You can go to a community college for two years and then transfer to a four-year university, which will generally save substantial amounts of money.
Hell, it might not even work to transfer from one university to another! I transferred after 2 years at a satellite campus of Penn State (where the curriculum is identical to the main campus) to a state school, stayed in Computer Science, and had to cram 4 years of CS at that school into 3 years just to be able to cut some of my losses because apparently taking intro to CS at a school that does it in C means you have to take it over again in a school that does it in Java.
Well, you certainly can't do it willy-nilly - you need to have a idea of where you're going after community college and what your major is. Generally, most community colleges work with local universities to ensure that their programs will transfer wholesale if you take the prescribed courses, which do not necessarily match up with what the community college recommends for other students.
I have indeed heard a lot of horror stories about transferring credits in general between universities or colleges - if the institutions don't have a relationship that keeps transfer students in mind it seems you're pretty much boned.
I did this, following community college direction, and all my courses transferred and I wasn't set back at all, though I was highly front-loaded on general education rather than CS-specific courses. At the time community college tuition and fees was $800/semester, while university tuition and fees was $5000/semester. That would have been a substantial savings! As it was, I really lost money, because I would have qualified for a full scholarship to my university academically anyway, but I lost it since transferred in and ended up paying the next three years (one year of grad school) out of my minimum-wage-earning pocket.
My personal experience at a couple schools is the smaller the school the more often exceptions will be granted. Or maybe rephrased across all sizes of school the (someone) will grant 10 exceptions per year and maybe 1% of students will try to get an exception, which is awesome odds if its a 500 person private college, not so awesome odds at a larger 5K person school. So even if on paper, calculus won't transfer, if you make a bit of a pest of yourself the dean or dept chair will eventually sign off. Also you can game the system, OK you won't accept my calculus transfer credits, very well, I will get instructor permission to take diffeqs without pre-reqs and when I pass diffeqs I will petition the dept head yet again for calc credit.