n8n Self-Hosting Is Free and Cloud Has No Free Tier: The Pro-to-Business Jump Is 13x for 4x the Runs

The n8n decision looks binary — self-host or Cloud. The hard part is which Cloud tier, because there is a cliff between Pro and Business. Read directly from the official pricing page on 2026-09-08.

1. The plans, as published

Note the currency is EUR, not US dollars. Conversion moves with the exchange rate and we do not convert on your behalf.

Trials: Starter and Pro are marked no credit card required; Business is a 14-day trial that requires a card.

2. About that 13x cliff

From Pro (EUR 50/month) to Business (EUR 667/month):

• Price: roughly 13.3x
• Executions: 4x (10,000 → 40,000)

If you are upgrading because you ran out of executions, this is the most expensive purchase on the table. Cost per execution rises sharply.

What that money actually buys is four things:

1. A self-hosted option
2. SSO / SAML / LDAP
3. Environments and Git version control (dev/prod separation, workflows under version control)
4. 30 days of insights and the AI Assistant

All four are team governance, not throughput. Working alone, you probably need none of them.

3. Three questions that settle it

Question 1: Do you have someone to run a server?

• Yes → Community Edition, self-hosted, free forever. You pay in operations: updates, backups, certificates, monitoring.
• No → Cloud, where the fee buys not having to.

The honest version of this question is: when did you last apply security updates to a server? If you cannot remember, do not self-host.

Question 2: How many executions a month?

Rough estimate: (triggers per day) × (execution steps per workflow) × 30.

• Under 2,500 → Starter (EUR 20/month)
• 2,500–10,000 → Pro (EUR 50/month)
• Over 10,000 → go back to question 1. With the next rung at EUR 667, self-hosting suddenly looks very attractive.

Question 3: Do you need SSO, environments or Git version control?

• No → do not buy Business for executions. Self-host, or optimise the workflows down.
• Yes → the price is for those features, and that is a defensible purchase.

4. Three ways to cut executions (cheaper than upgrading)

Before jumping to EUR 667, try these:

1. Consolidate triggers. Polling every 5 minutes instead of every 30 cuts executions to a sixth. Most flows do not need that latency.
2. Filter early. Discard irrelevant events at the front of the workflow rather than running the whole chain and throwing the result away.
3. Merge similar workflows into one with branches. Three separate triggers become one trigger with routing.

Together these usually remove more than half the executions, at no cost.

5. Two things to know before self-hosting

• Licence: the Community Edition uses the Sustainable Use License (internal business use permitted). That is not the same as a fully permissive open-source licence. If you plan to bundle it into a product you sell, read the terms first.
• Enterprise features are not included: SSO and environments do not appear because you self-host. Self-hosting saves hosting fees, not feature licensing.

Related: n8n self-hosting is Docker-only in practice.

Read directly from n8n.io/pricing on 2026-09-08 and cross-checked against this site’s verification record of 2026-08-28. Tier prices (EUR, annual monthly rate), execution counts, concurrency, AI credits, Business’s self-hosting/SSO/Git features, trial terms and the free Community Edition are as published; the Sustainable Use License comes from our existing record. The 13.3x in section 2 is our arithmetic from published prices; the estimation method and optimisations in sections 3 and 4 are our guidance, not n8n’s. The page lists no execution cap for the Community Edition and we do not estimate one.