Every comparison you’ll find puts “€20/month” next to “$5 VPS” and calls it a day. That comparison is wrong, and it’s wrong in both directions — self-hosting costs more than the VPS line item, and Cloud costs more than the sticker once you cross an execution threshold.
Here is the actual arithmetic, with the parts people leave out.
Last verified: 28 August 2026. Prices change; the sources are linked so you can check.
TL;DR
- Under ~2,500 executions/month and you value your evenings: n8n Cloud Starter, €20/month billed annually. Self-hosting saves maybe €150/year and costs you a maintenance job.
- Over 10,000 executions/month: self-hosting wins decisively. Cloud Pro is €50/month for 10,000 executions; a €10–15/month server runs far more than that.
- The break-even isn’t a price — it’s a person. Self-hosted n8n is free software running on infrastructure you now operate. If nobody on your team wants that pager, Cloud is cheaper than it looks.
What each option actually costs
n8n Cloud (verified pricing)
| Plan | Price (billed annually) | Executions/month | Concurrent executions | Active workflows |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | €20/mo | 2,500 | 5 | Unlimited |
| Pro | €50/mo | 10,000 | 20 | Unlimited |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | 200+ | Unlimited |
There is also a Business plan at €667/month for 40,000 executions — but it is a self-hosted licence, not Cloud. Most comparison tables get this wrong and present it as the next Cloud tier up from Pro. It is not: above Pro, the Cloud path is Enterprise (contact sales), and Business is what you buy to run n8n on your own infrastructure with SSO, SAML, LDAP and separate environments.
Source: n8n pricing, checked 2026-08-28.
Two things worth noticing. First, active workflows are unlimited on every tier — the meter is executions, not workflows. Second, the jump from Pro (€50) to Business (€667) is a 13× price increase for a 4× execution increase. If you’re growing past 10,000 executions, that cliff is the single biggest argument for self-hosting.
Self-hosted: the line items people include
The Community Edition is free. What you pay for is the machine.
| Provider | Plan | vCPU | RAM | Disk | Transfer | Price/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean | Basic | 1 | 512 MB | 10 GB | 500 GB | $4 |
| DigitalOcean | Basic | 1 | 1 GB | 25 GB | 1,000 GB | $6 |
| DigitalOcean | Basic | 1 | 2 GB | 50 GB | 2,000 GB | $12 |
| DigitalOcean | Basic | 2 | 4 GB | 80 GB | 4,000 GB | $24 |
| Hetzner | CX23 | 2 | 4 GB | 40 GB NVMe | 20 TB | €5.49 (~$6.49) |
| Hetzner | CX33 | 4 | 8 GB | 80 GB NVMe | 20 TB | €8.49 (~$9.99) |
Sources: DigitalOcean Droplet pricing, Hetzner price adjustment notice, checked 2026-08-28.
Note: Hetzner raised cloud prices on 1 April and again on 15 June 2026 — CX23 went €3.99 → €5.49, and the CPX and CCX lines rose by 144% and 169%. The figures above are the post-June prices for Germany/Finland, excluding VAT. Hetzner’s marketing page showed the CX line as currently unavailable when I checked, so confirm you can provision in your region before planning around it.
Don’t buy the $4 box. 512 MB is not enough headroom once n8n, Postgres and the OS are all resident. The realistic floor for a production instance is the $6 (1 GB) tier for light use and $12 (2 GB) once you’re running Postgres alongside n8n with a few concurrent executions.
n8n does not publish a hard minimum spec in its current docs, so treat those figures as practitioner guidance rather than a vendor requirement.
Self-hosted: the line items people leave out
This is where the honest comparison lives.
| Item | Typical annual cost | Can you skip it? |
|---|---|---|
| Server ($12/mo tier) | ~$144 | No |
| Backups (provider snapshots, ~20% of droplet cost) | ~$29 | No. A workflow database with no backup is a liability, not a saving |
| Object storage for offsite backups | ~$60 | Recommended |
| Domain for your instance | ~$12 | Practically yes, but you’ll want one for TLS |
| TLS certificate (Let’s Encrypt) | $0 | — |
| Your time | The real cost | No |
That last row is the one that decides it. Self-hosting n8n means you own: OS patching, Docker upgrades, n8n version upgrades (which occasionally include breaking changes to nodes), Postgres backups and — critically — restore testing, TLS renewal when the automation breaks, and being the person who notices at 2am that the container is in a crash loop.
Call it 2–4 hours a month in steady state, more in the first month and on any upgrade that goes sideways.
