n8n is one of the most powerful automation tools on the market. And one of the most flexible when it comes to pricing. Self-hosted for free, cloud from 20 euros per month, Business at 667 euros. The range is enormous.
What you choose does not depend on budget, but on use case, volume, and whether someone can maintain the system. Here is the honest breakdown.
How n8n Cloud charges: workflow executions, not users
The most important thing first: n8n Cloud does not charge per user like HubSpot or Notion. It charges per workflow execution. Every time a workflow runs, that counts as one execution, regardless of how many steps are inside.
That is good when building complex workflows with many steps. It can get expensive when you have many triggers that fire frequently.
The current cloud tiers:
Starter: €20/month (billed annually). 2,500 workflow executions per month. For first automations and smaller setups. Good for getting started, quickly too small once workflows are actually running.
Pro: €50/month (billed annually). 10,000 workflow executions. For solo developers and small teams running n8n in production. For many, the first serious tier.
Business: €667/month (billed annually, self-hosted). 40,000 workflow executions. For companies with under 100 employees needing higher automation volume. This is where serious investment begins.
Enterprise: Individual pricing, on request. Cloud or self-hosted, custom execution volume.
What 1,000 shop orders per day actually cost
A concrete example: an online shop with 1,000 orders per day. Per order, one n8n workflow runs: receive order, write to ERP, trigger confirmation email. That is 30,000 workflow executions per month.
Cloud Business: approx. €667-700 per month. Approx. €8,000 per year.
Self-hosted on own VPS: depending on provider and setup, €20-50 per month for the server. Approx. €240-600 per year.
The difference: up to €7,500 per year. Sounds clear-cut. But it is not always, because self-hosting is not free, it just shifts the costs.
What self-hosting actually costs, including effort
Infrastructure costs are manageable. A small VPS at Hetzner or DigitalOcean is sufficient for most setups, €5-20 per month. Add a Postgres database, done.
What is not in that calculation: someone has to maintain the system. Apply updates, check backups, respond to outages. For a stable setup this is manageable, maybe two to four hours per month. But those hours cost either internal expertise or external support.
And: those without their own tech team or dev-ops should not host the Community Edition alone and expose it to the internet. Real security risks lurk there without experience. Running n8n without external accessibility on an internal network is an option, webhooks become harder, but the risk is more manageable. Suitable when transporting data from A to B on a time-controlled pull basis.
Token costs: the hidden factor
Those integrating AI models into n8n workflows, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others, pay additional token costs to those providers. That has nothing to do with n8n itself, but it is a factor that is often underestimated.
Important: triggers must be defined cleanly. Those wanting to sync 100 products do not need to send all 100 records through an AI model on every execution, if nothing has changed on 98 of them. Delta sync instead of full sync.
There are too many examples where token costs have exploded due to a gap in implementation, because no API limits were defined and the workflow fired more often than planned. It happens fast and you usually only notice it on the invoice.
Does every job really need n8n?
Short answer: no.
Most systems now have clean, well-documented APIs. What sometimes gets built as an n8n workflow can be solved just as well with a Python script. Free, direct, does exactly the same job. Where does it run? Theoretically almost anywhere.
Just because tools like n8n and AI agents exist does not mean you have to use them for every small task. That is money thrown out the window. n8n delivers its value when multiple workflows run, when new automations are added, and when you want a central place from which everything is managed. As a permanent automation hub, not as a one-time tool for a single stable integration that never changes.
The question to ask first: is this the start of more automation, or is it a one-off use case between two systems? In the second case, the simpler path is usually worth taking.
When does what make sense? The honest decision guide
n8n Cloud Starter (€20/month): For first automations, proof of concepts, teams wanting to get to know n8n. No overhead, no infrastructure, just start.
n8n Cloud Pro (€50/month): For productive setups with moderate volume. Solo developers and small teams using n8n seriously but not wanting to maintain their own infrastructure.
Self-hosted Community Edition (free + server costs): For teams with their own tech expertise, high automation volume or strict data protection requirements. Pays off at approx. €3,000-5,000 annual savings vs cloud, if maintenance can be covered internally.
Cloud Business (€667/month): For companies that need high volume but cannot or do not want to run their own infrastructure.
Python script (free): For single, stable integrations that rarely change and need no monitoring dashboard. An underestimated option that should come up far more often.
The simple rule of thumb: No tech team: take cloud. Tech team and more than 30,000 executions per month: calculate self-hosting. One-off simple use case: first ask whether a script is enough.
The full overview of n8n, what it can do, how it is hosted and where it hits its limits, is on our n8n tool page.
— Robert
