Generally, this sort of discussion is better on Discourse (https://discourse.phabricator-community.org) than here.

We considered doing something like this in the past, but we haven't had luck with community funding when we've tried it before. For example, we explicitly tried funding T4245 (in I3). This raised only $525, of which $300 was from @chad (who was a Phacility employee at the time, and just trying to get the ball rolling) over nearly a year, despite significant interest in the task itself.

Although we didn't explicitly community fund it, another task which I think is informative here is T9640. The actual amount we charged the company which eventually funded it was $300, and it took about 2 hours from the time they prioritized it until it was implemented. But there was a large amount of discussion about prioritization for a year or so before that, some of which was critical of how we prioritize things.

More broadly, I think efforts in this vein in other projects (like Gratipay and BountySource) have generally not been successful. It looks like the most popular projects on Gratipay are earning less than $10K/year, and only two users on Bountysource have earned more than $500/month in the last 90 days.

And, in general, when we've suggested that users pay us for our time in the past, more have responded with frustration or indignation than interest in learning more.

Based on these experiences, I believe community funding is very unlikely to find enough support to get anywhere.

If you think there's an real opportunity here, you're welcome to sort of perform arbitrage on support pacts: collect $1,000 from the community, buy a month of support, and direct us to work on whatever the community asked for. You could probably even do this through an established platform like Kickstarter (although I'm not sure if the Kickstarter rules allow this, exactly). If they don't, IndieGoGo, or GoFundMe, or some other similar platform might work. If you do pursue this, I'd recommend assuming it will be a huge amount of work and taking a cut of the money for your project management services (e.g., raise $2K, give us $1K, keep $1K for yourself). Generally, we recognize this kind of project management work as valuable and are open to third parties building businesses on top of our support services if they're adding value.

I think some of the other challenges with this idea include:

Many Users Will Never Pay: A large part of the community isn't willing to pay anything for Phabricator. In fact, a large part of the community wasn't willing to even take the time to file good bug reports or feature requests by following simple instructions when access to this install was open (see T12134 for concrete details). This is just a part of building open source.

Overhead: Small transactions ("a buck or two") will mostly be eaten up by credit card processing fees. And, if you collect a large number of small transactions, especially for a future product, you may need to deal with a lot of fraud / chargeback issues. (Using an external platform could help with this, but this is a reason why we'd be hesitant to do the payment processing ourselves.)

Large Businesses Often Can't Crowdfund: Larger businesses often can't commit funds to this sort of thing. Small businesses just give employees credit cards; large businesses have separate purchasing departments and vendor management personnel, and are often unequipped for this kind of purchase. They're also more likely to have legal departments who want additional assurances (nondisclosure, poaching, indemnity, etc). Basically, any install that can spend more than $1,000/month is probably better served by a support pact than by crowdfunding, so you're unlikely to see support from large contributors.

Nebulous Nature of Development: Part of the reason we've moved away from feature-by-feature prioritization and toward a more traditional support model is that many requests from installs don't parcel up nicely into feature requests. Some do, but most of the stuff that businesses are actually interested in paying us for don't.

Upshot:

• The evidence we have today suggests that crowdfunding is not worth pursuing.
• If you want to try it, you can try to fund a community support pact via Kickstarter/IndieGoGo/GoFundMe (just make it clear that you are not affiliated with Phacility) and ask for feature development in that way. If this was successful, we'd be more open to considering upstream crowdfunding.