Lightweight Project Management WebApps

Some colleagues and I are considering working on some projects together. We are in the same city, although expect to collaborate on the projects mostly remotely. As such we need a lightweight and cheap web-based project management application. No doubt, a classical situation and a classical manifest need.

We don't need many features other than cross & per-project collaboration on discussion, tasks, time sheets, calender, and milestones (maybe some more?). At this stage there are a handful of us, and we have an expectation of at least four core projects for at least 4 months, minor needs my any standards.

Email is the first-pass solution, proving persistence and threaded conversations. It sucks because the structure of conversations is so limited. The natural next step would be to employ a host of free services, likely Google docs+calender (or equivilent) where spreadsheets are used for time management, tickets, to-do's, etc, and core information is persisted in documents. This is obviously a better solution given the variation in granularity and structure, and it's free.

I'd rather a specialised and integrated solution over a hodgepodge of online ad hoc documents. The next natural step are specialised solutions. The first batch of lightweight project management web applications our team came up with based on experience/exposure were as follows (priced for our needs):

• Basecamp: ($24 USD/M) Slick, simple, and lots of press/fanboys.
  
• Goplan: ($10 USD/M) Really simple, basic features are all there, not as pretty as some other options.
  
• Harvest: ($40 USD/M) Looks good, same old set of features + invoicing
  
• Zoho: ($8 USD/M) Feels more like a forum with additional features, still good
  
• Liquid Planner: ($70 USD/M) Really slick, heavy, feels more like a desktop application
• FogBugz: ($100 USD/M) (on demand) Project management with a software engineer focus
  

In terms of features, they all provide a reasonable fit, some heavier than others. I like the basecamp solution (maybe even backpack), although I suspect only because I'm interested in assessing it against it's press. I also like FogBugz, but not their on demand pricing.

While checking out each solution, it was clear that a "demo" account is the best way IMHO to promote your application. Sign-ups with a trial may be better for customer retention (my assumption), although for drive-by assessment, demo accounts (provided by goplan and zoho) were really useful. I also found very few 'round-ups' for this class of application (see this ask YC). I'm sure they're out there, so where are they?

The final step would be to take on the responsibility of the application ourselves. The best course in this case would be to select an opensource project or buy an application and take on the hosting concerns (maybe AWS EC2). I really don't like this final case. Although it has the potential to be cheap, I have been burned by this approach of self-managed webapps in the past (environments, patching, and eventual disaster).