n8n self-hosted vs n8n Cloud: what each really costs

What n8n Cloud charges

These are the figures shown on n8n.io/pricing with annual billing selected, read on 2026-09-15. The page also offers monthly billing, labelled Save 17% against it, so paying by the month costs more than the numbers below.

The unit matters more than the price. n8n bills a whole workflow run, not a step, and states it plainly in its own pricing FAQ: “An execution is a single run of your entire workflow. It doesn’t matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes. It’s still a single execution.” For a WhatsApp flow with 20 nodes, that is a real advantage over per-task pricing, and it is the reason the Starter tier stretches further than it looks.

One correction to the comparisons that circulate: Business at $800/mo is not managed hosting. It is a license key for a stack you run yourself. If you are pricing managed n8n, the ceiling is Pro.

What the box costs

The self-hosted Community edition is free to run for your own business, indefinitely, under n8n’s Sustainable Use License. That license is fair-code, not OSI open source, and n8n says so itself. Its restriction is worth reading before you build on it: “You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use.” Running it for your own automations is allowed. Reselling n8n, or hosting it as a paid service for others, is not.

So the bill is the server. Real prices, read on 2026-09-15:

AcmeLabs recommends no host and is paid by none of them. The two above are listed because they publish their prices and are what this audience already runs.

On sizing, n8n’s own documented figures are narrower than the “2 vCPU, 2 GB” recommendation repeated in third-party guides. Its prerequisites page gives memory of 320 MB – 2 GB and a database of 512 MB – 4 GB SSD, and captions that as illustrative rather than a minimum. With Postgres on the same box, the 1 GiB tier is tight and the 2 GiB or 4 GB tier is the honest starting point.

The column the tables leave out

Starter at $20/mo is $240 a year. A $12 droplet is $144 a year. The saving is $96, and $96 is two or three hours of a developer’s rate. At the Starter tier, self-hosting is not a cost decision at all, and any page that tells you otherwise is selling servers.

At the Pro tier the arithmetic changes: $600 a year against $144, a $456 gap, plus the things a subscription cannot give you at any price — your own database, your own credential store, no execution ceiling and no concurrency cap.

But the cost that actually bites arrives in month three, and it is paid in hours, not dollars. The n8n community forum documents the same failures over and over: the host or proxy layer silently dropping Meta’s POSTs, with “Meta webhook requests blocked by Hostinger VPS infrastructure” running to 42 replies on thread 264956; verification passing on the GET while real messages never arrive, on threads 259037, 294951 and 239346; and “Access token expired continuously” on 98749. n8n Cloud does not remove those — Meta’s tokens expire for Cloud users too — but it does remove the proxy, the TLS certificate, the backup you have never restored and the 2 a.m. question of which layer ate the request.

Where n8n Cloud is the right answer

Take the subscription if your workflows are worth more than your evenings and you are under 2,500 executions a month. Take it if nobody on the team wants to own a Linux box, or if downtime costs a client relationship. The free trial is 1,000 executions with no card required, which is enough to find out.

Self-host when you have a reason that is not the $96: data that cannot leave your infrastructure, execution volume that makes the tiers absurd, or the plain preference to own the stack. Then the question stops being what it costs and becomes whether it survives month three.