You know what I do about the upkeep?
I turn off the auto-repair in my character page.
I charge into battlefield with all my plate gears on.
I wear out all my equips until they are in unusable states (Or half-dead for horses)
And then I'd repair them manually through character page to only pay the repairs
once (Only 5% for like -3 items, not 20% total), instead of every round.
I don't know if that's a bug or intentional, but it certainly is saving me tons of gold. I can appear as a plated knight every now and then even though they're mostly rusty or crude, but the players don't need to know that