Most n8n pricing comparisons stop at the sticker price: €20 for Starter, €50 for Pro, free if you self-host. That's accurate, but it skips the two things that actually decide your bill: how many executions your workflows really burn through, and what "free" self-hosting costs once you count the server, the backups and your own time.
This post runs the numbers on both.
n8n Cloud plans at a glance
n8n charges by workflow executions per month, not by users. Every plan includes unlimited users and unlimited active workflows. Here's what the Cloud plans looked like in October 2026 (annual billing, prices in euros):
| Plan | Price | Executions / month | Concurrent executions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | €20/month | 2,500 | 5 |
| Pro | €50/month | 10,000 | Up to 50 |
| Business | €667/month | 40,000 | Not listed |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | 200+ |
There's also a Startup deal (50% off Business for companies under 20 employees) and a free trial on Starter and Pro. For the plan-by-plan details, trial limits and FAQ, here's a full n8n pricing breakdown.
Prices change often, so check n8n's own pricing page before you commit.
How fast executions add up
An execution is one run of a workflow, no matter how many nodes it has. That sounds generous until you look at scheduled triggers. A workflow that checks something every few minutes runs all day, every day, whether or not it finds anything.
Here's the math for a 30-day month:
| What runs | Executions / month | Plan you need |
|---|---|---|
| 1 workflow, every hour | 720 | Starter |
| 1 workflow, every 15 minutes | 2,880 | Over Starter, so Pro |
| 1 workflow, every 5 minutes | 8,640 | Pro |
| 5 workflows, every 15 minutes | 14,400 | Over Pro, so Business |
The jump from row three to row four is the one that catches people. Five modest polling workflows push you past Pro, and the next plan up is €667 a month.
A few ways to keep the count down on Cloud:
- Use webhooks instead of polling wherever the source app supports them.
- Lower the schedule frequency. Most "every 5 minutes" checks are fine every 30.
- Combine related checks into one workflow instead of five.
What self-hosting actually costs
The Community Edition is free to run on your own server. The software is free; the rest isn't.
The server
n8n isn't especially CPU-hungry, and a small VPS handles a lot of personal and small-team use. Typical options in 2026:
- Hetzner CX23 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM): around €5.50/month after Hetzner's 2026 price increases. Availability of this line has been patchy, so check before you plan around it.
- DigitalOcean Basic Droplet (2 GB RAM): around $12/month.
VPS prices moved several times this year, so treat these as ballpark figures.
Backups
Your workflows and credentials live on that server. If it dies without a backup, they're gone. On DigitalOcean, automatic backups add 20% (weekly) to 30% (daily) to the Droplet price. Other providers charge something similar, or you script your own.
Your time
This is the line most comparisons leave out. Someone has to:
- Apply n8n updates and security patches
- Watch disk space and prune old execution data
- Fix things when a container won't restart at 11 p.m.
Call it one to two hours a month once things are stable, more in the first weeks. Put your own hourly rate on that. At $40/hour, two hours is $80, which is more than the Pro plan.
The key difference
On Cloud, cost grows with executions. Self-hosted, cost grows with server size, and a small server can handle a lot of executions. So:
| Profile | Cloud | Self-hosted |
|---|---|---|
| Solo, light use (under 2,500 runs) | Starter, €20 | ~€6 to $15 for the server, plus your time |
| Small team, ~10,000 runs | Pro, €50 | Same small server, plus your time |
| High volume, 40,000+ runs | Business, €667 | A bigger server, maybe a few tens per month, plus your time |
At low volume, Cloud is often the better deal once you count your time. At high volume, the gap becomes hard to ignore, and self-hosting starts paying for the hours it takes.
Which should you pick?
- Pick Starter or Pro if you'd rather not manage a server, your volume is predictable, and your time is worth more than the difference.
- Pick self-hosted if you're comfortable with Docker and Linux, you run lots of scheduled workflows, or your volume would push you toward Business.
- Start on Cloud, move later if you're unsure. Workflows export as JSON, so migrating to a self-hosted instance is doable once you know your real usage.
Before you choose, count your triggers. Multiply each scheduled workflow's runs per day by 30 and add them up. That one number tells you more than any pricing table.
Disclosure: I write about SaaS pricing and automation tools for PerksValley. Prices above were checked in October 2026 and change often, so confirm on each provider's site before buying.
Top comments (1)
Your "your time" line is the one most comparisons skip, and it's the one that actually decides it.
Worth adding a row to the server table: what backups cost. You note DigitalOcean adds 20–30%, which quietly changes the comparison, since a self-hosted n8n without backups is one disk failure from losing every workflow and credential.
That's where we price differently at Krova Cloud. 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 40 GB is $10.22/mo , not cheaper than the Hetzner CX23 you list, and I won't pretend otherwise. But automatic snapshots are bundled with no per-GB charge and go to object storage separate from the host, so the backup line is zero rather than a surcharge.
Given this week's Censys numbers: a Cube has no inbound address until you map a port, and each mapping takes an IP allowlist. Unreachable unless someone opened it deliberately.