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I'm doing the same for the 5 user limit on GitLab currently.

But the pricing is just too steep for me to justify setting up, e.g. an extra user for some automated tasks.

You shouldn't need a user account for automated tasks, that's what webhooks and deploy keys are for.

I don’t know if this issue has been resolved, but as late as four years ago, GitLab didn’t have a notion of a service user. If you wanted a server to authenticate and pull from a private repo, you had to use a licensed account to do so. This meant your 5 user tier became a 4 user tier.

Project access tokens (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/project_acc...) is what you need and they have been around for 2+ years

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