You'll need to ask MSC about pricing of their products.

Do you need just a Nastran solver, or also a pre and post-procesor?  MSC used to sell a product called Nastran4Windows that was FEMAP bundled with a basic version of MSC Nastran.  It was fairly cheap, but MSC no longer sells that.  They should be replacing it with a Patran/Nastran product, but I don't know the details.

You can get versions of both NE Nastran and NX Nastran bundled with FEMAP without spending too much. NX Nastran is almost identical to MSC (will give identical results in 99% of all cases) since they were exactly the same code up until MSC V2004.  NE Nastran is different, but might also do the job for you depending on what your needs are.

As a general rule, the versions of the codes packaged with pre-post processors are cheaper than stand-alone versions.  That's because they're designed to be used by a single user on a single computer rather than by a group over a network.

Just as information:

MSC replaced Nastran4Windows with MSC.FEA. I don't know it that's good or bad but it means Patran instead of Femap.

You can buy stand-alone MSC.Nastran and Femap separately (Femap from UGS or Noran) but that will probably be very pricey.

MSC in my experience is more expensive than Noran. As for the price on NX Nastran I have no information other that for converting from N4W to NX Nastran. Based om that and a guess of 20% of listprice for maintenance I would say that NX Nastran costs more than NEiNastran.

As for prices in $$$ I don't have any current.

Good Luck

Thomas

Since we just upgraded the n4w to msc fea, which is patran with nastran integrated - you can't run the bdf file externally, I can tell you the difference.

upgrade to msc fea was about $8000. buy nastran + patran standalones  - about 4 times that.
I got the demo for femap (nei modeler) and trying it out.. just out of curiosity.