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>IF IF IF you have one complex report, it's probably not worth it, if you spend all day writting complex reports that are used to make critical business decisions it seem like it would cost you MORE to NOT use the tool that would make you more productive.
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As soon as you get one person asking for that report in Excel, or Word, or PDF, it's suddenly really nice to have built the report in Crystal as opposed to VFP. Once you have a good set of classes to deal w/CR, it's pretty easy to just create the report inside of Crystal instead of VFP. Being able to take a detailed report and roll it up (for drill down reporting), or be able to drop a nice graph on it, or easily create a cross-tab report, or export to PDF, Excel, Word, PDF, etc. and now you're way ahead of the game than if you had done the report in VFP.

I still use VFP reports for quick and dirty apps, but as soon as I'm working on anything that has the possibility of becoming more complex (or is already complex), I switch to using CR. I agree with you, it's MUCH cheaper in the long run, just in time saved.