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Most people who search for n8n pricing want one number. The honest answer is that n8n has two price lists that have almost nothing to do with each other. One is what n8n charges you to run it in their cloud. The other is what it costs you to run the free version yourself, which is never actually free once you count the server and the hours.
We build n8n workflows for clients, and we get asked this every week. So here is the full picture as of September 2026, checked against n8n's own pricing page, docs and help center, plus what we have learned from keeping a self-hosted instance alive in production. If you are new to the tool itself, start with what n8n is and how it works.
n8n pricing at a glance
All prices below are in US dollars, which is what n8n charges billing addresses in the US. n8n's default currency is the euro: in most other countries you pay the same numbers in euros, except Business, which is €667 a month billed annually. Annual billing saves about 17%.
Every paid plan includes unlimited users, unlimited workflows and every integration. That was not always true. Until August 2025, n8n also capped how many workflows you could have active at once, which made the cheaper plans far less useful than they look today.
How n8n charges: one execution per workflow run
This is the part that makes n8n cheap for some teams and oddly expensive for others. n8n bills per execution, and an execution is one complete run of a workflow, no matter how many steps are inside it. A 3-step workflow and a 40-step workflow cost exactly the same per run.
Compare that with Zapier, which charges a task for every action step, and Make, which charges a credit for nearly every module. We run a 37-step order and support workflow for an e-commerce client. On n8n, each run is one execution. On Zapier the same run would be dozens of tasks. That gap is the whole reason many teams move to n8n once their workflows grow past a handful of steps. We break down that comparison in our n8n vs Make vs Zapier guide.
What counts as an execution (and what doesn't)
n8n's documentation is specific about this, and a lot of the pricing articles out there get it wrong. Only production runs count. Here is the official list.
Counts toward your limit:
- A Schedule trigger counts one execution every time it fires, whether or not it finds anything to do.
- A polling trigger (for example, "check Gmail for new emails") counts only when it finds new data.
- A webhook counts once for every request that starts the workflow.
Does not count:
- Manual test runs from the editor while you build.
- Sub-workflows. Only the parent workflow's run counts.
- Error workflows that fire when something fails.
- Polls that come back empty.
- Malformed webhook calls that fail before the workflow starts.
Two practical consequences. First, you can split a big workflow into sub-workflows for sanity without paying more. Second, the real budget-killer is a Schedule trigger on a tight interval. A workflow that runs every five minutes uses about 8,640 executions a month on its own, which is more than three Starter plans. If you only need to react to new data, a polling trigger or a webhook is almost always cheaper.
Each n8n Cloud plan in plain English
Starter: $20/month (annual) or $24 (monthly)
2,500 executions, 5 concurrent executions, one shared project and 2,300 AI Assistant credits a month. It is enough for a small business running a few event-driven workflows: form to CRM, new order to Slack, invoice to accounting. It is not enough for anything on a frequent schedule.
Pro: $50/month (annual) or $60 (monthly)
10,000 executions, 20 concurrent executions, three shared projects, admin roles, global variables, workflow history and execution search. Pro also comes in a larger tier with 50,000 executions and 50 concurrent runs, and monthly subscribers on that tier can add more executions themselves. For most small teams running customer-facing automations, Pro is the plan that makes sense.
Business: $800/month (annual) or $960 (monthly), self-hosted
This one surprises people: Business is not a cloud plan. You run it on your own infrastructure. It adds SSO (SAML and LDAP), separate environments, Git-based version control, scaling options and six shared projects, with 40,000 executions included. Beyond that, n8n sells overage in buckets of 300,000 executions, priced at €4,000 each (n8n quotes overage in euros).
Enterprise: custom
Enterprise can run in n8n's cloud or on your own servers, with 200+ concurrent executions, longer log retention, an SLA and dedicated support. n8n does not publish a price. Since the August 2025 pricing change, it is quoted based on execution volume.
What happens when you hit your execution limit
This is the question we wish more people asked before choosing a plan.
On Starter and Pro, there is no grace period. According to n8n's help center, executions over the limit are not queued. They fail immediately with the error "Execution limit reached. Consider upgrading your plan." Your options are to wait for the reset on the first of the calendar month, upgrade (which applies instantly), or use a one-time courtesy reset that n8n grants once per customer on the Trial, Starter and smaller Pro tiers.
For a lead form or an order workflow, a hard stop in the middle of the month means lost leads or unprocessed orders, and you may not notice for days. If your volume is anywhere near the limit, size up. A Pro plan is cheaper than a week of missed orders.
On Business, the behavior is different. n8n's pricing FAQ says workflows keep running when you go over, sales gets in touch around 80% usage, and any overage is invoiced later.
AI credits: two different things with similar names
n8n now has two kinds of AI credits, and they are easy to mix up.
- Assistant credits pay for n8n's own AI helpers: the AI workflow builder and "Ask AI" inside the editor. Starter includes 2,300 a month and Pro between 5,700 and 13,700, depending on the tier. They reset monthly and do not roll over.
- Gateway credits are newer and separate. On Cloud Starter and Pro, they let your workflows call models like OpenAI or Anthropic through n8n without adding your own API key, and they are billed per request.
