Never forget the sudden GitLab price-hike and flavor feature changes just a few years ago. I was literally about to go from free to paid, when the pricing doubled nearly overnight. I left for Gitea.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35144974

Have you looked at migrating to Forgejo? It’s a fork of Gitea though I think it has diverged significantly since the fork.

I migrated my Gitea instance to Forgejo, it was pretty painless

I accidentally upgraded my Gitea instance beyond the fork which makes this more difficult...