n8n Pricing 2026: n8n Is Free, Running It Isn’t

n8n pricing starts at €0, and most people find the catch on day 9. That’s when a single workflow running every 5 minutes uses up n8n Cloud Starter’s 2,500 executions, and every triggered run after that fails until the 1st. The software is free. Running it is what you pay for: on n8n’s servers from €20 a month (billed annually), or on your own from $6 a month on DigitalOcean, plus the setup.

The short version:

• The software is free. The n8n Community edition has no licence fee and no limit on executions, workflows or users.
• There’s no free n8n Cloud plan. There’s a 14-day trial with 1,000 executions, and n8n deletes the workspace if you don’t upgrade.
• n8n Cloud bills by the execution. Starter is €20 a month for 2,500 and Pro is €50 for 10,000, both billed annually. One execution is one full run of a workflow.
• When you use up your executions, your workflows stop. On Starter and Pro, n8n doesn’t queue the extra runs or charge for them. It fails them until the 1st of the month. One busy workflow is enough to push you from Starter (€20) to Pro (€50).
• Running n8n on your own server means paying for the server and doing the setup yourself. The server is $6 to $24 a month on DigitalOcean. The domain, HTTPS, backups and n8n updates are all your job.
• The free version can’t share workflows between people. Only the person who creates a workflow (and the owner) can see it and its credentials. Sharing, single sign-on and Git version control need a paid plan, and on your own server that means Business at €667 a month, billed annually.
• Method: prices come from n8n.io/pricing and n8n’s documentation, checked on September 2026. n8n prices in euros, so we quote euros.

So the real question behind n8n pricing isn’t what the software costs. It’s where you run it, and how much of the setup you want to own. A VPS gives you the lowest server bill, but you still have to configure HTTPS, the webhook URL, the encryption key, backups and upgrades.

Selfhost.dev gives you the same Community edition on your own server, with that setup already done. You pick a server and click once, and about four minutes later n8n is live on its own domain with HTTPS, the webhook URL set and the encryption key saved.

The sections below price every n8n plan against one real workload, show what the free version leaves out and what happens when n8n Cloud runs out of executions, and work out what running n8n yourself really costs. By the end, you’ll know which option fits how often your workflows run.

How much does n8n cost in 2026?

The n8n software costs €0, but running it doesn’t. For one workflow that runs every 5 minutes, n8n Cloud costs €50 a month, billed annually, because Starter’s 2,500 executions run out on day 9. Your own server costs $6 to $24 a month plus setup, Business costs €667 plus a server, and Selfhost.dev costs $15.18 in Europe.

The third column is the one to read. It shows what you’d actually pay each month if you had just one workflow running every 5 minutes, which is 8,640 runs a month.

n8n prices are in euros, billed annually, from n8n.io/pricing on 27 September 2026. “Every 5 minutes” is 288 runs a day, 8,640 in a 30-day month. DigitalOcean prices are Basic Droplets from digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets. Selfhost.dev is a 2 vCPU, 4 GB, 40 GB server in Europe at $0.02 an hour for 730 hours.

The listed price only holds when your workflows fit the allowance. On Cloud, a busier workflow moves you up a plan. On a server, the bill stays the same and the server’s size becomes the limit.

Most of what a free n8n install asks of you is setup, not money.

The VPS is the cheap part. The setup is what you have to own. Selfhost.dev’s n8n template comes with HTTPS, the webhook URL and a saved encryption key already configured, so you get the free Community edition without doing those steps yourself. The page shows the server it runs on and the price before you commit to anything.

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Is n8n free?

Yes, n8n is free if you run the Community edition on your own server: no licence fee, and no limit on executions, workflows or users. n8n Cloud isn’t free. There’s no free Cloud plan, only a 14-day trial with 1,000 executions, and n8n deletes the workspace when the trial ends unless you upgrade.

Is there an n8n free plan on Cloud?

There’s no n8n free plan on Cloud, only an n8n free trial. It gives you 14 days of Pro features with 1,000 executions, 5 at once, a 180-second limit on each execution and 1 team project. No credit card is needed. When the 14 days end, you pick a paid plan or lose the workspace.

n8n’s documentation is direct about that last part: “If you don’t upgrade by the end of your trial, the trial automatically expires and n8n deletes your workspace.” Export anything you’ve built before day 14 if you might not continue.

