I do still like the idea of something I can host myself, but it’s feature list looks good enough that I’ll still consider it (and the price seems reasonable).

Thanks again for the suggestion. Good luck with you own, Micro-ISV. Don’t forget to let everyone know when you get a blog up

I still have no affiliation with them; I can’t say if they are responsive or friendly or anything like that.

Here is what led me to that decision. As a microISV, I expect to do most of the help desk work myself to start. However I do other consulting and need to be away from the base computer. Thus a very important feature for me was ticket escallation via mail. With their setup, I can dynamically configure unanswered tickets to be forwarded to my blackberry or cell phone after an interval.

I also wanted mail-in tickets without registration. Foolish as I may be, I believe it is important to make pre-sales support as easy as possible for potential customers.

I spent several hours getting one of the PHP support desk packages to meet my needs. Then I found these guys: Ten dollars a month flat fee per operator. So if you have three people and never need them to be logged in at the same time you can get by on one operator license. Thus $120/year — or about 1 third of what I spent (in my time) trying to select a package.