Houdini Indie's harder limit is funding, not revenue

The picture

SideFX's own Houdini Indie product page states that commercial and contracting entities qualify only while two conditions both hold: annual gross revenue must not exceed $100,000 USD, and total funding raised by the organisation or its affiliates - the page names 'private equity, venture capital, angel or mezzanine financing, and all other forms of funding' - in the trailing 24 months must be less than $1,000,000 USD. The licence itself costs $299 for one year or $449 for two, per the same page, and a commercial entity may hold at most three Houdini Indie and three Houdini Engine Indie seats. SideFX's own buy page summarises the tier as revenue 'under 100K USD' without restating the funding clause in its own heading.

What the documents show

The product page's own wording makes the funding test the more restrictive of the two in practice: a founder-led studio with no revenue at all can still be disqualified the moment it closes a seed round above $1,000,000, while a studio with revenue just under $100,000 but no institutional funding remains eligible. A summary that repeats only the buy page's revenue framing, without the product page's funding clause, describes an easier test than the one SideFX actually publishes. Both pages are the same vendor's own statements and do not conflict; the buy page is simply less complete than the product page it links from.

What it is allowed to decide

Eligibility for a discounted licence is a commercial and provenance fact, not a technical one: it decides who may legally hold the tool at this price, not whether a simulation is physically defensible. This supports class 3, commercial, at most. It holds Provenance in that the eligibility terms are published and specific. It does not hold Auditability: neither page addresses whether a studio's own compliance with the funding and revenue test - a self-certification made at purchase - is checked or reproducible later.

The disclosure label

A disclosure travelling with a Houdini Indie-made simulation would read: produced under a Houdini Indie licence, eligibility conditioned on under $100,000 USD annual revenue and under $1,000,000 USD in funding raised in the trailing 24 months, class 3 commercial at most; Provenance held for the published eligibility terms, Auditability not established for the studio's ongoing compliance; dated 16 September 2026; asserted by the studio holding the licence.

• Has the studio raised funding in the last 24 months that would disqualify it regardless of current revenue?
• Is a comparison of Houdini's cost against other tools using only the buy page's revenue figure, or the product page's full funding-and-revenue test?
• Does the three-seat cap on Houdini Indie and Houdini Engine Indie licences match the size of the team actually using the tool?

Editorial reading: a two-part eligibility test that a marketing summary can flatten into one figure is exactly the kind of detail this site's disclosure standard exists to preserve.