Thanks a lot for clarifying!
We have charge and limit by something. We had the choice and thought a lot about what that should be. The obvious candidates were executions, tasks/steps, workflows, or users. Why we went with active workflows, in the end, gets also explained here, and I still think it is the best and fairest choice. If we had optimized for revenue, the choice would surely have been executions/tasks instead. Allowing an unlimited amount of workflows and then limiting by executions was for sure also discussed but I am sure, that would have not just been much more expensive for most, also has other disadvanages as explained in the original post. Also very certain people (including you as it is even more limiting) would have liked that even less.
Regarding paying $500 and still being limited. There is, for sure, a price for which we can allow an unlimited amount of workflows. But what should it be? $10k, $1k, $500, $100, or $10? Generally still think it is fair to pay more the more people use it, and the more value gets generated. It would also sound wrong if you pay X for unlimited active workflows and have 100, and a big Enterprise company has 5000 and pays the same.
And again, I am aware that it is not perfect, but it is not that bad either. And considering the number of users we have and the number of views the above post got where we communicated it (as of today 1.1k) there were few complaints about it, as you can see. For me, that is actually a great sign and shows we did not get it totally wrong.
Regarding putting in the same cap as our competitors. That is very wrong; they do not even live on the same planet. Most of them charge not by active workflows, or even executions; they charge by tasks! Many of our users have workflows where a single execution would literally eat up 10k and more tasks. If such a workflow executes once an hour, we talk about 7.2m tasks a month. Even going now with the cheaper alternative Make, that would be $8.2k/month, and is literally only active workflow in n8n, so $5 a month (to be 100% correct would be $25 as that is our smallest plan starts with 5). It is an extreme example, but even if you go with 100 tasks every hour, it is 72k tasks/month and would bring you up to $55/month, so 11x.
And you are right, it runs on your own hardware. But that is honestly not where the magic happens. So does not make a big difference in my eyes.
On top, is that also not something that makes it cheaper in most cases, it is even something people are willing to pay a lot of money for (it is a feature, not a bug). No idea what our competitors charge for their self-hosted option (and how many have one), but I am pretty sure they do not even take a call for $500/month.
Regarding the arbitrary number and the fee quickly scaling into the thousands of dollars per month. Literally, all pricing for digital products is in big parts arbitrary. For most SaaS solutions, if you access it with 1 or with 100 users does not make a huge difference in cost but it gets limited by it. That is how it works, and to get into the thousands (the first number that would qualify there is $2k) you would need 400 active workflows. If, for that huge amount of workflows $2k is not a fair price, then I would say there are other things wrong. We at n8n are 35 people right now, and not even we have probably reached that number yet (and we obviously automate a lot lot with n8n).