Tuning file portal software cost over five years

We sell one of the products in the table below. That is declared here rather than in a footnote, because a cost comparison written by a vendor is worth reading only if it tells you where it stands and then shows its working. Ours is not the lowest line in the table, and we have not arranged the table so that it is.

One other thing before the numbers. RemapDash does not write, calibrate or supply tuning files. It is the platform a file service runs on. Some of the products below include tuning in the price and some do not, so read the inclusions column before you read the totals.

How much does tuning file portal software cost over five years?

A flat £129 per month portal with no setup fee comes to £7,413 over five years. A £199 per month portal with a £599 setup fee comes to £12,539. A self-hosted one-time licence can be under £1,000 before you add your own server. Per-file pricing has no five-year total at all until you know your volume.

That spread is not a discount. It is four different pricing structures, and structure decides the five-year number far more than the monthly figure does.

All figures taken from each vendor's own published pricing on 23 August 2026. Ben Sky's portal, widget and website prices are on their order store; their marketing pages do not show them. Their website is advertised as a "starting from" price, so a site with more than five pages may cost more than the figure used here. Their checkout states totals excluding VAT, so every Ben Sky figure on this page is ex VAT. We are not VAT registered, so our prices are the whole amount and nothing is added at checkout. The table compares both excluding VAT, which is the fair comparison if you are VAT registered and reclaim it. If you are not registered, the money actually leaving your account for their three products is £447.59 a month, and about £28,293 over five years, against £7,413 from us. Prices change — check before you commit to anything, including us. Our own £7,413 is 6 × £74.50 (£447) plus 54 × £129 (£6,966); we show it that way rather than as "from £74.50", because "from" is how a six-month intro rate gets used to make a five-year number look like something it is not.

Two vendors are deliberately absent. Automotiv3's portal price could not be read from their own site, and we will not print a figure for a named competitor that we have not seen ourselves. Ben Sky's WinOLS bot is quoted on enquiry only, so it has no published price to compare.

The price we print is the price you pay, anywhere in the world

The price we print is the price you pay. No added tax. RemapDash is not VAT registered, so £129 a month is £129 a month — nothing added at checkout, no VAT line on the invoice, whether you are in Manchester, Madrid or Melbourne. There is no VAT question to answer, because there is no VAT.

Everyone else in this table is charging from a VAT-registered business — Ben Sky Limited is GB421266231, and their checkout quotes ex-VAT totals. What that means for you depends on where you are and what you can produce at checkout:

• UK, VAT registered. 20% goes on and you reclaim it. It costs you nothing but the cashflow, which is why the table above compares ex VAT on both sides. We are not going to pretend otherwise to make our number look better.
• UK, not VAT registered. 20% goes on and it stays gone. On their portal, widget and website that is £74.60 a month plus £239.60 of VAT on their two setup fees — £4,715 over five years you simply do not pay us.
• Outside the UK. Whether a UK supplier adds VAT depends on the rules where you are, whether you can give them a valid business or VAT number, and how their checkout is set up. Some overseas buyers are charged and cannot reclaim a penny of it, because it is a tax in somebody else's country. We are not going to tell you what any other vendor will do at their checkout — ask them before you buy. We can only tell you what we do, which is nothing.

This is a description of our own billing, not tax advice. VAT treatment of cross-border sales depends on your circumstances and your own country's rules — check with your accountant, and ask any vendor directly what their checkout will add before you commit.

Why does a setup fee matter so much in the five-year total?

A setup fee is paid once but it never amortises away. On a five-year view a £599 setup adds about £10 to every month you run, and a €500 setup adds about €8.

That is the whole point of quoting setup separately from monthly: it moves cost out of the number people compare. Nobody compares setup fees, because there is usually nothing to compare them against — you cannot tell whether £599 buys a week of engineering or an invoice line. What you can tell is the effect on the total, which is why it belongs in the total. Our position is short: no setup fee, and not "waived for a limited period" either.

What are the costs that don't appear on the pricing page at all?

Five recur in this trade: server hosting, update fees, per-file commission, storage tiers, and the add-ons that turn a headline price into a real one. None of them usually appear in a monthly figure.

Hosting. If the portal is self-hosted, the licence is not the cost — the server is, and it is yours forever, along with the patching, the backups and the two-in-the-morning outage. MyTuningPortal's one-time plan includes hosting for the first year, which is worth reading carefully: a five-year total on that plan is €1,100 plus four years of hosting, not €1,100.

