That oversimplifies the cost though. Take your typical 200 person company. Maybe 20 of them develop using Jira, 30 more create issues, and then 10 more poke their head in there so they can check on developers and project managers. So of those 60 registered users 40 of them spend just about 20 minutes a month in it. You still have to pay for them though. The problem grows because we need to run similar numbers for every Saas this 200 person company uses. You've got Jira for project management, Zen/FreshDesk for support issues, Mailchimp for spamming customers, CMS, CRM, payroll, etc.
You end up with many many hours of employee time per month spent on licenses for SaaS products that you never own, can't control, and often can't extract your data from if you want to bail.
So yeah, as a middle manager trying to cut costs, any free alternative to a SaaS product sounds good to me. It beats dribbling out licenses piecemeal and living without core functionalities (looking at you monday.com) to stay within the lowest payment tier where I can see that 10 minutes-employee-time per month.
I admit that paints products like Jira in a bad light and ignores all the upsides (no hosting issues, upgrades are automatic, etc.).
You end up with many many hours of employee time per month spent on licenses for SaaS products that you never own, can't control, and often can't extract your data from if you want to bail.
So yeah, as a middle manager trying to cut costs, any free alternative to a SaaS product sounds good to me. It beats dribbling out licenses piecemeal and living without core functionalities (looking at you monday.com) to stay within the lowest payment tier where I can see that 10 minutes-employee-time per month.
I admit that paints products like Jira in a bad light and ignores all the upsides (no hosting issues, upgrades are automatic, etc.).