n8n pricing confuses people because the same product has two opposite billing realities. n8n Cloud meters workflow executions — the free/starter allowances are a few thousand runs a month, and a polling workflow on a 1-minute schedule burns 43,200 alone.
Self-hosted Community edition has no execution meter at all. Unlimited workflows, unlimited runs; the constraint is your server's CPU and RAM. The same 1-minute poller that's impossible on a cloud allowance is a rounding error on any VPS.
That makes the decision mostly about workflow shape: event-driven, low-volume automations fit the cloud free tier fine; anything that polls, loops or fans out belongs on a self-hosted instance. The middle path people miss — webhook-triggered instead of polling — often cuts execution counts 100x and makes cloud viable.
Setup and where the self-hosted gotchas are (queues, webhooook URLs): https://toolfreebie.com/n8n-workflow-automation/
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