Question

The clear benefit of the On Demand is having everything taken care of and just being able to have FogBugz available without any other effort than paying the monthly bill.

In the case of a 5 user account after 12 months the On Demand lifetime cost climbs much faster than a self-hosted with an attached maintenance contract of 10 cents per day per user.

1 Year

• 5 Person - Self Hosted + Maintenance Contract = $999 + $182.50 = $1181.50
• 5 Person - On Demand = 12 * $25 = $1500

2 Years

• 5 Person - Self Hosted = $1364
• 5 Person - On Demand = $3000

My question is that the only advantage of On Demand - the ease of use (convenience), when compared to self hosting? Is that what is reflected in the pricing model?

Answer 1

Capital expenditures vs. Expense, Internal Maintenance, Uptime... those are all worthy of consideration too.

My last company used the hosted version, and it worked quite well for us, even though it was more expensive. We didn't have an IT department, crappy bandwidth from the office and wanted to manage fewer servers, not more. But with any service offering, your mileage may vary.

Answer 2

Another important consideration is whether you intend to do any mods to FogBugz (The self-hosted version comes with source-code) or want to use/create any plug-ins that for some reason might not get approved for installation on FBOD.

Also, if you need direct access to the DB for mods/reporting then FBOD might not be for you either.