I was wondering the same thing. I've had good luck with a couple of Allen Bradley items bought from China that were much cheaper, and I hear others had too. I came to realize that they are selling them cheaper because they are distributed cheaper in China because all of the competition over there. Who ever is selling it on Ebay is probably violating their distributor agreement though.
I'm not trying to start the debate of free/paid for software, as I understand the argument for both, and im not trying to debate whether circumventing your local distributor is right or wrong, but sometimes budgets are budgets. Obviously no one wants a piece of s**t, and there's always a different level of need for every project, so you do what you can (Legally of course). But you're always rolling the dice when you buy something "used".
Is the software for the Weintek and Maple free? I remember looking at maple a while ago, and their software was around 1200$ ish but I could be mistaken. I ended up going with Red Lion for a number of different reasons, but am curious about the software
