If you're comfortable with slightly shadier methods, there's "grey market" access to most BMW tools.

With the F and G series ISTA is the "gold standard"

Can confirm. I paid a guy on a BMW forum about $100 for the vehicle interface, which is ethernet to a J1962 connector (aka "OBD II Port"). That also included the e-sys software (Windows only). A few years later I needed an update to the software and found a guy on ebay who charged me about $75. So, those might be some places to look for this kind of thing.

Pro tip for any BMW owners, MHD is a tuning company that makes great hardware for this.

Even if you're scared of tuning your engine, their dongle originally for that purpose is one of the fastest interfaces and supports Wifi.

The difference in speed is large enough I stopped needing a battery charger to flash my ECU and TCU (would still recommend one though since you are technically playing russian roulette doing that...)

Bonus: If you do care about tuning, they have some excellent off the shelf tunes to go with it

The OBD adapter should be cheaper nowadays; most folks on the BMW forums will charge ~$100 for coding services, and it's generally "any time you need anything changed, it's free."

If you're in the bay area, there are a few local folks who are happy to do it!

Esys is available fairly easily: https://f87.bimmerpost.com/forums/showpost.php?p=26123409&po... (but as you say, there's some megaupload and a cracker involved).

Whoa! Thanks for sharing that. I've been scared to even change my battery myself because it requires interfacing with the computer. I didn't realize there was a BMW sanction way of accessing the APIs.