The 12-month comparison
Assumptions: 5,000 executions/month (above Starter, below Pro’s ceiling), a single production instance, Postgres as the database, backups actually configured.
| n8n Cloud Pro | Self-hosted ($12 droplet) | |
|---|---|---|
| Software | €600 (€50 × 12) | €0 |
| Server | — | ~$144 |
| Backups + object storage | — | ~$89 |
| Domain | — | ~$12 |
| Cash total (12 mo) | ≈ €600 / ~$650 | ≈ $245 |
| Cash difference | — | ~$405 saved |
| Your time (2–4 hrs/mo) | ~0 | 24–48 hours |
| Implied hourly rate of the saving | — | $8–17/hour |
That’s the number nobody publishes. Self-hosting at this scale saves roughly $400 a year and costs you 24–48 hours. If your time is worth more than $17/hour, the cash saving is not the reason to self-host.
So when does self-hosting actually win?
Three cases, and none of them are “to save €20 a month.”
1. Execution volume. Above ~10,000 executions/month, Cloud’s next tier is €667. A $24 droplet handles considerably more than 10,000 executions of typical workflows. Here the saving stops being $400/year and becomes thousands.
2. Data residency and secrets. If your workflows touch customer PII, internal databases, or credentials your security policy won’t let leave your network, this isn’t a cost decision. Self-hosted is the only option that passes review.
3. You already run infrastructure. If you have a server, a backup routine and a monitoring setup that this instance can ride along on, the marginal cost of self-hosting is close to zero — and so is the marginal time. This is the case where self-hosting is genuinely, unambiguously cheaper.
The inverse also holds: if n8n would be the only thing you self-host, don’t. You’re not buying a $6 server, you’re starting an operations practice.
Where self-hosting quietly gets expensive
- Concurrency. Cloud Starter gives you 5 concurrent executions, Pro gives 20. On a 1 GB box, a handful of concurrent workflows pulling API responses into memory will hit the OOM killer. The fix is a bigger box, which narrows the price gap.
- Queue mode. Once one worker isn’t enough you add Redis and separate worker containers. That’s another service to run, monitor and back up.
- Upgrade breakage. Community edition upgrades occasionally change node behaviour. On Cloud that’s someone else’s regression to catch.
- The restore you never tested. A backup you’ve never restored is a hypothesis. Budget an afternoon to actually test one.
Which should you pick
| Your situation | Pick |
|---|---|
| Under 2,500 executions, no ops experience | Cloud Starter (€20) |
| 2,500–10,000 executions, no server yet | Cloud Pro (€50) — the $400/year saving isn’t worth starting an ops practice |
| Over 10,000 executions | Self-hosted — the €667 tier makes this obvious |
| Any volume, but PII or internal systems involved | Self-hosted — not a cost decision |
| You already run a VPS with backups and monitoring | Self-hosted — marginal cost is near zero |
FAQ
Is the n8n Community Edition really free?
Yes. The self-hosted Community Edition is free (n8n pricing). You pay for infrastructure, not licence.
What’s the cheapest server that actually runs n8n?
For light use, a 1 GB instance (DigitalOcean’s $6 tier). Once Postgres runs alongside it with real concurrency, 2 GB ($12) is the realistic floor. The $4 / 512 MB tier will run n8n briefly and then disappoint you.
Does Cloud limit how many workflows I can have?
No. Every published tier lists unlimited active workflows. The meter is monthly executions and concurrent executions.
Can I start on Cloud and move to self-hosted later?
Yes — workflows export as JSON. The migration cost is in credentials and webhook URLs, not the workflows themselves. Starting on Cloud to validate that your automation is worth running is a reasonable, cheap decision.
What about the €667 Business tier?
It is a self-hosted licence, not the next Cloud tier — SSO, SAML, LDAP and separate environments, priced for organisations that need governance. Almost every comparison table on the web files it under Cloud. If you are hitting Pro’s ceiling and cost is the driver, the intended answer is the Community Edition on your own server, not Business.
So which one
If you came here to decide, the split is clean:
- Cloud, if you are under 2,500 executions/month and nobody wants to operate a server. €20/month for Starter, and the migration work in every n8n major release is somebody else’s problem → n8n Cloud.
- Self-hosted, if you are past 10,000 executions, have data that cannot leave your jurisdiction, or already run servers. The next question is which box, and the honest answer with prices checked this month is in the cheapest VPS that actually runs n8n 2.x.
- Already self-hosted and upgrading? Everything n8n 2.x breaks, and the fix for each — four environment variables changed, and one of them silently points your webhooks at localhost.
Prices verified 28 August 2026 against the linked vendor pages. This post contains affiliate links; if you sign up through them we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.