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There’s good reason that the software industry is moving toward cloud-delivery: hardware requirements, maintenance and upgrades are all issues of the past when software is hosted in the cloud. There also is added connectivity that comes from cloud-hosted software, as software systems can more easily connect with each other.

But there’s a big downside to cloud solutions, at least from the customer perspective: cost. Recently I went shopping for a customer relationship management (CRM) system for my small business, for instance, and even the cheapest SMB editions were $40/month. That doesn’t sound like much, but over the course of a year that amounts to $480. By year three, this CRM intended for my small business would cost a whopping $1,440, on average. If I had bought an on-premise CRM it would have cost a third or less of that amount. The cloud can be costly.

This holds true for other areas of software, too, such as auto dialers.

With your average cloud-hosted auto dialer, a business will pay on average of $800 per month for a four-seat license. This is acceptable given the usefulness of auto dialer software for most businesses, but it need not cost that much.

While a business might pay $800 per month for a hosted auto dialer, an on-premise auto dialer solution such as Spitfire runs only $620 per month for four users with its FlexPay financing. That’s a $180 savings—per month.

Spitfire’s FlexPay lets a business purchase the auto dialer on a monthly installment basis, not unlike hosted solutions. The big difference is that eventually the business gets to keep the software, instead of continuing to pay a monthly fee!

While hosted solutions keep costing a business money, after a year a business will own the Spitfire solution and the monthly cost will go down to zero.

The cloud has its advantages, but it doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes on-premise software still is the way to go.