I have played through the first few months several times with version 18 and I have been trying to balance the production costs of Jackal armour against the alien weapon ramp ups.
Jackal armor currently costs $30k a unit and it starts to become fairly vital once you hit the second month and alien weapons start to 1 hit kill.
Currently the high cost feels like an inhibitor when you are trying to get yourself established, as it is something that you almost must produce in a large quantity if you want to keep up.
I use a 15 soldier rotation at the start of the game and trying to equip these units with armour can become a bit of a headache early on and the funding for this is heavily affected by the number of UFO's that you can shoot down in the first 4 weeks before you hit the bigger UFO'S.
My suggestion would be to reduce the cost of Jackal to 15k a unit. This way production of the armour doesn't cripple your efforts to expand/build hunters/interceptors at the beginning, but still requires some thought and planning.