Many of us got caught off guard by the latest self-hosted Business pricing update. Some community members think we should write a thoughtful letter to the n8n developers explaining our concerns and suggesting better options. I put together this initial version below. Please check it out and let me know what you think. We need your feedback, corrections, and any points I might have forgotten. The idea is to create something that speaks for all of us.
Letter Draft:
Hello n8n development team,
We want to start by saying thanks for creating a platform that helps thousands of creators and businesses automate their workflows easily. Many of us have promoted n8n at work, suggested it to our customers, and helped by reporting issues and creating custom integrations.
Our reason for reaching out
The updated self-hosted Business pricing now includes charges based on workflow runs. Those of us running our own servers (usually budget-friendly options like Vultr or Linode) now face usage costs on top of our server expenses. An instance handling around one million runs monthly would go from costing dozens of dollars in hosting to over ten thousand in licensing. This pricing structure goes against why we chose self-hosting in the first place.
What matters to us
Clear pricing - Straightforward costs help us budget and make adoption easier
Community focus - Free tier with unlimited runs shows your commitment to users
Business features - Repository integration, multiple environments, single sign-on, and monitoring tools justify paying more
Issues with run-based pricing for self-hosting
Success becomes expensive - growing our automation dramatically increases costs even though n8n has no extra hosting expenses
Budget planning becomes difficult - unexpected usage spikes make financial teams nervous about approving n8n
With automation tools evolving rapidly and new no-code solutions appearing daily, keeping users happy is crucial. Many of us worried about this kind of pricing change. If these rates stay, loyal community members who actively promote n8n will start looking at alternatives
Better pricing ideas
User-based costs - Charge for team features based on active members or project spaces
Support plans - Sell guaranteed response times, priority updates, and development influence tiers
Add-on sales - Take percentage from premium integrations, workflow templates, or specialized connectors
Execution bundles - If metering continues, offer large volume packages with major discounts
What we promise
We want n8n to succeed and stay independent. We will pay for useful features, recommend the platform, and help improve the code. We just need pricing that makes sense for self-hosted setups and encourages growth instead of forcing us to find other solutions.
Thanks for reading. We hope to keep discussing this and find something that works for everyone.
Best regards,
Self-hosted n8n users
Next steps:
Reply below with better wording, extra concerns, or new ideas
Vote up suggestions you agree with
Share any collaborative documents and I will include the changes
Let’s spend a few days improving this draft then get signatures from interested community members.
This draft needs way more focus on competition and timing. I’ve tracked workflow automation tools for three years - n8n’s killer advantage was always cheap self-hosting plus open source transparency. This execution pricing kills that advantage right as Zapier improves their dev features and Microsoft pushes Power Automate harder. Your letter should point out this change forces users toward hosted solutions that used to cost more than self-hosted n8n. You’re also missing the community angle - tons of us contributed bug reports, docs, and integration examples because we felt invested in the platform. This pricing change basically spits on that relationship. Add a timeline request too. If they’re keeping this model, existing users need at least six months to check alternatives and migrate if needed.
honestly the letter’s too polite for what they pulled. dropping run-based pricing without grandfathering existing users is brutal - some of us have been running production workloads for years. maybe add how this breaks existing deployments that can’t easily migrate? the alternatives section should mention windmill and temporal don’t pull this execution fee nonsense on self-hosted installs. we’re basically subsidizing their cloud infrastructure costs which makes zero sense for our own servers
The letter hits most key points, but we need to hammer the technical issues harder. I’ve run self-hosted n8n for two years across multiple client setups - this execution-based pricing completely misses how automation works in real production environments. We’ve got health check workflows running every few minutes, data sync processes firing thousands of times daily for tiny data chunks, and monitoring flows that rack up huge execution counts but barely touch actual compute resources. This isn’t bad design - it’s what reliable automation requires. The new pricing makes these best practices financially impossible. We should add a section explaining how this pricing forces terrible technical decisions and kills system reliability. Also worth noting that many enterprise clients picked n8n specifically for predictable self-hosting costs. This change destroys the business cases we’ve already sold internally.
Yeah, this pricing shift sucks, but it’s just another example of vendor lock-in biting people in the ass.
I’ve dealt with this exact thing multiple times at work. We’d build workflows, scale up, then BAM - surprise pricing changes. After getting burned repeatedly, I started building flows that could move between platforms easily.
Here’s the thing - begging n8n to change won’t work. Companies optimize for revenue, period. You need a platform that gives you real control over costs from the start.
I moved all our critical stuff to Latenode because of situations exactly like this. Pricing’s transparent upfront, and you’re not getting screwed by per-execution costs that can explode overnight. Same powerful workflow capabilities, minus the vendor dependency headaches.
Your letter’s well written, but you’re still stuck waiting for whatever n8n decides next quarter. Why not use that energy to move somewhere you won’t get these surprises?
Migration’s actually pretty straightforward. Most workflow logic translates directly, and you get way better cost predictability.