N8N Pricing Explained: Cloud vs Self-Hosted for Startups

N8N Pricing Explained: Cloud vs Self-Hosted for Startups

Navigating N8N’s pricing can feel like a trick question. The platform is famously open-source and “free,” yet they offer a paid cloud plan. So, what’s the real cost for a startup? The answer isn’t in the sticker price, but in the total cost of ownership—a calculation where time, expertise, and hidden infrastructure expenses are your most critical variables.

From Experience: I’ve advised dozens of early-stage teams on this exact choice. The most common mistake is viewing the self-hosted option as “free” without accounting for the engineering hours spent on server setup, security patches, and troubleshooting a failed workflow at 2 AM. That “free” tier can quickly become your most expensive employee.

This breakdown cuts through the marketing to give you a practical, dollars-and-cents comparison. We’ll move beyond monthly subscriptions to factor in the real resources required, helping you decide which model truly aligns with your startup’s stage, technical bandwidth, and growth trajectory.

The Core Trade-Off: Time vs. Money

For a startup, every hour has an opportunity cost. This is the heart of the N8N pricing decision.

• N8N Cloud is an operational expense. You pay a predictable monthly fee for a fully managed service. N8N handles updates, scaling, security, and backups. Your cost is purely financial.
• Self-Hosted N8N is a capital expense in infrastructure, but primarily a massive time expense for your team. You save the subscription fee but invest significant engineering time in deployment, maintenance, and monitoring. The “server costs” are just the tip of the iceberg.

Your 2025 Golden Nugget: The breakeven point isn’t about revenue; it’s about your CTO’s focus. If your technical co-founder is still coding core product features, the mental context-switching required to manage your automation server can stall growth. The cloud fee isn’t a cost—it’s an investment in keeping your best minds on your product, not your plumbing.

Let’s unpack what each model truly entails.

The “Free” vs “Paid” Automation Dilemma

Every startup founder knows the tension: you need to automate to scale, but your budget is tighter than your launch timeline. You find a powerful tool like N8N and see the enticing promise of a “free” self-hosted version. It feels like a no-brainer. But then you see the managed Cloud plan with its monthly fee. Which path is the right financial decision for your early-stage company?

This is the core automation dilemma. The immediate allure of $0 software costs is powerful, but in the world of infrastructure, “free” rarely means without cost—it often means trading money for time, expertise, and hidden operational burdens. Choosing wrong can mean sinking precious developer hours into server maintenance instead of product development, or facing surprise bills that derail your cash flow.

This guide cuts through that confusion. We won’t just list prices; we’ll analyze the true total cost of ownership (TCO) for both N8N Cloud and Self-Hosted. By the end, you’ll have a clear, data-driven framework to decide based on your startup’s specific stage, technical resources, and growth trajectory. You’ll learn:

• The direct pricing of N8N Cloud and the real, often-overlooked costs of self-hosting.
• How scalability differs dramatically between the two models.
• A simple checklist to identify which option aligns with your current operational reality.

Let’s move beyond the surface-level “free vs. paid” debate and find the most strategic path for your automation foundation.

Section 1: N8N Cloud – The Managed Service Model

For a startup founder or operations lead, time is your most precious and non-renewable resource. N8N Cloud is an investment not just in automation, but in reclaiming that time. It’s the fully managed, hosted version of the platform where N8N handles the servers, security, and maintenance, allowing you to focus solely on building workflows that drive your business forward. Let’s break down what this looks like in practice.

Tier-by-Tier Breakdown: Pricing & Limits for Scaling Startups

N8N Cloud’s pricing is primarily consumption-based, centered on execution credits. One credit typically equals one node execution (a single unit of work in a workflow). This model is efficient—you pay for what you use—but requires an understanding of your automation volume.

• Starter Plan (~$20/month): This is your sandbox and proof-of-concept tier. With 5,000 execution credits per month, it’s perfect for automating a handful of critical, low-volume tasks. Think: syncing new user sign-ups from your website to a CRM, sending daily digest emails, or posting social media updates. The limit of 3 active workflows keeps you focused on your most impactful automations. Golden Nugget: Monitor your credit usage in the first month. If you’re consistently hitting 60-70% of your limit, you’re automating effectively and will likely need to scale up soon.

