Perth-WRX.com - ECUtek reduces U.S. Licensing Fees

It finally had to happen....
It seems that the artificially high licensing fees charged by ECUtek are finally falling in the USA due to competition and also freely distributable ECU reflashing software. ;)
I'm sure prices will soon fall in Oz if they have not already...

They had a monopoly once but not anymore....

[COLOR=Navy]" Dear US Ecutek Partner.

The market in the US has changed for us all.

We have seen the way that even our own partners have dragged the price down of mapping Subarus and EVOs and quite honestly it has shocked us.

In the past we have tried to introduce some stability in the market. You might want to call it price control. It enabled tuners to earn good money per car. It enabled you to spend time, take care and give your customers good quality work, with a warranty. It gave you and EcuTeK a good reputation. We did not think that this was an unreasonable amount to earn considering the investment that most of you have in your business. As you know every time you open the hood on a customer's car you are taking a risk and making money in the automotive business is hard enough, so the chance to make a good profit for good work, using a good tool has been good for you.

However the market has dictated that customers do not seem to want to pay for the luxury of good work, skilled tuning and back up, therefore there are no longer any pricing recommendations from our point of view.

For this reason we are reducing the license cost to you . We will use the current exchange rate and invoice in UK Pounds but try to make sure that you are paying as close to the same as possible. With this change in pricing we will now strictly enforce a minimum order quantity of 5 licenses. There are no changes to the pricing for EasyECU.

In the US only, there seems to be a culture (with a few notable exceptions amongst our dealers) of "let's make things as cheap as possible" combined with "my product is better then yours because it is cheaper".

As someone who deals with companies all over the world on a daily basis I can say that this method of marketing is almost totally unique to the US. What it results in is that the price drops until such time that there is no profit in the work for reputable companies with sensible facilities, staff and costs. This in turn means that the work is being carried out by less skilled people who do not have the infrastructure or the financial stability to offer customers, warranty, support, updates and in a lot of cases even half decent work.

How can anyone map a 30,000 dollar car for less than the price of a vacuum cleaner and give it the time and skill that it requires?

Taking this discussion further how can you, our partners expect us to provide high quality products, development, support (which is almost 24 hour), training, a North American office without a license cost.

I would urge you to spare a moment to think how much money you have made from Ecutek and how much support we have given on a technical and sales basis to you. Think of other suppliers that you have for highly technical products and compare the quality of their products, support and training to ours (Have any of you ever tried to get telephone or e-mail support for a PC?).

This has been possible because of the licenses that you buy. Please do not think of these as some sort of expensive e-mail. These give you the ability to make money. They provide us with an income that enables us to spend over a million dollars per year on development staff, equipment, overheads and resources.

Some people reading this mail are now using openecu to program customer cars. Some people reading this are openly advertising the fact and are saying in forums that EcuTeK offers the customer nothing that openecu offers. Please don't be fooled into thinking that openecu is the result of thousands of hours work by highly skilled people who understand electronics, software, engineering and vehicles. It is not.

It is always easier to imitate than innovate.

Some of you have bemoaned the fact they we are not developing anything new. You could not be more wrong. However, in our position, would you release new work only to have it appear for free and be used against you by people who we thought were loyal customers and had made significant profits using our products?

As you MAY know the MY07-08 Legacy has a different ECU that cannot be supported with current EcuTeK software or any other product and requires us to develop new hardware and software. This will be fitted to the WRX and STi very shortly. We have been working on this for over a year now. Have the people responsible for openecu been working on this for a year already? Will they be offering this new software and hardware for free to you BEFORE we bring out a product? Do we release this new product to you and see it appear for free soon after and watch the price of mapping these cars descend to 99 dollars?

You tell us what to do because we are currently discussing whether to offer new products into the US market.

We are fortunate that we have a lot of customers around the world that DO have the attitude that they want to offer high quality work and they want to make a profit as well. We also have customers at the highest possible level within Mitsubishi and Subaru (as well as other manufacturers that we work with) who place great value on the work that we do.

We hope that you appreciate something of what we have done for you and that this price reduction will help you compete with a free product.

If you are in any doubt about the origins of this free software then see below just one screen shot that shows our unique data that appear in the openecu products. Also study the names and letter capitalisation. Ask yourself if you were writing software could you come up with EXACTLY the same names for 50 maps and capitalise them the same as us? As well as shortening words like "Advance Mult for Boost Disable" as used in both pieces of software?

All the best

David Power"[/COLOR]

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