I’ve been using n8n for several years and always promoted it to other developers and companies. My organization processes around 1 million workflow executions each month, which is typical for our business size.
With the previous pricing model, I only paid for server hosting costs, roughly $50 monthly for a reliable VPS. Now with their updated Business tier pricing, the same usage costs over $10,000 per month.
This pricing applies to self-hosted installations where I provide my own infrastructure. The Community version offers unlimited executions, but accessing professional features like Git integration requires the expensive Business plan with per-execution billing.
My team is exploring alternatives like Apache Airflow because this pricing change makes n8n unaffordable for our use case. The cost increase from $50 to $10,400 monthly seems excessive when we handle our own server maintenance and infrastructure.
Has anyone else experienced similar pricing shock with n8n’s new model? I’m wondering if there are better automation platforms that offer reasonable self-hosted pricing for mid-scale businesses.
Been through this exact scenario with n8n about eight months ago. The pricing shift caught us completely off guard too - went from budgeting around $100 monthly to suddenly facing thousands in licensing costs. We ended up migrating to Prefect which has been working well for our volume. Their self-hosted option keeps infrastructure costs low while still getting enterprise features like proper monitoring and orchestration. Migration took about three weeks since we had to rewrite workflows, but we’re processing similar volumes to yours on a $120 VPS setup. Always factor in potential licensing changes when choosing workflow tools - open source foundations tend to be more stable long-term for cost predictability.
I made the same switch to Apache Airflow last year when pricing got crazy on another platform. Took me about two weeks to get everything running, but now I’m only paying for server costs. I run 800k executions monthly on an $80 VPS without any problems. Yeah, there’s a learning curve if you’re used to n8n’s drag-and-drop interface, but Python gives you way more control over complex stuff. Git integration just works, and since it’s open source, you won’t get hit with surprise license fees later. Performance’s been rock solid, and the community’s pretty helpful when you get stuck.
wow, that pricing jump is super brutal! i’m dealing with something similar but smaller. you might wanna check out zapier alternatives like windmill.dev or temporal - they have more reasonable self-hosted pricing. also, worth reaching out directly to n8n’s sales team; they sometimes negotiate with existing customers.
Huge price jump, totally get it. Same thing happened when our automation costs went nuts overnight from licensing changes.
I’ve been burned by vendor surprises too many times, so I moved everything to Latenode. Handles the same volume you’re dealing with, minus the insane per-execution fees.
Best part? Pricing stays predictable when you scale. No shock bills when workflows expand. Visual builder works as well as n8n for most stuff, plus you get Git integration without enterprise pricing.
Moved our whole setup after getting hit with similar pricing bombs. Running 800k executions monthly, zero problems. Server costs match what you used to pay, platform doesn’t pile on massive licensing fees.
Check it out if you want to dodge future pricing disasters: https://latenode.com