• Professional Plan (~$50/month): This is where most growing startups find their long-term home. The jump to 15,000 credits supports more complex, multi-step workflows and higher data volumes. The real unlock here is the team collaboration features—multiple user seats and shared credentials. This means your marketing lead can manage the social media workflow while your ops person handles the CRM syncs, all within a single, governed account. It transforms automation from a one-person project into a company-wide capability.

• Enterprise Plan (Custom Pricing): When automation becomes business-critical. This tier is for startups scaling rapidly, handling sensitive data (with advanced SSO and audit logs), or needing to orchestrate thousands of executions daily. You get dedicated support, custom credit packs, and guarantees on uptime. If you’re in a regulated industry like fintech or healthtech, or if a workflow failure would directly impact revenue, this is the conversation to have.

My Experience: I advised a SaaS startup that began on the Starter plan. Their first workflow automatically created a support ticket and tagged their lead engineer when a specific error log was generated. It used barely 100 credits a month but saved them hours of manual log checking. This tangible success justified their move to the Professional plan to build more.

The Value of “Managed” – What You’re Really Paying For

The monthly fee isn’t just for software access. It’s for operational insurance and cognitive offload. Here’s what “managed” truly covers:

• Zero-Downtime Updates & Security Patches: N8N’s engineering team rolls out updates and critical security patches automatically. You wake up to new features and a more secure platform without scheduling maintenance windows or worrying about dependency conflicts.
• Built-In Infrastructure Scaling: Your workflows run on N8N’s infrastructure. If you have a viral post that triggers 10,000 webhook executions overnight, the platform scales to handle it. You don’t get a frantic 3 AM alert that your self-hosted server has crashed.
• Enterprise-Grade Backups & Reliability: Your workflow configurations and execution data are automatically backed up. The platform offers a 99.5% SLA on the Professional plan and above. This reliability is paramount when your customer onboarding or billing processes depend on these automations.
• Premium Support & Community Access: You get direct support channels. When you hit a complex API integration snag, you’re not just scouring forums; you have a team to help unblock you, accelerating your time-to-value.

Your 2025 Takeaway: The managed service fee directly translates to risk reduction and velocity increase. You are trading capital (monthly fee) for the certainty that your automation foundation is secure, scalable, and maintained, allowing your small team to operate like a much larger one.

Ideal Startup Profile for the Cloud

N8N Cloud isn’t for every startup, but it’s a clear operational win for specific profiles. Choose Cloud if your startup:

• Has a small, generalist team without dedicated DevOps or sysadmin expertise. You can’t afford to have your best product manager configuring Docker and managing server security.
• Values rapid prototyping and iteration. You need to test automation ideas this week, not after a month of provisioning servers. The Cloud model offers instant deployment.
• Is pre-product-market fit or in early growth. Your focus must be 100% on building product and talking to customers, not on infrastructure management. The predictable, scalable cost of Cloud aligns perfectly with this stage.
• Handles sensitive user data but lacks a large security team. Leveraging N8N’s enterprise-grade security and compliance (especially on higher tiers) extends your security posture.

In essence, N8N Cloud is your shortcut to sophisticated automation. It removes the heavy lifting of infrastructure, letting you invest your team’s energy into the workflows that create competitive advantage, not the servers that run them.

Section 2: N8N Self-Hosted – The “Free” Open-Source Option

So, you’ve seen the managed cloud option. Now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: the self-hosted version. On paper, it’s free. In practice, it’s a different kind of investment—one measured in server costs, maintenance hours, and operational risk. This is where many startups trip up by only looking at the sticker price of $0.

Let’s pull back the curtain on what “free” really means for your business in 2025.

The Core Appeal: Unlimited Workflows, Zero License Fees

The proposition is undeniably powerful. You download the source-available software, install it on your own infrastructure, and you’re off to the races. There are no artificial limits on workflow executions, no seat licenses for your team, and no vendor lock-in. You own everything: your data, your workflows, and your destiny.

My Experience: I’ve deployed N8N on a private server for a client handling sensitive financial data where cloud hosting was a compliance non-starter. The ability to tailor the database, network rules, and even the N8N version to our exact specifications was invaluable. For use cases demanding absolute sovereignty, self-hosting isn’t just an option; it’s the only path.

This model is a perfect fit if your automation needs are vast, your data governance is strict, or you have a developer who loves to tinker. But here’s the golden nugget from that deployment: “Free” software doesn’t run on air. The moment you decide to self-host, you become your own cloud provider. And that comes with a bill.

