So roughly how much would this cost for a small team, say <10? I'm assuming far too much for me, since it's not visible anywhere, but I'm still curious :)
GitHub:FI was really built with large customers in mind, places with tens to hundreds of developers bridled with restrictions that prevent them from hosting their code on GitHub.com.
There's no reason smaller companies can't use it, but for the time being we want to dedicate more attention and support to fewer well-paying customers.
We may offer a pricing model in the future that's more affordable for smaller teams, but I can't state emphatically enough that if your team doesn't have the type of restrictions mentioned earlier, you should absolutely be using GitHub.com.
Not using web services has less to do with being bridled corporate restrictions and more to do with preferring to use our nice, fully automated infrastructure. Hosting another small java servlet isn't going to make us break a sweat -- it'll be less work than trying to maintain user accounts and access controls across another web service.
For this reason, we solely use products that drop right into our standing infrastructure. I don't think we're too unusual in this, although we may be amongst the HN sample set.