Why VETuner costs £10

VETuner has been getting very little traction. It is a long way from covering its costs, so I thought I’d do a bit of promotion. I posted about it in a Speeduino group on Facebook.

I got a lot of comments and likes and even a couple of sign-ups! However, one comment made me pause.

I know it's only a tenner a year, but locking features that don't cost a penny to serve like tooth logger etc kind of adds a sour taste to the experience, I get it though for things like tune backups/storage/versioning etc

I started to write a response, but I deleted before posting as I wanted a bit more thinking time and room to lay out my case. I will be posting a link to this post back there.

Serving bytes on a wire is effectively free. The thing that costs is putting those bytes in the right order that they do something useful¹ It isn’t about the cost of delivering the bytes, it’s about the value they represent.

Tooth logger is an interesting case. It does fall between two camps. The aim of VETuner was that in its default Focus Mode, it was for people who were new to the ECU and were having trouble getting their engine to run for the first time. This is free functionality. It focusses on that as the prevailing tool in the market Tuner Studio basically shows you every possible knob you can twiddle and it can be overwhelming. If you know what you are doing, you can pay £10 to unlock the entire functionality if you see the value in that. Tooth logging can indicate configuration problems that prevent starting, but the charts it generates are not user-friendly. I have seen many posts of charts with comments of ‘what does this mean?’

(This screenshot is unrealistic as I just captured it from an ECU connected to Ardustim so the signal is ‘perfect’)

So Start Doctor does capture tooth logs and puts them in the zip report, but it doesn’t show them as a newbie is unlikely to be able to interpret them. However, if they share that zip package with someone experienced, they can see the tooth log. If Start Doctor cannot make sense of the tooth log, it will tell the user that something is up in that area in its diagnosis. It has its use in diagnosing a start issue, but it is not useful to someone who doesn’t understand what it means.

Circling back to the original complaint, the flippant answer is if you don’t think all of this is worth £10, I’m not forcing you to buy it. Feel free to pay Tuner Studio $70 for the same. Feel free to implement it yourself. Developing software is free if your time is worthless.

The more nuanced answer is I don’t want unhappy users. If you sign up for it, you can cancel in the first month and not get charged at all. If the tooth logger does not meet your needs, you have no financial risk. If you help me fix a bug, I’ll refund your money. However, I do value my own time and expertise, so I’m not going to give that away for free if people see some value in it.