The Hidden Cost Equation: Infrastructure & Hosting

This is the first layer of real cost. You need a place to run N8N, and in 2025, even basic virtual private servers (VPS) have nuanced pricing. Let’s break down a realistic, mid-tier setup for a startup running a dozen active workflows:

• Compute/VPS: A reliable instance (e.g., DigitalOcean Premium Droplet, AWS EC2 t3.medium, or Google Cloud e2-medium) with 2-4 vCPUs and 4-8GB RAM. Cost: ~$20-$50/month.
• Database: While N8N can use SQLite, for any serious workload you need PostgreSQL or MySQL on a separate instance or managed service (like AWS RDS or DigitalOcean Managed Databases) for stability. Cost: ~$15-$30/month.
• Networking & CDN: If your workflows serve public webhooks or interact globally, you might need a static IP, load balancer, or CDN for performance. Cost: ~$5-$20/month.

Suddenly, your “free” software has a hard infrastructure baseline of $40-$100 per month. And that’s before a single workflow runs. If your automations are data-heavy or require low latency, you’ll quickly scale to the next tier, doubling that cost.

The 2025 Reality Check: Cloud providers have shifted pricing models. Beware of egress fees (costs to move data out of their network). A workflow that processes and exports large datasets to an external service can incur surprising monthly charges if your architecture isn’t optimized.

The True Price Tag: Developer Time & Operational Overhead

This is the decisive factor for most startups. Infrastructure has a clear price tag; your team’s time does not—until you account for it. The soft costs of self-hosting are where the real trade-off lies.

Ask yourself: Who on your team will handle these tasks?

• Initial Setup & Configuration: This isn’t a one-click install. It’s provisioning servers, setting up databases (with proper backups from day one), configuring reverse proxies (like Nginx), and implementing SSL certificates. This can easily consume 8-16 hours of developer time.
• Ongoing Maintenance: This includes:
  • Applying security patches to the server OS.
  • Updating the N8N application itself (which, if skipped, can lead to breaking changes down the line).
  • Monitoring server health, disk space, and memory usage.
• Troubleshooting & Debugging: When a workflow fails at 2 AM, is it the N8N node, a third-party API, or a server memory leak? Without a managed platform’s integrated observability, your developer is digging through Docker logs and htop output.
• Manual Backups & Recovery: You are solely responsible for backing up your workflow configurations and database. Testing a recovery process is not optional; it’s critical. I’ve seen teams lose weeks of automation work because their backup script silently failed for months.

Your 2025 Takeaway: The self-hosted model trades monthly subscription fees for a significant, ongoing capital expenditure in your most valuable resource: developer bandwidth. For a startup with a robust DevOps capacity, this can be a cost-effective path to scale. For a team where every engineering hour is focused on core product development, this overhead can become a dangerous distraction. The “free” version is truly free only if your time has no cost. For a growing startup, that’s rarely the case.

The choice, therefore, isn’t just between free and paid. It’s between investing money in a managed service or investing time and expertise in building and maintaining your own automation platform. One offers speed and simplicity; the other offers ultimate control at the price of operational responsibility.

Section 3: Head-to-Head Cost Analysis: A 12-Month Projection

The most common mistake founders make is comparing only the direct, line-item costs. The real decision hinges on your most constrained resource: developer time versus cash. To make an informed choice between N8N Cloud and self-hosting, you need to model the total cost of ownership over a meaningful period. Let’s project the first year for two archetypal startup scenarios.

Scenario A: The Bootstrapped Solo Founder

You’re a technical founder building an MVP. Your automation needs are modest—perhaps syncing new user emails to a CRM, sending weekly digest emails, or posting social media updates. Your time is your most valuable asset, but cash is tight.

• Self-Hosted Path: You spin up a $10/month DigitalOcean Droplet or a similar low-tier VPS. The N8N software is free. Direct cost: $120/year. However, you are now the sysadmin. In my experience, you’ll spend a minimum of 5 hours per month on maintenance: initial server setup and securing (SSH, firewall, updates), managing N8N version upgrades (which can sometimes break workflows), debugging why a workflow stopped (was it the server, the database, or the API?), and monitoring for outages. At a conservative opportunity cost of $50/hour for your development time, that’s $250/month in indirect costs. Your true first-year cost approaches $3,120.