What does the n8n Community edition leave out?

The free n8n Community edition leaves out 10 features, and sharing is the one most teams notice first. Single sign-on, Git version control and separate environments are missing too. Everything that runs a workflow is still included: every integration, code steps, webhooks, retries, error workflows and queue mode.

The 10 features the Community edition doesn’t include, from n8n’s own comparison of its editions:

1. Sharing workflows and credentials. In n8n’s words: “Only the instance owner and the user who creates them can access workflows and credentials.”
2. Projects, for grouping workflows and giving a team access to them.
3. Single sign-on through SAML or LDAP.
4. Git version control for workflows.
5. Environments, such as separate development, staging and production instances.
6. Custom variables shared across workflows.
7. External secrets, for pulling credentials from a secrets vault.
8. Log streaming to outside tools such as Datadog.
9. External storage for binary data, such as files kept in S3.
10. Multi-main mode, for running more than one main n8n instance at once.

Registering the free edition with your email adds three extras: folders, debug in editor and custom execution data.

For one person, or a small team that doesn’t need to share credentials, that’s enough. As one r/n8n user put it: “for many real-world use cases the free self-hosted version is plenty powerful.”

Free n8n still needs a server that’s on all day, every day. Managed n8n hosting on Selfhost.dev gives you that server with the setup already done, for $0.02 an hour in Europe.

How does n8n Cloud pricing work?

n8n Cloud pricing is based on executions. One execution is one full run of a workflow, however many steps it has. Starter includes 2,500 a month for €20 and Pro includes 10,000 for €50, both billed annually. On both plans, runs fail once you reach the limit, until it resets on the 1st of the month.

What counts as an n8n execution?

An n8n execution is one run of a whole workflow, from trigger to finish. In n8n’s words: “It doesn’t matter how many steps are in the workflow or how much data it processes. It’s still a single execution.” A 2-step workflow and a 50-step workflow each use one execution per run.

So the number that matters is how often each workflow runs. Here’s how fast a single workflow uses up each allowance:

Each workflow counts separately, so add them up. Webhook-triggered workflows count every time they’re called.

What do the n8n pricing plans include?

The n8n pricing plans differ in far more than executions. Starter keeps 2,500 past executions for 7 days and Pro keeps 25,000 for 30 days. Starter runs 5 workflows at once, Pro 20 and Enterprise 200 or more. Shared projects go from 1 on Starter to 3 on Pro and unlimited on Enterprise.

From n8n.io/pricing, September 2026. Every plan includes unlimited users, unlimited workflows and every integration. Business isn’t sold on n8n Cloud.

What happens when you run out of n8n executions?

On n8n Cloud Starter and Pro, runs fail as soon as you reach the limit. n8n’s help center says “Executions at the limit are not queued. They fail immediately with an error,” and that includes runs started by webhooks, retries and error workflows. Limits reset on the 1st of each calendar month, not on your billing date.

The self-hosted Business and Enterprise plans work differently. There, “your workflows will continue running without interruption, but overage charges may apply.” On Business, that’s €4,000 for each extra 300,000 executions.

On Starter and Pro, there’s no overage to pay, so the workflows simply stop, including the one you set up to alert you about failures. n8n emails you as you approach the limit, and allows one courtesy reset per customer on the trial, Starter and Pro. After that, the options are to wait for the 1st or to upgrade.

A server doesn’t count your runs, so there’s no limit to hit.

On your own n8n server, a workflow that fires every minute costs the same as one that fires once a day, and nothing stops on day 9. Deploy it in one click and n8n is live in about four minutes.

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When is n8n Cloud worth paying for?

n8n Cloud is worth paying for when your team shares workflows and credentials, or when nobody wants to own a server. Starter includes 1 shared project and Pro includes 3, and the free Community edition has no sharing at all. n8n also runs the servers, keeps your data in Frankfurt and answers email on Pro.

Sharing is the case that settles it. On the Community edition, a workflow and its credentials are visible only to their owner and creator, and that includes the Community edition we run at Selfhost.dev. If several people need to build on the same credentials every day, n8n Cloud is the better fit.

