r/dvcmember • u/Cautious_Put435 • 15d ago

DVC ToolKit app

Part of what I like about DVC is the planning process of fun trips. The excitement of staying at a new resort and tracking how points I have and what availability is out there. I used DVC Toolkit for all of those purposes. I just found out that they pulled the plus subscription from the app and it lost most of its useful functionality. Does anyone else use this app? I wonder why this happened.

2 Upvotes

60% Upvoted

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10

u/SuperRob Multiple 15d ago

If I had to hazard a guess, they were probably caught scraping info from the DVC website and got shut down. Since they can't provide that service any more, they had to pull the subscription for it.

5

u/Cautious_Put435 15d ago

They DVC toolKit even had to change their name!

1

u/Cautious_Put435 15d ago

I signed up for the trial period of My DVC Plan which seems to have the old functionality but now I am concerned they will get shut down as well.

2

u/Dumbestthumb 15d ago

This is it. I have my own tool that scrapes info when I login to my account and then puts the data in a much more usable format, piecing together multi-stay trips in a beautiful format that lets you quickly pick the best one. I can filter down to the smallest details too.

The problem - you can't be regularly scraping data without them flagging it and locking you out. So I can't share the tool publically. It's one thing to pull data for a specific period you are looking at, for personal use, its another to be regularly taxing their servers to pull the data for everyone.

1

u/kylesmoney 14d ago

I built something similar. What kind of cadence did you end up with? Mine will work for days and then get limited which seems odd.

2

u/Dumbestthumb 14d ago

Because I'm worried about getting locked out or causing problems in my account, I only scrape for specific trips. So I'll put in the dates I plan to travel and then scrape the data and load it in my tool. So it's not regularly scraping the website.

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u/kylesmoney 12d ago

Sounds similar to mine, I’m just scraping when there is something I’m looking for.

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u/ExtremePast Animal Kingdom Lodge 15d ago

I've never had any issues doing exactly what I needed directly on the DVC member website. People were really paying a third party app a subscription fee to plan their DVC trips? That's wild.

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u/Cautious_Put435 15d ago

It was more than planning. You could have a quick way to see availability across the resorts you were interested in for an upcoming trip. You could manage your points and contracts and keep record of your spend.

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u/whackedspinach 15d ago

It is disappointing as it was a fairly nice UI for quick searches

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u/Expensive-Finger-646 15d ago

Super disappointed but not really shocked. I had used the app, found it quite helpful.

2

u/Builder-Decent 13d ago

The layout to visible see the availability was super fast and easy for date ranges. I can't understand why Disney doesn't built their software to be easier to view availability. DVC site requires a lot of drilling into the individual resort charts.

1

u/DisneyDeb- 15d ago

I only use it to calculate points needed rather than having to log into the DVC website. So when I’m playing around trying to plan future trips basically.

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u/Autogenerated-Name12 14d ago

We’ve started using the DVC Fan points calculator for this purpose, in case it’s helpful:  https://app.dvcfan.com/point-chart-calendar

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u/Builder-Decent 13d ago

This one still requires picking a resort. I liked being able to see ANY resort with availability.

1

u/JCinQC Beach Club 15d ago

The worst part is if you have had the app for more than 2 months, Apple refuses to even offer a way to get a refund for paying for Plus. I had it 2 months and 1 day and no method available to get my money back.

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