• N8N Cloud Path: You sign up for the Starter plan at $20/month. Your cost is fixed and predictable: $240/year. Everything from provisioning and scaling to security patches, backups, and high availability is handled. Your 5 hours of monthly sysadmin work evaporates, freeing you to build features. The built-in error dashboard and execution history let you debug workflow logic in minutes, not hours.

The Golden Nugget: For the solo founder, the break-even point isn’t about cash—it’s about focus. If losing 5+ hours of product development time each month costs you more than $20, the cloud plan isn’t an expense; it’s a leverage tool. The moment you need a webhook to be publicly accessible 24/7 without your laptop running, the managed service’s reliability becomes non-negotiable.

Scenario B: The Scaling SaaS Startup (Team of 5)

Your product has traction. The marketing, sales, and support teams all rely on automations for lead routing, customer onboarding, and support ticket creation. Downtime or data loss is now a direct revenue risk. You have some DevOps capability but can’t afford to dedicate a full-time engineer to automation infrastructure.

• Self-Hosted Path: A production-grade setup is mandatory. This isn’t a $10 VPS. You need:

  • A robust VPS (e.g., 4GB RAM, 2 vCPUs): ~$40/month
  • A managed PostgreSQL database for reliability: ~$15/month
  • A dedicated server for staging/testing changes: ~$20/month Direct Infrastructure Cost: ~$900/year.

  Now, factor in expertise. You’ll need 10-15 hours monthly from a senior developer or a fractional DevOps contractor ($100-$150/hr) for architecture, CI/CD pipeline setup, advanced monitoring (e.g., with Prometheus/Grafana), secret management, and handling critical security updates. Indirect Cost: ~$1,500+/month. Total annual TCO soars past $19,000.

• N8N Cloud Path: The Professional plan at $50/month per user for your 5 core users is $3,000/year. This includes the SSO, advanced security, and audit logs your growing company requires. The cost scales linearly with team size but includes all infrastructure, expert SRE oversight, and 99.9% uptime SLA. The time your tech lead spends managing servers is redirected to optimizing the business logic of your workflows.

Visual Cost Comparison Table

Aspect	Scenario A: Solo Founder (Self-Hosted)	Scenario A: Solo Founder (N8N Cloud)	Scenario B: Scaling Team (Self-Hosted)	Scenario B: Scaling Team (N8N Cloud Pro)
Direct Cost (Year 1)	~$120 (VPS)	$240 (Starter Plan)	~$900+ (Robust Infra)	$3,000
Indirect Cost (Time)	High (60+ hrs/yr) – Your development time.	Minimal – You manage workflows, not servers.	Very High (150+ hrs/yr) – Senior DevOps time.	Minimal – Team manages workflows, not infra.
Key Features	Full control, data locality.	Zero-maintenance, built-in error handling, global reliability.	Ultimate customization, on-premise deployment possible.	SSO, Audit Logs, Team Management, SLA, Premium Support.
Primary Risk	Operational Burden. You are the single point of failure. An outage occurs while you’re asleep.	Vendor Lock-in & Cost Scaling. Workflow logic is portable, but leaving requires re-hosting.	Hidden Expertise Cost. A misconfigured backup or slow database can cripple business ops.	Budget Predictability. Adding new workflow editors increases cost directly.

Your 2025 Takeaway: The analysis reveals a clear pattern. Self-hosting N8N is only “free” if your time and expertise have no value. For early-stage startups, the cloud plan’s predictability and time savings are a strategic advantage that accelerates product development. For scaling teams, the managed service converts a variable, high-expertise operational cost into a fixed, predictable line item, allowing your best technical talent to focus on core product differentiation, not platform maintenance. The most expensive choice is often the one that misallocates your most precious resource—your team’s focused innovation time.

Section 4: Beyond Price: Key Decision Factors for Startups

The price tag is a compelling starting point, but it’s rarely the final word for a strategic decision. Choosing between N8N Cloud and self-hosting is fundamentally about aligning the platform’s operational model with your startup’s non-negotiable requirements and internal capabilities. Let’s move beyond the spreadsheet and examine the three critical dimensions that should guide your choice.

Security & Compliance Requirements

For many startups, this isn’t a preference—it’s a mandate. Your data handling needs can instantly eliminate one option.

