In practice, the trial period exists: just sign up and disable your instance before the first invoice, or don't ever pay us. You don't need to give us a credit card or pay anything to sign up.

We could make it more clear that we expect/allow this.

Because Phabricator is open source and we're targeting a serious business client base, I'm not sure how much of a barrier the lack of a trial period will really present. With a service like, say, Dropbox, users might not really understand the product until they can use it and are more price-sensitive, so offering a trial makes a lot more sense.

It's technically easy to either make the "try it for 30 days and just don't pay us if you don't like it" workflow more obvious, or not generate an invoice for the first billing period, but I'd like to see more evidence that any serious customers are sensitive to these things before pursing them.

I'm mostly interested in making the workflow more obvious, or even having it be an A/B test we run to understand these things. Mostly, it's a significant barrier for most people to install Phabricator. Even myself on a laptop took about an hour, and that's knowing how to. Creating an account and launching an instance is maybe a 1 minute process.