Honestly have never seen pricing that everybody liked.
In the end, you can ask ten different people and receive ten different answers. The only thing they usually all have in common is that they will propose something that makes it cheap for their use cases (and I am not different in that regard, it is human nature). In our case will users with a lot of executions argue for charging by workflows. Users with many workflows but few executions will argue for executions, and so on.
So if we would change it today, the only thing that would happen is that tomorrow somebody else would be unhappy. Unless we find a price that ensures that everybody pays very little, for unlimited everything. Obviously, like that, we will not be able to build a sustainable business.
Honestly not sure what you mean with “Based on this conversation it feels like the community edition will have this ability stripped in the future for the purposes of profit”. That is not what I am saying or have ever said. The community version is and will stay unlimited regarding the amount of workflows and executions. And we are incredibly far away from anything which can be called “profit”. The goal, for now, is to become self sustaining, which should be in the interest of everybody.
And you made a great point with “Why use Teams at all when community allows us to run unlimited workflows? There goes your business model”.
- That is exactly one of the problems we are facing. We give incredibly much value away for free, but we have to charge for something. And is again the same as mentioned above what we charge by. Here people will always argue that the features they need are free or cheap, and the ones they do not require, to be expensive. But we very purposefully choose features people do not require to use n8n successfully.
- It shows that n8n is still a viable product for you and others, even without it. You get thousands of dollars worth of value even without paying anything. But there are also companies that can not simply operate without the sharing functionality. Especially the larger ones and that ones we want to monetize.
Regarding being able to host unlimited workflows because that’s the purpose of self hosting. That can be one advantage and apparently the main one for you. But for most of our users, especially the larger ones, is the main advantage, for example, that it runs on their infrastructure which is important for security and data privacy reasons.
That also brings me again to what I linked above. n8n was never supposed to be the free/cheap solution. It is rather the most powerful solution out there. That is maybe also where this disconnect comes from. Anybody should be able to run n8n for free if they are on a budget. But it is not given that n8n (the pro features) will be cheaper for power users or big companies. It is possibly even more expensive, and that is fine for them. Again because they do not use n8n over Zapier/Make/Workate … because it is cheaper, they use n8n because what they want to do can not be done in others.
Regarding the $500/month you mentioned. Why should you, for example, not pay that? In my eyes, is that not a crazy outrageous price. Especially if I think about what we are paying for some apps. Many one-person startups or stores seem to pay that and more for Zapier every month. Even if each workflow just saves you 15 min a week, do we talk about 100h/month.
For me, it feels like, people have a tough time paying reasonable amounts for open-source/fair-code projects. They are OK paying a lot for proprietary ones because they are used to paying for them. But if they start with free, most of them are okay with paying something, but that something is often way lower than what the proprietary solution would cost.
A possible reason is that for the proprietary product, they consider the value of the whole product, and price X seems fine.
For open-source/fair-code, they get so much value for free, which they take for granted. And then see that the paid plan adds only feature Y, and that seems crazy. How can all of that other stuff be free and that one small, simple feature so expensive? What they forget is, that even though companies like ours may charge just for that one feature, they still have to build and maintain the rest. So they do NOT just ask for money for that one feature, they ask for money to build the whole product, maintain it, create documentation, give support, and so on. Just because they give the rest away for free, does not mean it is cheaper or free for the company. The only difference is that they only charge for that one feature and give away the rest for free.
So the assumption that using an open-source/fair-code project has to be always cheaper than their proprietary alternatives is a misconception that has to change! 100% of the same work goes into it, and a lot of that work goes into supporting users that will probably never pay, and that is fine. But that should not be a reason for trying to shortchange open-source-fair-code projects.
And to make it clear, I do not speak at all about any particular person. That is a problem I generally see.
