OVTune/VFTuner Extortion

$700 for an email tune? Yikes. Tacoma crowd likes taking it in the pooper.

 

Again, it's for a supercharger tune.

You're more than welcome to do all the R&D on that and decide if your time and effort and development expenses are worth less.

 

Mine was for the standard OV tune, not some type of supercharger tune...
$700 was the OG buy in cost.

 

I'm aware, I paid it myself back in December 2017.

 

Sorry, but that rational isn't going to work on me. Paid $200 for email tune of my supercharged Magnum SRT. And it wasn't just the canned tune, that would have been $100. I installed tune data logged, emailed back, tweaked tune, data logged, tweaked, data logged, third time was the charm.

What's happening here is a bunch of non-gearheads allowing themselves to get raked over the coals. You're paying for from scratch, half day on the dyno prices for canned tunes.

 

Thank you for your input.

 

Don’t know this backstory with complaints over the OVTune software, but Matt sunk a ton of time and money back engineering Toyota’s notoriously near impossible coding. Nobody else was doing it in the community. I personally thank him for sticking with it, fixing and improving the SW, resolving the bugs, and putting up with all the complaints along the way. He had the best of intentions selling and putting his stuff out there, and there were a lot of people who took advantage of the OVTune and VFTune software and tunes to the point where Matt has put the control in place that we have today. So folks that aren’t happy can point the finger at the douche bags that helped get us where we are at today.

I have had VFTuner for a year and a half now. I paid quite a bit for the SW and initial base tune. The game may have evolved since then, but I know for a fact it is worth it. It has been the single most important mod I’ve done. I still pay others to try out there custom tunes and I have to say my Taco is my forever rig.

It sucks it hasn’t worked out for some, but the overwhelming majority of owners that have upgraded their trucks are raving about the improvement. To all those doing it right out in the community keep it up. And To Matt, thanks for what you have done to date. This hasn’t been an easy journey, but it has made a huge impact, and most of us appreciate it.

 

Feels even better when every tune in the tune pack literally does nothing to change the behaviour of your truck (my experience, yours may differ) Or when you have been led to believe performance tunes where going to be an upcoming addition at the time of purchase. My bad. I also dont like how the company has talked down to Tacoma owners in the past. They aren’t Tacoma owners, they are your customers.

 

We are, his name is Mat.
I was an early adopter when OVTune came out and I am not disputing the need for better SW in these trucks as well as the improvement in the way it drives with OVTune but the way it was rolled out and the confusing process of upgrading and sending info back and forth then fundamentally changing the process and the name and charging for something many people already feel like they paid for (the ability to flash my ECU) its just been a real boondoggle. I'm not sending Mat another red cent and the useless tune I just bought will get refunded or I'll dispute the charge.

 

For the record, refunds on digital products are difficult at best because there's not really a way to confirm that you haven't simply kept the product.

Do you not have VFTuner Lite from the Magnuson supercharger kit purchase? Customers receive it as part of the purchase/instal.

 

A lot of crying about about a measly 79 bucks.

 

A lot of dumbing without reading.

$79 after the hundreds people have already spent not to mention the amount of time jumping through licensing hoops like a seaworld dolphin.

 

I have downloaded again today from maggy and it too license error's out with either dongle (OVTune, MaggyVF)

 

The license error is a known issue with the 1.6.x VFTuner software and the most recently released version is supposed to have fixed that.

If it has not, I recommend contacting Mat with your serial number for the tactrix that you received as part of your Magnuson supercharger kit purchase, as that one should be registered to a VFTuner Lite license.

Hopefully then Mat can assist you with whatever needs to be corrected to allow you to use VFTuner properly.

 

I know that Mat spent a ton of time on developing his tune and so have the others that have come behind him, but honestly for me a tune isn’t really worth more than a couple hundred for the performance gains. My 2 cents.

 

Tune packs from various tuners for the 3.5L N/A Tacoma only run a couple hundred bucks.

For example, YotaWerx is $200. CVC is $200 I believe. I think KD is $300 but I could be wrong. $200-300.

The software costs an additional amount but you're also paying for the ability to flash your truck at your convenience and the ability to edit unlocked files if you want.

If you pay a tuner to flash your truck instead, you're paying for their time, the cost of registering your VIN, their own overhead as they'll be then paying the creator of the tune they're flashing, and giving them a profit to take home (it's naive for anyone to think that product service should be done for free).

 

To be fair, Mat was offering the Dongle upgrade to VFtuner for free at the time he was banned from TW. I think he said over 80% of the users had taken him up on it at that point. And i've seen posts of his recently doing it for free for some people.

He upgraded my tablet account to a VFtuner account for free (i bought a used tactrix cable off TW).

I'm running the latest kdmax tune now, and it's a significant upgrade over OVT2.0, which was a significant upgrade over 04B04.

 

The various tunes/tune packs are useless without the $400 software, for a total of 6-700 dollars US. Hardly a couple hundred.

 

With that logic, the tunes should be free to the community. Effectively saying that anyone's time and effort is worthless and the tunes should be distributed at no cost because people want them for cheaper.

If you buy an accessport from Cobb Tuning for a Subaru or Mazdaspeed, you'll pay $650 just for the handheld, without a tune.

 

I think there are two different complaints being conflated into one.

1.) I am unhappy with the insane process of licensing and re-licensing and etc.... totally shitty process for the customer.

2.) People that think the tune itself wasn't/isn't worth it

I am in camp 1 with this whole process being overly complicated with name/licensing changes and installs without turning your windows machine wide open to the internet because ANY security software totally forks it up. Years and god only knows how much money and I have to email,wait,upgrade,wait,email,downgrade,upgrade,wait,new license, wait, another payment, broken software, wait its ridiculous.

Shockingly it isn't, I know right!