You don't have to use gateway credits. Any AI node can use your own API key instead, in which case the model provider bills you directly. For client builds, we almost always use the client's own keys, so model costs show up on one bill the client already understands.
Is n8n free?
The software is free if you host it yourself. The Community Edition has no execution cap, no user cap and no workflow cap. What you give up compared with paid plans are the team and governance features: projects and sharing, SSO, environments, Git version control, external secrets, log streaming and multi-main scaling.
Worth knowing: if you register your Community Edition with an email address, n8n sends a free license key that unlocks a few extras, including folders, debugging past executions in the editor, and custom execution data. It takes two minutes, and most self-hosters never do it.
There is no free n8n Cloud plan. There is a 14-day Cloud trial with Pro features and 1,000 executions, and no credit card is required.
The licensing detail agencies and SaaS founders miss
n8n is not open source in the strict sense. It is "fair-code," released under n8n's Sustainable Use License. For internal business use, that makes no practical difference. For agencies and product builders, it matters a lot. n8n's help center spells it out:
- Helping a client set up and run their own n8n instance needs no commercial license from you.
- Hosting and managing clients' workflows and credentials inside your instance requires an Enterprise license.
- Embedding n8n in your product so your customers build or run workflows requires an Embed license.
This is why we set up n8n in each client's own account rather than running everyone on one shared server. It is cleaner for security, and it keeps the licensing simple.
What self-hosting n8n really costs in 2026
Most articles say self-hosting costs "$5 a month." That was roughly true in 2025. In June 2026, Hetzner, the favorite budget host for n8n, raised cloud prices across its range, and several popular guides still quote the old numbers. Here is where common options stand now.
Then add the things that don't show up on the server invoice:
- Backups. DigitalOcean charges 20% of the droplet price for weekly backups and 30% for daily. Budget something similar wherever you host.
- A real database. n8n starts on SQLite. For anything in production, use Postgres. It can live on the same server for small setups.
- Scaling. If you ever need queue mode for high volume, you add Redis and worker processes. That is a different cost bracket, typically several servers instead of one.
- Your time. Updates, SSL, monitoring and the occasional 2 a.m. surprise. This is the cost people underestimate.
A realistic small production setup in 2026 lands around $8–14 a month in hosting, plus an hour or two of maintenance each month if nothing breaks.
What we've learned keeping a self-hosted n8n instance alive
Three things from a real client system, a multilingual customer support pipeline built on self-hosted n8n with Shopify, Airtable and OpenAI:
- Disk fills up quietly. Execution logs from AI steps plus daily database backups were adding about 1 GB a day. Nothing warns you until the disk is nearly full. Set execution data pruning on day one and watch disk usage.
- "Active" doesn't always mean working. An email (IMAP) trigger dropped its connection during a forced reconnect while n8n still showed the workflow as active. We only caught it because incoming emails stopped being processed. Any workflow that listens for events needs an outside check, not just the green toggle.
- Third-party APIs move under you. The same system was still pointed at an old Shopify API version that Shopify has since retired. Self-hosting means you own that upkeep, not n8n.
None of this is a reason to avoid self-hosting. It is a reason to count maintenance as part of the price.
n8n Cloud vs self-hosted: which should you choose?
Our rule of thumb for clients:
- Choose Cloud Starter or Pro if nobody on your team wants to manage a server, your volume fits comfortably under the plan limit, and you are happy with your data on n8n's EU infrastructure.
- Self-host the Community Edition if you have high or unpredictable volume, need data to stay on your own infrastructure, or run many frequently scheduled workflows. Budget for maintenance or a support retainer.
- Look at Business when you need SSO, Git-based deployments or separate staging and production environments, and you already self-host. If you are a startup with fewer than 20 employees and under €5M in funding, n8n's startup plan takes 50% off Business.
A quick way to decide on cost alone: if your monthly executions would push you past Pro's 10,000, the self-hosted Community Edition becomes very hard to beat on price, even after you pay someone to maintain it.
A worked example: estimating your n8n bill
Say you run three workflows:
- A website lead form workflow that sends leads to your CRM and Slack, about 600 submissions a month (webhook): 600 executions.
- A Shopify order workflow with 25 steps, about 1,200 orders a month (webhook): 1,200 executions, not 30,000.
- An hourly inventory sync (Schedule trigger): 24 × 30 = 720 executions.
That is 2,520 executions a month, just over Starter's 2,500. On Starter, the last day or two of the month would fail. The sensible choices are Pro at $50 a month, or moving the inventory sync to every two hours (360 executions), which brings the total to 2,160 and fits the $20 Starter plan with a little headroom. Small scheduling decisions like that often matter more than the plan you pick.
Run the same numbers through a per-step tool and the 25-step order workflow alone becomes tens of thousands of billable actions a month. That is the case for n8n in one line.
Discounts worth knowing about
- Startup plan: 50% off Business ($400 a month billed annually, €333 in euros) for companies with fewer than 20 employees and less than €5M in funding. Self-hosted only.
- Non-profits: a 30% discount code on all Cloud plans for verified non-profits, NGOs and charities. You request it through n8n support.
- Annual billing: about 17% off any paid plan.
Frequently asked questions
