the tl;dr is that we have a certain amount we people at the company (think sales, admins etc) who don't write code etc, but need to be able to see and comment on certain content. They really skew the pricing out of range.

I get that from a hosting perspective, they're essentially the same cost to Phacility, but I have to ask ;)

Hey, that's why its beta!

We view Phabricator in 3 pieces, Code Management, Project Management, and Team Communication. It may be that your team only uses 1 of those portions, but we feel the platform is best when everyone communicates across all three. So maybe Sales doesn't use Differential, but they'd use Conpherence and Phriction. Our rough plan is anything we need to build Phabricator, will eventually end up in Phabricator. It's not strictly a tool for engineers. It has features for just about everyone in the company.

We've attempted to price Phacility as fair as possible. Most competitors we looked at sold 'packs' of users, so if you have 21 engineers, you have to buy 40 seats. We felt 1 user, 1 seat was as simple as we could get. We have some expectation that missing pricing models will get filled in by other companies at lower costs, lesser services. Those are something we expect more budget conscious business to explore. And then there is always self-host.

The main reason we expect people to want to use Phacility is twofold. First, that the cost of maintaining their own Phabricator instance (updating, maintaining hardware, keeping backups, etc) time wise was greater than what they'd pay us. Second, you'd have more direct access to the core team for support on issues.