n8n pricing in 2026: what it actually costs to run

I get asked how much n8n costs almost every week, and the honest answer depends on who is going to run it. n8n publishes a clean pricing page with plans and euro figures. What it does not publish is what "free, self-hosted" costs once you count the server, the backups, the upgrades, and the afternoon you lose the first time something breaks in a way the docs don't cover. I checked n8n's pricing page live for this guide, and I'll walk through both sides, including the exact monthly figure Otimiz pays to run its own production instance.

What n8n Cloud actually costs (checked live)

n8n's pricing page, read on 24 September 2026, shows prices in euros, billed annually. Starter and Pro are hosted by n8n. Business is a paid plan you run on your own server, and Enterprise can go either way.

• Starter: €20/month, 2,500 workflow executions with unlimited steps, 5 concurrent executions, 2.5 GB storage, 1 shared project, 7 days of insights, and up to 2,300 AI credits a month.
• Pro: €50/month, 10,000 workflow executions, 20 concurrent executions, 25 GB storage, 3 shared projects, and up to 13,700 AI credits a month.
• Business: €667/month, 40,000 workflow executions, 6 shared projects, 30 days of insights, and it is self-hosted. It adds SSO, SAML and LDAP, and version control using Git.
• Enterprise: no listed price, contact sales. Custom execution volume, 200+ concurrent executions, 365 days of insights, unlimited shared projects, and a choice between n8n hosting it or you self-hosting it.

There is also a free trial on Pro-level features with 1,000 executions and no credit card required.

Two things stand out reading this as someone who runs n8n daily. First, "workflow executions" counts every run of every workflow, not just the busy ones. A handful of processes at a small company won't touch 2,500 a month. An agency running dozens of client workflows blows past Starter fast, and the next paid step after Pro is Business at €667 a month. Second, the page shows no price at all for the free Community edition, because there isn't one. That's the option the rest of this guide is about.

What "free" self-hosted n8n really costs

n8n's page states plainly that a standard, self-hosted version of n8n is available on GitHub. That's the Community edition, and it is genuinely free: no license fee, no per-execution meter. That's the headline that gets repeated everywhere, and it's true as far as it goes.

Where it stops being the whole story is the running cost. Someone has to:

• Rent and secure a server. A VPS, a Docker setup, a domain, a TLS certificate. None of this is hard in 2026, but none of it is free either.
• Take backups. n8n's database holds every workflow, credential and execution record you have. If that volume disappears with no backup, you have lost the business logic, not just some logs.
• Apply upgrades. n8n ships new releases constantly. Sitting still is a choice with its own risk (security patches you skip), and moving is a choice with its own risk (see below).
• Know what to do when something breaks. This is the cost that never makes it onto a spreadsheet. A comparison that only counts server rent against a Cloud subscription is comparing two different things.

None of this makes self-hosting a bad choice. It makes "free" the wrong word for it. "Flat and controllable" is closer to the truth, and at agency volume, flat beats metered by a wide margin. We made the full case for n8n's cost model against per-task pricing in n8n vs Make vs Zapier.

What Otimiz actually runs, and what it costs

Here's our real number instead of a hypothetical one. Otimiz's own production n8n runs self-hosted on a 2-vCPU VPS, and the subscription behind it costs €359.76 for two years, roughly €15 a month. That's the entire hosting bill for the box running our production automations, with no per-execution charge on top.

The version running on that box is pinned explicitly, not left on :latest. That single decision is the difference between a predictable upgrade path and n8n migrating your database to a newer schema, irreversibly, the next time the container restarts. What nearly went wrong for us, and why, is in what we learned moving a production n8n instance.

Pin the version. Running :latest in production means the next restart can silently and irreversibly migrate your database to a newer schema, whether you were ready for it or not. €15 a month buys you nothing if you can't control what happens the day it restarts.

€15 a month is small because we already know how to run it. The VPS rent is the cheap part. The parts that would trip up a first-timer don't show up in a monthly cost, and they're next.

The hidden costs of self-hosting nobody puts on the pricing page

This is the section a vendor's pricing page will never write, because none of it is the vendor's job to warn you about.

• Version upgrades are not optional forever. Pin a version to stay stable and you drift further behind every month you don't touch it. Eventually you have to move, deliberately, with a backup taken first, because database migrations only run forward.
• Community node packages live outside the database. If you use an integration that isn't one of n8n's built-in nodes, it usually comes from a community package installed alongside n8n, not stored in your workflow data. Move servers or rebuild the container without reinstalling it, and every workflow using it looks fine in the editor and fails the next time it actually runs.
• The encryption key is not automatically backed up with your workflows. n8n encrypts every stored credential with a key that, left on its defaults, lives inside the running container. Lose it without a copy elsewhere and your workflows survive, but every credential inside them does not.

Each of these is a real failure mode, not a hypothetical one. How each one played out for us, what caught it, and the rule we run by now is in self-hosting n8n: lessons from a production migration. If you're weighing "free" self-hosted n8n against a Cloud plan, that piece is the missing line item.

When Cloud is the better call

I run n8n self-hosted by default, and I'd be doing you a disservice if I pretended that's the right answer for everyone. Cloud is the better choice when:

• Nobody on the team wants to own a server, a backup schedule or an upgrade cadence. That ownership is real work, and n8n Cloud's price is partly the price of not doing it.
• Your execution volume is genuinely light. At 2,500 executions a month, Starter's €20 is cheap insurance against ever touching a server.
• You want n8n's own team accountable for uptime and security patching, not you.

If you need SSO, SAML or LDAP, note that on the pricing page they come with the paid Business and Enterprise plans, not with the free Community edition.

Self-hosting wins on cost once your volume is real and someone is willing to own the operational side. Cloud wins when the operational side is exactly what you're trying to avoid paying for with your own time.

Paying someone to build it, versus building it yourself

Whichever way you host n8n, hosting is not the same question as building the workflows that actually save you time. We don't publish a rate card on this site, on purpose, because a fair quote depends on what you're automating. What I can point to is what already happened for real clients: Engage Media went from three days of manual invoicing a month to a 30-minute review, and Stand Up Recruitment freed roughly 15 hours of recruiter time a week once their screening pipeline ran itself. Neither came from paying for a fancier plan. They came from designing the workflow properly on top of whichever hosting choice made sense, which is the job of our n8n development service.

If you want a concrete starting point instead of guessing, the free automation audit gives you three automations worth building for your business, with rough hours on each, no call required.

Bastien Daumas

Founder, Otimiz

Ex English-French translator who built a translation SaaS, automated the backend with no-code, and turned that into an AI automation agency. Based near Nice, working with B2B clients globally. No false promises, just fewer repetitive tasks and concrete results.