Managed Gitea Hosting — production-ready from $15 a month
Lightweight self-hosted Git service. Deployed on your own dedicated instance in AWS, Azure, or GCP, kept patched, backed up, and monitored by ManageStacks — standard Gitea, no lock-in.
Gitea on ManageStacks is the lightweight open-source Git host (or Forgejo, the community fork) deployed to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP region — priced flat at $29 per instance per month regardless of user or repo count, instead of the per-user pricing of GitHub Enterprise or GitLab. Full Git hosting, PRs, issues, Gitea Actions CI/CD, package registry, and LDAP/SAML SSO included. Materially cheaper than GitHub Enterprise or GitLab Premium/Ultimate, with the source code hosted in your cloud.
What does Gitea do, and why do teams deploy it?
Gitea is a lightweight, self-hosted Git service written in Go. It provides all the functionality of GitHub or GitLab for code hosting, review, and collaboration — with a fraction of the resource requirements (Gitea runs comfortably on a 1 vCPU / 1 GB VM; GitLab needs 8 GB minimum).
Gitea offers repository management, issue tracking, pull requests with code review, Gitea Actions for CI/CD (GitHub Actions-compatible workflow syntax), a container/npm/PyPI package registry, wiki documentation, and full LDAP/OAuth2/SAML SSO. It's the default self-hosted Git for teams that don't need the full GitLab feature set or don't want to pay for GitHub Enterprise.
ManageStacks also supports Forgejo — the community fork of Gitea maintained by the Codeberg team, focused on a stronger open-governance model. Both engines are compatible; pick based on your governance preference.
Self-hosting Gitea means running the Gitea binary + Postgres (or SQLite for small setups) + persistent storage for repos and LFS + SSL + Gitea Actions runners on separate hosts. ManageStacks handles it.
- Full Git repository hosting with SSH + HTTPS + LFS support
- Pull requests with review, protected branches, and required checks
- Issue tracking, project boards, milestones, and labels
- Gitea Actions — GitHub Actions-compatible CI/CD workflows
- Package registry for Docker, npm, PyPI, Maven, Cargo, and more
- LDAP, OAuth2 (GitHub, Google, Microsoft), and SAML SSO
Lightweight self-hosted Git service
What does managed Gitea hosting cost?
Flat per-app pricing, in your chosen AWS, Azure, or GCP region. No per-user pricing — a busy deployment costs the same as a quiet one.
Starter
Staging and internal tools. Dedicated instance, TLS, daily backups, managed upgrades.
Standard
Production workloads. Adds monitoring, staging environment, region choice, priority support.
Business
High-traffic and compliance workloads. Adds a high-availability replica and same-day support.
24×7 SRE retainer
Round-the-clock on-call across every hosted application, for teams that need a pager answered at 3am.
Self-hosting Gitea vs managed — what does it really cost?
The software is free. The engineer-hours are not.
Running it yourself
- Provision a VM, install Gitea binary + Postgres + Nginx by hand
- Configure SSL, DNS, LFS storage, and Gitea Actions runners separately
- Set up SSO with Keycloak or LDAP; wire team + org permissions manually
- Test upgrades in staging; run database migrations; handle runner-image updates
- Monitor repo storage growth, LFS cost, and runner queue depth on your own
On ManageStacks
- Subscribe through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace
- Gitea comes up with Postgres, LFS, SSL, and Grafana monitoring
- Gitea Actions runners deploy on Business+ plans
- Rolling version upgrades handled by us
- SSO integrated with Keycloak (on the same account) or your IdP
Gitea on ManageStacks vs the alternatives
How Gitea on ManageStacks compares to the two dominant enterprise Git hosts and self-hosted GitLab.
| Gitea on ManageStacksUs | GitHub Enterprise Cloud | GitLab Premium/Ultimate | Self-hosted GitLab CE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Managed on your AWS, Azure, or GCP | Vendor-hosted | Vendor-hosted or self-managed | You provision + operate |
| Data residency | Your cloud region | Vendor infrastructure | Vendor or yours | Your cloud region |
| Pricing basis | Flat per instance | Per user (~$21/user/mo) | Per user ($29-99/user/mo) | Your compute cost (8 GB+ RAM min) |
| CI/CD included | Gitea Actions | GitHub Actions (with metering) | GitLab CI included | GitLab CI included |
| Open source | Yes (MIT) | No (proprietary) | MIT (Community) or proprietary (Premium) | Yes (MIT) |
| User limit | Unlimited | Metered per user | Metered per user | Unlimited |
Provisioning, upgrades, backups and monitoring on your team’s plate.