The other reason is simpler. Some teams don’t want a server in their stack at all. In an 80-comment r/n8n thread on exactly this question, the top reply answered it in one line: “Because then you have to manage the infrastructure.”

If your runs fit comfortably inside 2,500 or 10,000 a month and you don’t want to maintain a server, Cloud is the simpler option. If you want the Community edition without an execution limit, but don’t want to manage the infrastructure yourself, managed self-hosting is the middle ground.

What does it cost to run n8n on your own server?

Running n8n on your own server costs the server plus your time. A 1 GiB DigitalOcean droplet is $6 a month and a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB droplet is $24. On Selfhost.dev, a 2 vCPU, 4 GB server in Europe is $0.02 an hour, $15.18 a month, with the setup already done and no execution limit.

The server is the cheap part of self-hosted n8n. A $6 VPS can run n8n, but the server isn’t the whole job: you still have to configure HTTPS, the webhook URL and encryption key, then handle backups and upgrades. The replies in the r/n8n thread that asks this exact question were largely about that time and maintenance.

One user wrote that getting n8n set up “took me a few months to figure out and was rather frustrating at times.” Another, who runs n8n for clients, put it plainly: “Infrastructure is a rounding error; you are charging for reliability and maintenance.”

Two setup steps cause most of the trouble, and n8n’s own docs describe both:

• The encryption key. n8n “creates a random encryption key automatically on the first launch and saves it in the ~/.n8n folder,” and uses it to encrypt every saved credential. Lose that folder in a rebuild and the credentials can’t be read.
• The webhook URL. n8n builds it from the host and port, and “If n8n runs behind a reverse proxy, that won’t work.” It has to be set by hand before outside services can reach your webhooks.

The 4 GB server is the one we run n8n on, so it’s also the size we price. For heavier use, n8n on Postgres runs a Postgres database on the same server at no extra charge.

From this page to a working n8n editor takes about four minutes.

You get the free Community edition on your own dedicated server, without doing the fiddly setup yourself. Pick a server and n8n comes up on its own domain with HTTPS, the webhook URL set and the encryption key saved. The $5 welcome credit covers about 10 days of the 4 GB server.

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Why is n8n so expensive?

n8n’s paid self-hosted plan costs €667 a month, billed annually, because n8n prices on value rather than on what it costs to run. Its pricing page says so: “Our pricing is not tied to how much it cost us to run n8n but the value it brings to you and your organisation.” Business adds SSO, Git version control and environments.

The price surprises people for a second reason: Business is self-hosted only. You pay €667 a month and still run the server yourself. The licence key also has to “ping our license server daily to stay active,” reporting your production executions to n8n. When the plan launched, the reaction on r/n8n drew more than 200 comments.

Smaller companies get a way in. The Start-up plan halves Business to €333 a month, billed annually, for companies with fewer than 20 employees and less than €5M in total funding.

For most small teams, though, the real question is narrower: do you need single sign-on, Git or shared credentials? If not, the free Community edition still gives you the core workflow automation, and the only bill is the server.

Which n8n pricing option should you choose?

The right n8n pricing option depends on three things: how often your workflows run, whether your team shares credentials, and how much setup you’re willing to own. The choice is essentially between paying n8n to run and manage the service, paying for a VPS and managing it yourself, or paying for managed self-hosting that leaves the Community edition on your own server.

• Choose n8n Cloud if your team shares workflows and credentials, your runs fit inside 2,500 or 10,000 a month, and you want nothing to maintain.
• Choose n8n Business if you need single sign-on, Git version control or separate environments, and the €667 a month (or €333 on the Start-up plan) is worth it to you.
• Choose your own VPS if you’re happy to set up HTTPS, the webhook URL, backups and upgrades yourself, in exchange for the lowest server bill.
• Choose Selfhost.dev if you want the free Community edition without the setup: $15.18 a month in Europe, the same bill at any run count, live in about four minutes.

n8n is free. Running it doesn’t have to be the hard part.

The free Community edition, your own dedicated server, no execution limit and none of the fiddly setup.

You get a 4 GB server in Europe for $15.18 a month, with HTTPS, the webhook URL and encryption key already configured. The $5 welcome credit is enough to run your real workflows for about 10 days before you decide.

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