Sounds like you would be interested in v2 (https://zitadel.ch/v2) as in it will be provided as single binary, which you should be able to use in our homelab setup.
There are a lot of other improvements, but if that's the only dealbreaker, v2 should take care of it.
True, we think that for most setups and early explorations K8s is too much of a beast. TBH we are in the process of switching our cloud from K8s to Cloud Run which is kind of close to Knative but without the ops hustle ;-)
What do you not like of the new pricing? The pay-as-you-go approach?
The background to this is, that we got many customers asking for features on the lower tiers and that many of them wanted to have a more linear scaling in their business cases. On the other hand we wanted to make sure, that even from the start you get all security features without paywalling them.
The 25K request roughly translate to 10K user per Month and you will be able to get that without a credit card :-)
There are a lot of other improvements, but if that's the only dealbreaker, v2 should take care of it.