Well I bought a cloned/pirate version of VCDS from a UK seller on ebay which cost me £57.00 which looks identical pretty much in every way to the original, not one of these bright blue see through plug & cable ones for £5 - £20. So far it's read and allowed me to erase any fault codes and hasn't uploaded any nasty bugs to my car, I may not be able to update the software but my cars 2005 so it's hardly likely to suddenly change. I'm not the most gifted person technically and I never bought it with any plans to use it to change the parameters of anything but simply so I had an idea of what if anything was wrong with the car before booking it into to a garage and got ripped off.
I'll probably be exiled for such blaspheming but personally I think prices of the original unit are kept artificially high for a product that is years old.