Open-source automation tools like n8n give teams full control over workflows, hosting, and data. No subscriptions, no limits. Just freedom.
But if you’ve ever thought, “Let’s self-host to save money”, you may be in for a surprise.
The true cost of self-hosting tools like n8n is rarely visible up front. Infrastructure. Maintenance. Backups. Compliance. Downtime. DevOps. Multiply that by scale, and the monthly overhead often surpasses what you'd pay for a managed SaaS platform like Make or Zapier.
Here’s what most teams overlook when going down the self-hosted automation path.
Self-Hosting Isn’t Free! It Just Hides the Bill
Let’s be clear. Open-source tools remove licensing fees, not the total cost of ownership.
What you save in subscriptions, you pay in:
- Developer time and DevOps
- Cloud infrastructure
- Monitoring and backups
- Security hardening
- Compliance operations
- Performance bottlenecks
And that’s before anyone even touches a flow.
What n8n and Similar Tools Actually Cost
Here’s a realistic monthly cost breakdown for teams running n8n in production.
| Cost Category | Estimated Monthly Cost (USD) |
|---|---|
| VPS or container hosting | $80 – $250 |
| Database (Postgres) | $20 – $100 |
| Backups and monitoring | $50 – $200 |
| Logging + error tracking | $50 – $100 |
| DevOps maintenance (6–10 hrs) | $600 – $1,000 |
| Security and patching | $100 – $250 |
| Compliance and audit prep | $250+ |
| Total Monthly Range | $1,150 – $2,000+ |
And this doesn’t include costs of incidents, outages, onboarding, or switching cloud environments.
What Do You Get With Self-Hosting?
To be fair, there are good reasons to self-host:
- Full data ownership
- Local execution (for on-prem use cases)
- Access to internal-only APIs
- Custom node development
- No vendor lock-in
But these benefits come at a price. The more your business depends on automation, the higher the reliability and security demands — and the more resources required to keep it running smoothly.
Comparing SaaS vs Self-Hosted: Beyond the Price Tag
Make
Make.com offers a low-code interface, built-in uptime, and support — but its usage-based billing is where costs spike.
- $10/month → 10K operations
- $35/month → 100K
- $105/month → 1M
- Enterprise → $1,000+
If you’re running complex flows with multiple HTTP calls, databases, routers, and iterations, 500K to 2M operations per month is common. That’s easily $300–$600/month in credits alone.
Make becomes costly at scale, but governance features like SSO, audit logs, and RBAC are only available in Enterprise.
Zapier
Zapier is great for lightweight workflows — but it lacks depth.
- No branching logic or real flow visualization
- No DevOps access
- Poor debugging tools
- No audit logs or access controls
Costs rise fast above 20K tasks per month. Enterprise users often pay $600+ with limited transparency.
Self-Hosted n8n
n8n gives you complete control — but the cost is in complexity.
- Set up and maintain the full stack
- Add RBAC and SSO yourself
- Set up monitoring and alerting
- Handle every incident manually
- No SLAs unless you enforce them
You're not just hosting automation. You’re building infrastructure.
Where the Hidden Costs Really Hit
1. DevOps Overhead
You need team members who understand:
- Container orchestration
- Database backups and restores
- Workflow engine scaling
- Token management and encryption
- Secure access to internal APIs
If those people aren't already on payroll, you're buying that expertise — one way or another.
2. Scaling Headaches
More flows, more executions, more integrations.
This introduces:
- Memory leaks
- Deadlocks
- Hanging executions
- Resource starvation
- Broken queues
Unless you actively monitor metrics, you won’t see these issues until they hit users or break critical processes.
3. Compliance Exposure
If your company handles sensitive data or operates in regulated environments, you’re expected to provide:
- Access logs
- Change history
- Role-based access control
- Secure offboarding
- Disaster recovery plans
n8n doesn’t come with these out of the box. You build them yourself or risk non-compliance.
4. Uptime and SLA Gaps
When something breaks at 2 AM, you are the support.
No support tickets. No escalation path. No guarantees.
Self-hosted means self-responsible.
5. Opportunity Cost
Every hour your developers spend debugging a failed webhook or patching a container is an hour not spent building your core product.
Self-hosting becomes a distraction from value creation.
Real-World Use Case
A SaaS company migrated their customer onboarding automation from Zapier to self-hosted n8n. They saved $350/month on subscription costs.
Three months in:
- DevOps spent 6 hours/week on maintenance
- 1 failure caused delayed onboarding for 14 customers
- GDPR audit flagged missing access logs
- Monthly cost (time + infra): $1,600+
They switched back to a managed platform with enterprise-grade logging and SSO.
When Does Self-Hosting Make Sense?
You should consider self-hosting when:
- You require strict data localization
- You have in-house DevOps capacity
- You’re integrating with internal-only systems
- You need full customizability
- You’re okay with infrastructure becoming a product
If you're a startup or small team just starting with automation — use SaaS. Focus on validating value, not managing uptime.
What About Hybrid Approaches?
Some teams mix models:
- Start with SaaS
- Migrate high-cost or sensitive flows to self-hosted
- Retain simple marketing ops in Make/Zapier
- Use VPN tunnels or proxies to expose internal APIs securely
This lets you optimize for cost and control — without betting everything on infrastructure.
Final Thoughts
Self-hosting automation tools like n8n seems efficient.
But at scale, it’s rarely cheaper.
You’re trading platform fees for infrastructure complexity, compliance exposure, and lost developer time.
If you’re running critical automations or scaling workflows across teams, governance and reliability matter more than theoretical savings.
Want help architecting a secure, scalable automation stack that fits your growth?
Reach out to us at Scalevise. We specialize in designing automation infrastructures that stay fast, compliant, and maintainable — whether they’re self-hosted or fully managed.
Top comments (6)
We self-hosted n8n for six months and it started fine, but once we hit 50+ workflows, the maintenance killed our team. This post hits hard.
Exactly. Most teams underestimate the tipping point. Past a certain scale, infra becomes a full-time job and that’s when SaaS starts to look cheap again.
One thing we struggled with was secrets management in n8n. It’s really not enterprise-grade unless you build wrappers around it.
Spot on. Token storage, encryption, key rotation it all requires custom scaffolding. We’ve built hardened wrappers for this for our clients, but it’s not plug and play.
$2,000/month sounds exaggerated unless you’re scaling aggressively.
Totally fair! small teams can run lean. But once you factor in DevOps hours, incident overhead, backups, and audit trails, the costs stack up fast. Especially in regulated environments.