Email/remote Tune Worth It?

So I just want to know if anyone has experience with these and are they worth it? I'll start by saying I know that a dyno tune is the best but the cheapest one around (coincidentally the only one around) is $500 and that's kind of steep considering I plan on boosting in the next 3 or 4 years and would have to go again after that.

My set up is as follows:
96 Gt, full K&N CAI, 90mm Trick Flow throttle body and Plenum, Full PI swap, Bassani Catback exhaust, X pipe, Dougs LT headers, and cat delete.

I plan on buying the SCT X4 but I was told by an SCT tech that with my mods the stock tunes would make my car run like trash. So that begs the question who can make a good tune for me? With the data logging feature of the X4 I'm less skeptical of getting a tune that's not in person but just wondered what the consensus was on this stuff.

Well the thing is that $500 already assumed you have a 300+ tuner. So I think that's their flat fee. But the X4 has data logging so they should be able to make a tune off that. Or are you saying even with its data logging by the time the issue shows up in the log it'll be too late?

Noobz347 said:

If you drive gently, send your data-logs back to them and receive an adjustment, then we are no longer talking about an off-the-shelf tune...

Here's the wrinkle... The data-logs are almost useless without a reading from a wideband AFR sensor and meter. The o2 sensors from the factory are narrow band and only return, "in range", "Off-scale high", and "off-scale low" . They are little more than a 'switch' and will not provide the data necessary to tweak your tune into the sweet spot. What you get instead are more 'best guesses'.

God help you if there's anything at all wrong in the engine bay (say, a small vacuum leak or something) because all of your data will be useless and you'll be standing there scratching your head as to why.

Click to expand...

That's a good point, I guess I'm back to square one. Dyno or die.