I’m not certain you’ve done all the homework it would take to understand the costs involved, and just how much tax is collected by the station owner.
Assuming you get the structure and service module for free, you still have to pay the fuel cost to operate it. A manufacturing module in a raitaru (for the fuel cost savings) will consume 216 units of fuel per day. That is an expense of 4,000,000 isk at today’s prices to avoid paying your taxes to someone else who would otherwise be footing that fuel bill for you.
Just how much tax do you manage to skip out on? Not all that much. Each system has a system cost index (SCI) that determines the base tax you pay, and you WILL pay it. There is no avoiding it no matter what you do. Owning the structure does not reduce this cost. The player collected tax is a percentage of the SCI. In the case of an NPC station, this percentage is 10%, while I see structures in the area with much lower rates.
For people running jobs in my structures, I typically collect a couple thousand isk per job. At that rate the structure would finally break even at 2,000 jobs of whatever type people are running per day.
Looking at it another way, the NPCs with their crazy high 10% tax rate would have to tax you for 4 million isk each day before owning your structure was saving you money. That’s 40 million worth of SCI tax payed for your jobs. At a SCI of 5%, which is on the high side in my area, that’s an industry production rate of 800 million isk each day worth of finished goods. If a group can manage this, then it seems a bit far fetched that group can’t afford a Raitaru and its associated modules. The raitaru has additional benefits, true, but you can have your cake and eat it too for an almost negligible tax and maybe the cost of an office.
I haven’t had to beg anyone to use their structures. I’ve only had to ask. There’s a lot of difference between begging and trying to strike a mutually beneficial business arrangement. There is always the danger that someone else will pull the plug on your industrial jobs or clones, and that can be a major concern for a budding industrial group. That’s why you talk to people and get to know who it is you’re entrusting your affairs to, and to what extent you can trust them to.
Again, I am not trying to say small structures are not a good idea. I want them, too, for all the gameplay options the current structures do not support as well as the POS. I just feel like people don’t realize the benefits of ownership are more in not having to trust someone else than it is in any kind of cost savings for the small groups we’re talking about.