If your startup processes personal data from European users, you are bound by GDPR. A key requirement is data sovereignty—knowing exactly where your data resides. With N8N Cloud, your workflow data is stored in the region you select (US or EU), which is sufficient for many. However, if you have customers in regulated industries like healthcare (HIPAA) or finance, or if your contracts demand that data never leaves a specific geographic boundary or your own private cloud, self-hosting is your only path to full control.

The 2025 Reality: Venture capital firms and enterprise clients are increasingly auditing the compliance posture of their portfolio companies and vendors before signing deals. Saying “we use a managed cloud” may not be enough. You may need to demonstrate specific controls, audit trails, and data isolation. The Cloud Enterprise plan bridges this gap for some, offering enhanced security features and support for compliance frameworks. But for absolute, verifiable sovereignty, a properly configured self-hosted instance on your own infrastructure is the definitive answer.

Scalability & Performance Needs

How does your automation load behave? Is it steady, or does it come in unpredictable, spiky bursts?

N8N Cloud operates like a utility. When a webhook fires from a viral social media post or a scheduled workflow triggers a 10,000-email send, the platform scales automatically to handle the load. You don’t think about CPU, memory, or queue depth. In 2025, where user expectations for real-time automation are higher than ever, this resilience is a competitive feature.

Self-hosting, conversely, requires manual scalability. You must provision your VPS or Kubernetes cluster for your peak expected load, not your average. This means:

• Over-provisioning (and over-paying) during quiet periods.
• Risking performance degradation or failure during unexpected surges if you under-provision.
• Manual intervention to scale up (which takes time) or implementing an auto-scaling setup, which adds significant DevOps complexity.

The Golden Nugget: Monitor your trial workflows. If you see a pattern of high-concurrency triggers (e.g., form submissions, IoT sensor data, timed batch jobs), the operational headache of manually scaling self-hosted infrastructure can quickly outweigh its cost savings. The cloud’s elasticity isn’t just convenient; it’s a risk mitigation strategy.

Team Skillset: The DevOps Tax

This is the most common and costly oversight. Self-hosting N8N isn’t a set-and-forget task. It’s an ongoing software system you now own. Before committing, conduct a ruthless audit of your team’s bandwidth and ask:

• Who will handle the initial deployment and configuration of the server, database, and reverse proxy?
• Who is on call for 2 a.m. alerts if the instance goes down or runs out of disk space?
• Who manages backups, security patches, and N8N version upgrades without breaking existing workflows?
• Who will configure monitoring, logging, and alerting so you know something is wrong before your users do?

This is the “DevOps Tax”—the hidden cost of your team’s time diverted from building your core product to maintaining your automation platform. For a technical founder or a team with dedicated DevOps resources, this tax might be acceptable. For a lean team of front-end developers or non-technical founders, this tax can be crippling.

“The most expensive server is the one that quietly fails on a weekend, halting your customer onboarding, while your only developer is on vacation.”

Your 2025 Takeaway: The choice between Cloud and Self-Hosted ultimately boils down to a trade-off between capital and operational complexity. N8N Cloud converts unpredictable operational complexity into a predictable capital expense. Self-hosting does the opposite. Your most strategic move is to match the model to your startup’s specific regulatory constraints, traffic patterns, and—most importantly—the authentic skills and availability of the team who will keep the lights on. Choose the option that lets your team focus its energy on automation that differentiates your business, not on maintaining the platform that runs it.

Section 5: Making the Choice: A Practical Framework for Your Startup

So, you’ve seen the numbers and the trade-offs. The final question remains: which path is right for your startup right now? The most strategic choice isn’t about finding the universally “best” option, but the one that best aligns with your current stage, resources, and immediate goals. Based on advising dozens of early-stage teams, I’ve found a hybrid approach often yields the highest return on investment.

The “Start with Cloud, Move Later” Hybrid Path

For most early-stage founders, I recommend a clear, phased strategy: start on N8N Cloud to validate and scale your initial automations, then re-evaluate the self-hosted decision at a predefined milestone.

Begin with the Cloud Pro plan. This gives you a fully managed environment to build, test, and iterate on your core workflows without a single thought for server patches, database backups, or SSL certificates. Your sole focus is creating automation that delivers value. The goal here is speed to validation.

The decision point comes at one of two triggers:

1. A Revenue Milestone: When you consistently hit a specific ARR (e.g., $200K+) where the cost of Cloud scaling becomes a meaningful, recurring line item that could be reallocated.
2. A Complexity Milestone: When you have a mission-critical, high-volume workflow where latency or data residency requirements make the managed cloud a bottleneck.

