gap, date the fix, and price the interval. A discount that only an account manager can mention is not an objection handler. It is a secret.

The company holding the deadline should win this. Most of the base will move, because most of the base has nowhere else convenient to go. But a forced migration is the one moment when your customers are legally, contractually and emotionally free to reconsider everything, and the vendor who makes the next step easiest gets a disproportionate share of that freedom.

Right now the next step is a phone call.

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Frequently asked

How much does Bentley OpenGround cost?

Bentley publishes two components that are bought together. The cloud service runs from 2,420 US dollars a year for OpenGround i3 Band 1 up to 12,830 for i5 Band 1, and user applications are listed at 245 dollars for Base and 710 for Advanced. Seequent, the same company, lists 233 and 673 for the same two bundles. A UK public-sector listing prices the service at 26,046 pounds an instance a year. Which figure applies to you depends on band and negotiation, and no published page says how to pick a band.

When does gINT stop being supported?

Bentley says new perpetual licences and annual subscriptions can be bought until 31 December 2027, and support continues until the end of 2028 for customers on an active subscription. From 2029 a perpetual licence still works, but access is restricted to one user on one device.

Is OpenGround just the new version of gINT?

No. Bentley calls OpenGround the successor to gINT, but it is a different product on a different commercial model: a cloud platform sold as a service subscription plus per-user application bundles, rather than a desktop licence. Bentley provides tools to migrate gINT project and library files, and its own migration page notes that some gINT functions may not be available yet.

What are the alternatives to OpenGround for former gINT users?

EarthSoft's EQuIS is the most vocal alternative and has published material aimed squarely at gINT users facing the deadline. Datgel, long known for gINT add-ins, and GAEA's GDMS also compete for the same base. The commercial point for any vendor watching this is that a forced migration puts an entire installed base into evaluation at the same time.