Bug/Issue reporting from affiliates and licensing

[garrick s]

We are a small company (<10 developers+testers+in-house PMs) and we are considering switching to JIRA from Fogbugz for project & development tracking and, possibly, issue tracking. Our company has multiple affiliates. There 10+ such affiliates, each may have more than 1 individual working on/with the product. I'd say the closest analog is a reseller to make it simple.They currently report bugs, issues, make suggestions, etc. via Fogbugz and, also, quite frequently directly, via email to in-house personnel. The questions I have are:

1. Licensing for this scenario - do we need 1 license each or is there a 'global login' license for the affiliates to report issues? If so, is there a ways to limit viewing of issue threads to the issue/bug/suggestion reporter via his/hers id, if they are using a global login? 
2. Is there a way (an add on/listener in Exchange/Outlook) to capture emails?
3. Finally, we would ideally also like to report crashes/errors from the application directly. Is there an api for that? We currently have the ability to send an email, so that's the fallback provision, which obviously depends on your answer to question 2 above. If there is API, does it consume 1 license? Please note that our software is hosted on multiple servers and different web servers on each server, so technically we would be logging in from 3 physical servers (and also test/dev environments) and about 20 different sites.
4. Depending on your answers above, is there a hybrid pricing for small # of developers/project managers/etc. but larger number of people that have a much limited access to the system - e.g. see status of their bug/issues but not more?

[Boris Berenberg]

I would recommend your remote users each use their own individual license seat. You can protect users from seeing each others tickets using issue security: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Issue-level+Security

JIRA can also connect to your mail server and create issues from there: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Creating+Issues+and+Comments+from+Email

We do have an API which you can see at: https://docs.atlassian.com/jira/REST/latest/ When connecting to the API, you will need to authenticate. You can use 1 set of credentials, or ask people to enter their own and submit that if you want. 

There isn't really hybrid pricing like you are requesting, but one option would be to use JIRA Service Desk: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-desk/pricing which is based around having an unlimited number of customers that can only access a very rudimentary interface. For example, you could have 10 JIRA licenses, and 3 Service Desk agent seats. The 10 JIRA seats are used by your internal team. The 3 Service Desk seats are used by 3/10 of the JIRA license holders which are the most common ones to communicate with "customers" or resellers in your case.