Pricing automation tools is harder than it should be. Each platform bills a different unit, and most VPS deals advertise a price you only pay for the first term. I wanted one honest answer to "what will this workload cost me per month?", so I collected current prices, each with a source link and check date, and built a small calculator around them. Here's what I learned. All prices were checked on 16 Oct 2026.
Three platforms, three billing units
- Zapier bills tasks. Each successful action step is one task. Triggers and built-in tools like Filter, Formatter and Paths don't count. A 5-step Zap that runs once uses 5 tasks.
- Make bills credits. Roughly one credit per module action, and polling triggers spend a credit on every check, even when nothing is new. I couldn't pin down Make's current prices: make.com blocks automated reads and dated third-party sources disagree, so I show a range marked "sources conflict" rather than guess.
- n8n Cloud bills executions. One execution is one full workflow run, however many steps it has. A 5-step workflow and a 50-step workflow each cost one execution per run.
That last difference is the whole game for multi-step workflows.
A worked example: 5,000 runs a month, 5 action steps each
- Zapier: 5,000 × 5 = 25,000 tasks. The Professional tiers jump from 20,000 to 50,000 tasks, so you pay for 50,000: $289/mo billed yearly, $433.50/mo billed monthly (zapier.com/pricing).
- Make (sources conflict): 5,000 runs × (5 actions + 1 trigger module) = 30,000 credits. Core has 20,000 and 40,000 credit tiers, so you pay for 40,000: $34.12–$51/mo billed monthly, $29–$38/mo billed yearly, depending on which dated source is right (make.com/en/pricing blocks automated checks; figures from third-party trackers). Check make.com in your own browser before you buy.
- n8n Cloud: 5,000 executions. Starter covers 2,500, so you need Pro (10,000): $50/mo billed yearly, $60/mo monthly (n8n.io/pricing). Pro also has a 50,000-execution tier at $120.83/mo yearly or $145/mo monthly; above that it's Enterprise.
- Self-hosted n8n (Community Edition): no per-execution fee. You pay for a server, from $3.70/mo on PikaPods at minimum resources (pikapods.com/apps) or $6/mo for a 1 GiB DigitalOcean droplet. On a droplet that small, n8n plus Postgres will be tight.
So for this workload, on monthly billing Zapier costs roughly 7× as much as n8n Cloud ($433.50 vs $60), and Make lands in between at $34.12–$51. Self-hosting is an order of magnitude cheaper again, if you're willing to run it.
The VPS renewal trap
Headline VPS prices are often intro prices tied to a long prepay. Hostinger is the clearest example (hostinger.com/vps-hosting):
| Plan | Specs | Intro (24-month prepay) | Renews at |
|---|---|---|---|
| KVM 1 | 1 vCPU / 4 GB / 50 GB | $6.49/mo | $11.99/mo (+85%) |
| KVM 2 | 2 vCPU / 8 GB / 100 GB | $8.99/mo | $14.99/mo (+67%) |
The intro price means paying the term upfront: $155.76 for KVM 1 or $215.76 for KVM 2. That isn't necessarily a bad deal. But if you compare hosts on the first-month price, you're comparing the wrong numbers. Compare year-2 cost.
Other hosts bill flat or hourly with a monthly cap:
- DigitalOcean Basic droplets: $6/mo (1 GiB), $24/mo (4 GiB).
- Hetzner CX23 (2 vCPU / 4 GB): €5.99/mo including IPv4. It currently shows "not available" to order in its EU locations (Nuremberg and Helsinki), so you may not be able to buy it right now.
- InstaPods Build (n8n's minimum plan there, 2 vCPU / 2 GB): $7/mo flat.
- Elestio managed n8n: from $11/mo.
- Render: the Starter web service is $7/mo, but n8n needs Postgres too, so the real bill is higher.
- Railway Hobby: $5/mo minimum that includes $5 of usage; beyond that you pay per use (about $0.00000386 per GB of RAM per second and $0.00000772 per vCPU per second), so the true cost depends on your workload.
- Oracle Cloud Always Free: Ampere A1 (2 OCPU / 12 GB Arm) is $0, but new instances often fail with "out of host capacity" and idle ones may be reclaimed, so don't count on getting one.
When does n8n Cloud make sense?
At 10,000 executions a month, n8n Cloud Pro is $60/mo billed monthly. A Hostinger KVM 2 at its renewal price is $14.99/mo. That's about $45 a month you keep by self-hosting. You pay it back in time spent on:
- updates
- backups and testing restores
- TLS
- monitoring
- the odd 2 a.m. "why is the disk full" (execution history grows, so turn on pruning)
If you'd spend more than an hour or so a month on that, Cloud is a fair deal. If you already run a box for other things, self-hosting is hard to beat.
Caveats I'd want someone to tell me
- Server price ≠ capacity. A flat $4–7 box runs unlimited executions only until it runs out of RAM or CPU.
- Prices change. I run a daily script that re-reads vendor pages and flags changes for review instead of auto-updating, because a scraper that silently writes a wrong price is worse than no scraper.
- Some vendors can't be read reliably. Make blocks automated reads, which is why it shows a range.
The calculator
The table and calculator are at https://selfhostcost.dev. It's free, with no signup or email. Enter runs per month and steps per run, and toggle intro vs renewal pricing. Every row links to its source.
Disclosure: some outbound links on the site are affiliate links. If you buy through them the site may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Rankings are by price data only.
If you spot a wrong number, leave a comment. I'd rather fix it than be quietly wrong.
Top comments (2)
Marking Make's numbers 'sources conflict' instead of printing one confident figure is the part worth copying — most comparison posts resolve a conflict by picking whichever number flatters the winner. The billing-unit table quietly decides most real cases too: a polling trigger spending a credit per check even when nothing changed means a busy poll bills you for silence, which per-execution pricing never does. And the VPS renewal trap is the right headline — first-term pricing is the hosting version of an intro rate.
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