I think it's worth the money to at least be a premium member here. There are 2 freeware programs BCTool and FreeScan that seem to work fine. The ability to download directly from the database is priceless in my opinion. You definitely need to know how to program the scanner manually but the software can be a big help there as well giving you a good idea of how things get setup in the scanner.
Imagine having to input and Alpha Tag every talkgroup in a large system it takes hours with the software it's done in minutes.