What does running Gitea yourself involve?
ManageStacks deploys Gitea (or Forgejo) with Postgres, persistent storage for repos and LFS, automated SSL, and Gitea Actions runners on Business+ plans. We handle version upgrades, database backups, storage scaling, and SSO integration with Keycloak or your enterprise IdP.
Gitea key numbers
How long from subscribing to a live instance?
Subscribe
Subscribe to ManageStacks through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace.
Choose engine
Pick Gitea or Forgejo based on your governance preference.
Provision
Instance spins up with Postgres, LFS storage, SSL, and monitoring — typically 3-5 minutes.
Migrate + go live
Import repos from GitHub/GitLab via the built-in migration tool. Configure SSO. Deploy Actions runners for CI/CD.
When is self-hosting Gitea the right answer instead?
“Managed hosting is not always the correct call.”
Self-host when a platform team already runs the infrastructure and on-call rotation to operate Gitea at genuinely low marginal cost. Self-host when compliance requires an air-gapped or on-premises deployment that no hosted option can satisfy. And self-host when the deployment depends on heavy customisation with a fast internal build-deploy loop, because an internal release process will beat any managed change process.
For everyone else — teams whose engineers have better things to do than shepherd upgrades — managed hosting is cheaper than the hours it replaces.
Which cloud should Gitea run on — AWS, Azure or GCP?
For most workloads, the choice of cloud matters less than proximity: run Gitea in the same cloud and region as the applications and data it talks to, because every request between them adds a round trip. The underlying compute performs equivalently across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
In practice, an existing cloud footprint decides it. All plans support all three clouds, and moving regions later is a scheduled migration, not a rebuild.
Deepest managed-service catalog, default when there's no existing footprint
Best fit for teams already on Microsoft 365 or Entra ID
Strongest for data/analytics-adjacent workloads
Every plan supports AWS, Azure, and GCP — region choice included.
Common questions about Gitea on ManageStacks
Gitea or Forgejo — which should I pick?
Forgejo is a community-governed hard fork of Gitea (started in 2022 after Gitea Ltd formed as a for-profit). Both share the same core codebase and feature set today, and repos + configuration are compatible between them. Pick Forgejo if community governance matters to you (Codeberg team maintains it); pick Gitea if you want the original project's roadmap.
How does this compare to GitHub Enterprise or GitLab Premium?
GitHub Enterprise is priced per user (~$21/user/month for Enterprise Cloud). GitLab Ultimate is ~$99/user/month. Both grow linearly with team size. ManageStacks Gitea is flat $29 per instance regardless of user count. For teams beyond ~5-10 users, self-hosted Gitea on ManageStacks is materially cheaper — often 10-50x. GitHub Enterprise wins on Copilot integration, GitHub Actions Marketplace, and the ecosystem; GitLab on built-in DevSecOps features.
Does Gitea Actions work like GitHub Actions?
Yes — Gitea Actions uses GitHub Actions workflow syntax and most GitHub Actions from the marketplace work unchanged. Run act-based runners on the same ManageStacks account or on your own infrastructure. Business+ plans include managed runner pools.
Can I migrate repositories from GitHub or GitLab?
Yes. Gitea's built-in migration tool imports repos, issues, PRs, releases, and wiki from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Codebase, OneDev, and Gogs. LFS content migrates too. Bulk migration for org-level moves is supported.
Does ManageStacks handle Gitea version upgrades?
Yes. We test each Gitea (or Forgejo) release, run database migrations on a staging clone, and roll forward once validated. Zero-downtime rolling upgrades on Business+ HA deployments.
Is Git LFS supported?
Yes. Git LFS is enabled by default with persistent storage sized to your repos. LFS objects can be offloaded to S3-compatible storage (including MinIO on the same account) on Business+ plans for cheap long-term retention.
What about SSO / SAML for enterprise?
SAML SSO, OAuth2 (with Keycloak, Okta, Auth0, Azure AD), and LDAP are all supported. Configure through the Gitea admin console. On Business+ plans we pre-integrate with the Keycloak app if it's on the same ManageStacks account.
What if I want to move to GitHub / GitLab later?
Git repos are portable by definition. Push to any Git remote. Issues and PRs can be exported via Gitea's REST API and imported into GitHub or GitLab via their migration tools. Gitea is MIT-licensed and portable.
Run Gitea without carrying the pager
Subscribe through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace. We handle provisioning, SSL, monitoring, backups, updates, and security. From $15/mo.