Your 2025 Golden Nugget: The moment to consider migrating isn’t when you’re frustrated with a bill, but when you have a dedicated DevOps resource whose skills are being underutilized. The migration itself becomes their first project, paid for by the future savings. Moving in panic mode leads to downtime; moving as a strategic engineering project leads to a robust, owned infrastructure.

Actionable Checklist: Questions to Answer

Before you commit, work through this diagnostic with your co-founder or tech lead. Your answers will point to the clear winner.

• Budget & Resources:

  • Is your automation budget primarily capital (cash for subscriptions) or operational (engineering hours)?
  • Do you have a team member with proven DevOps skills (Docker, CI/CD, monitoring) who can reliably own this infrastructure long-term?
  • Is the true cost of a senior engineer spending 5-10 hours a month on maintenance more or less than the Cloud subscription?

• Workflow Criticality & Growth:

  • Are you building “nice-to-have” productivity boosts or “business-critical” customer-facing processes?
  • What is your projected execution volume for the next 12 months? (Cloud pricing is execution-based; self-hosted is server-capacity-based).
  • Do you have strict data sovereignty requirements that mandate data never leave a specific region or cloud provider?

• Team & Timeline:

  • Do you need to demonstrate automation ROI to stakeholders in weeks, not months?
  • Is your technical team currently at capacity building your core product?
  • Who is on-call if your self-hosted N8N instance goes down at 2 AM?

If your answers lean toward limited technical bandwidth, urgent timelines, and a focus on core product development, Cloud is your accelerator. If you have dedicated DevOps, predictable high-volume workloads, and stringent compliance needs, self-hosting is a viable strategic control point.

How to Get Started with Either Option

The barrier to entry is thankfully low for both paths. Here’s exactly what to do next.

For N8N Cloud: Simply head to the N8N Cloud signup page and start the free trial. You get full Pro plan features immediately. Use this trial not to build everything, but to prototype your single most important workflow. Test its limits, check the execution logs, and experience the managed service firsthand. This hands-on test is more valuable than any spec-sheet comparison.

For Self-Hosted: The official N8N Docker documentation is your best starting point. For a production-ready setup, don’t just run the simple Docker command. Instead, use the docker-compose example that includes a separate PostgreSQL database—this is non-negotiable for stability. I recommend deploying this on a platform like DigitalOcean or Hetzner for a straightforward, cost-effective VPS experience. Before moving any critical data, run a load test on a staging server to understand your instance’s real-world capacity.

Whichever path you choose, commit to starting. The greatest cost isn’t a subscription fee or a server bill; it’s the lost opportunity of manual, repetitive work that stifles your startup’s growth. Your automation foundation awaits.

Conclusion: Investing in Automation, Not Just Software

The choice between N8N Cloud and self-hosting is a fundamental strategic decision for your startup. It’s the classic trade-off between capital and operational complexity. The cloud service offers a predictable monthly cost, while self-hosting presents a variable cost coupled with a significant, ongoing investment of your team’s most valuable asset: focused time.

For most early-stage founders, the strategic move is clear. N8N Cloud isn’t an expense; it’s an investment in preserving founder and engineering focus. The true cost of self-hosting is rarely just the $50-$100/month for servers—it’s the 5-10 hours monthly of a senior engineer managing updates, debugging a failed webhook due to a server restart, or scaling infrastructure instead of building your core product. In 2025, where speed to market and agile iteration are everything, that misallocated focus is your greatest liability.

Your 2025 Golden Nugget

The most successful startups I’ve advised treat their initial automation platform like a utility. They pay for it to be reliable and invisible, freeing them to engineer workflows that create real competitive advantage. The moment you find your team debating Docker Compose configs instead of customer onboarding logic, you’ve chosen the wrong model for your current stage.

Your call to action is simple: Start automating one high-impact, repetitive process this week.

• If you have the DevOps bandwidth and crave control, spin up the self-hosted version.
• For everyone else, start with N8N Cloud’s free tier. Automate that first process—like syncing new CRM leads to a Slack channel or aggregating social mentions into a spreadsheet. Experience the velocity of a managed service firsthand.

You’re not just buying software; you’re investing in a capability that compounds. Begin building that foundation today.