Storage tiers. MyTuningPortal's €50 monthly plan is the 10 GB tier. Tuning files are small; job history, customer attachments and logs are not. A five-year total on the entry storage tier stops being a five-year total the moment you outgrow it in year two.

Add-ons. This is the one that moves the number most. Ben Sky's gains widget is £14.99 a month as advertised, but the specification most tuners actually want — no supplier branding on it, dynograph estimates, and UK registration lookups — is £134.99 a month, and the registration lookups are capped at 650. That is not a criticism of their pricing; it is an argument for reading the configurator rather than the marketing page. Ours is included, uncapped, and free to portal subscribers.

The website. A tuning company usually needs a forward-facing site as well as a portal, and in this category that is often a fourth line on the invoice. Ben Sky sell a remapping website from £39 a month plus a £599 setup fee, with up to five pages and the vehicle lookup built in. Every RemapDash portal includes a website builder with the gains lookup already in it, free, and you can add as many pages as you want — there is no page count in the price, because there is no price. You do not have to use it, and plenty of tuners keep the site they already have. But it is there, and it is not a line on the bill.

The page limit is worth pausing on, because it is the kind of thing that only bites later. A five-page site is fine on day one. It stops being fine when you want a page per service, a page per vehicle make, or a handful of local landing pages — which is exactly the point at which a tuning company starts caring about search. A capped site quietly caps that, and the cap is priced.

Automation. A WinOLS automation bot is sold separately by at least one competitor and quoted on enquiry. Ours is included in the monthly price, and it does not need a dedicated PC sitting in the corner running it. Read the WinOLS automation bot page for what it does and does not do.

Per-file commission. That gets its own section.

Does per-file commission cost more than a flat monthly fee?

Above roughly 30 to 35 files a month, per-file pricing at €3.50 to €5.00 a file costs more than a £129 flat monthly, and the gap widens every month you grow.

The arithmetic is unkind. At 60 files a month at €4 a file you are paying about €240 a month, roughly €14,400 over five years. At 150 files a month it is €600 a month. The flat fee does not move. Flat pricing means your busiest month costs the same as your quietest, which is another way of saying per-file pricing taxes your growth and takes most from you exactly when you are doing best.

To be fair to the model: below that crossover, pay-per-use is genuinely cheaper. If you are doing eight files a month, a per-file portal with no monthly fee costs you about €32 and a flat £129 subscription makes no sense. That is a real answer and we would rather give it than pretend otherwise. The question is not which model is better. It is where your volume sits relative to the crossover, and whether you expect to be there in three years. If you are at the earlier end of that curve, how to start a tuning file service covers it from the other direction.

What does a contract do to the five-year figure?

A five-year total assumes you stay five years. If you are on a contract you cannot leave, that assumption is imposed on you. If you are not, it is a forecast you can abandon at any point.

This is the part people miss. The number in the table is a projection, not a commitment, and the projection is only as good as your ability to walk away from it. We do not do contracts. Cancel any time and the five-year figure stops being your five-year figure the month you do. Worth asking every vendor before you need the answer: what is the notice period, and what happens to your data on the way out? The second half is the more important one.

Which portal is cheapest over five years?

On published pricing alone, a self-hosted one-time licence is the lowest five-year figure — TunerSuite Ultra at £699 if you never hit a busy month, before you add your own server. MyTuningPortal's monthly plan at €3,250 is the lowest cloud figure. Neither of those is us, and we would rather say so than have you discover it in four minutes.

What we would actually argue is narrower. RemapDash is the lowest five-year cost among the portals that include hosting, storage, backups, both mobile apps, unlimited registration lookups, the gains widget, a forward-facing website and the WinOLS automation bot in the monthly figure instead of charging for them separately. Change the inclusion list and a different vendor wins, which is exactly why every comparison in this category needs its inclusion list stated out loud.

Here is the test we would apply to any vendor on this page, us included: ask for the five-year total in writing, with setup, hosting, updates, storage, add-ons and per-file charges named individually. If they will give you that, you can compare them. If they will not publish pricing at all, ask why.

You can see what is in our monthly fee on the tuning file portal software page, read the honest comparison of the portals, or open an account and check the figure against your own volume.

Common questions