I would love to see n8n grow to a product that can really compete with Zapier. In fact, I wouldn’t mind contributing with a small monthly “subscription” like $5/month, and I think many other developers would be willing to do the same, as long as that would give them access to all the exciting new features of the self-hosting option, leaving the door open to contribute more if they wish to do so. I don’t think putting exciting new features like “environments” in the more expensive tiers is a good idea, but I would obviously leave actual enterprise features like LDAP integration or team collaboration out of the “fans tier”.
In summary, let the people cheering for your success support your development with a minimum small monthly subscription (or larger if they wish), while sharing with them all the intriguing new features.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to share this.
Is always great to hear that people want to support us, it is very appreciated. Thanks a lot for that. So I want to provide some background. We currently give away a lot for free, meaning there is already not a lot of reason for most users to pay. Every additional feature we add to the community version makes it less likely that users pay in the future. And each feature we would make available for very cheap makes it less likely that people will start to pay for the higher plans in the future. So we have to create some differentiation.
There are for sure more people out there in the world that would pay us $5/month vs. for example companies that pay us $2.000/month. But obviously, does one of the 2.000 ones make up for 400 of the $5/month. From what we have learned in the last years and some basic math, did we figure out that we can we build a sustainable company by focusing on these large users but not the other way around. Because even though there are more people out there that are willing to pay 5 than 2k, as mentioned before, is multiple, not 400, rather incredibly much smaller.
Or, to say it differently: To produce, let’s pick a round number, $1M in annual revenue, is it easier to find ~42 companies that pay 2k/month than 16.666 users that pay $5/month and it keeps on getting harder as we scale.
Just think about how many people are in the world that are able to self-host n8n + have the need + would pay vs. how many companies are out there where the same is true.
It is not that we would not like to give everybody access to those features, but we also have to think about building a sustainable business. That is not just in our interest, but also in the interest of the whole community.
I hope that makes sense and makes it clearer.
Thanks Jan for your response and your great work!
I don’t believe a business large enough to spend $2k/month would go for the $5/month tier, not just because of the missing enterprise features, but because they need someone to yell at when they are losing money because something does not work.
My calculations are that having 20k+ (less than 1% of current Zapier’s user base) $5/month enthusiastic supporters would definitely help you attract more of those high-valued $20k enterprise level customers away from Zapier, not the other way around.
You are welcome and thanks!
About the rest. All I can say is, that you can probably ask any open-source (in our case fair-code) company out there, but there are a lot of companies out there that could spend $2m+ and they are totally fine using the free version. Ask the most databases for example.
Is also understandable and nothing you can blame anybody for, why pay more or go through the hassle to pay (which is not fun in a large organization) when you do not have to.
For what it’s worth, we went from being raving fans of this product (I have contributed time to supporting others in this forum, posting solutions etc) and being willing to pay upwards of $125 a month for a team of 2 to moving our most critical infrastructure into custom Python containers running in our cluster.
The idea of spending $200+ USD / month on hosting and then having to pay more and more for the “privilege” of running workflows on our own infra is - to put it bluntly, a punch in the gut.
The cost is simply not worth it when you combine the cost of hosting on our own infrastructure with having to pay for workflows. Add in the founder’s insulting and dismissive “we know best” replies to myself and several others in this thread, and I think we can make a pretty good guess as to why the pricing structure is set up in such a way as to make running on your own infrastructure “not worth the cost” vs the cloud plans.
Now, it is very generous of N8N to provide a Community Edition, but for how long? Until the company can not find enough enterprises who want to switch from Zapier at the “$2000+ a month” price range and decides it is too expensive to offer a free product?
Now with all of the above risk (and what constitutes “risk” in the business world is subjective), add in the fact that Zapier also offers enterprise packages and has been doing this for a lot longer - not to mention, much faster updating + expansion of their library (it has been more than 2 months and the BitWarden node for N8N is still not updated, to which the response has been “you can contribute to the project yourself if you want it badly enough”). I am not advocating for Zapier btw, we switched away from them because this project seemed to hold a lot of promise. But to suggest that N8N is a for-profit company, while still continuing to act like an open-source project “build it yourself”, seems hypocritcal at best.
Very sorry it was not meant as a simple “we know best” response at all. I tried to explain the reasons behind the decision but at the same time is that a discussion that would probably never find an end. Trying to finish every debate and talk about every single point is not possible, no matter how much I would like it to be. Next to a company to run I also have a family. So sorry if you think my answers are not sufficient.
I always try to be very transparent and honest, but you also have to understand that we have more data and more information as we are running the company. So we see the usage, how many people pay, how much they are willing to pay, and which people pay. We have a lot of conversations with users, other projects, and also investors who did support successful open-source companies in the past. I am not saying we know best and that we make the perfect decisions but we also do not make these decisions lightly and a lot of thought, work, and research goes into them.
About contributions. Right now, probably more than 99% of the code is written by us. So it maybe not a bad suggestion by you to say we do not accept any contributions moving forward. Not because we do not value them, just to avoid that problem moving forward. We will think about it. Thanks a lot for that input.
Do you mean why pay $5/mo when you can get it for free and/or why pay $2k/mo when you can get it for free?
I first encountered n8n due to constraint on project budget. My research led from the big paid ETL players such as Zapier, panoply, fivetran, talend etc to n8n. I want to work on a POC but don’t want the idea get killed or stucked just for requesting software budget. I was an employee for a big engineering corporate, IT budget was tight as big bucks had spent on software maintenance, and expectation was high for customer service and support, on top of SLA.
I agreed with @dp1791 that n8n users are willing to pay at a lower subscription coming from zero cost of ownership. As the market is crowded with ELT/ETL players, you need to aware who is your user base and leverage on it. But if you have a different target audience, such as a $200 subscription, then how do you distinguish n8n against the big players? I think to be a paid company, you want to do a case study or see how others gone thru the transformation journey. I found an interesting link monetizing-open-source-business-models-that-generate-billions.
In my case, Zapier covers 100% of my modest needs with just the starter package, but I was attracted to the do-it-yourself approach of n8n. Unfortunately it looks like n8n
would rather have a handful of multi-million dollar customers than a million of small developers, so while they decide, I will stick with Zapier’s cheap plans 
You are spot-on @engowen. I think the problem is n8n cannot fight the “free riders” without killing their supporters too, and to be successful I believe you need lean towards love rather than hate, but that is a tough pill to swallow.
@dp1791 to make it clear. We are not fighting anybody! We value every user/community-member very much, no matter if they pay us or not. If you look through our forum, you will see that. Everybody receives top support and help with all of their problems.
About your “you need lean towards love rather than hate”. The world is, most time, not black & white, things are rather grey and exist on a spectrum. That is the same here. Imagine a graph. Each side has very extremes. On the left side is “most love possible” where we would give away all features that exist and will ever exist for free, offer everybody free 24/7 personal live support, and probably best pay users on top to use n8n (again, is the extreme). On the other side, we have no free version + no support at all anymore, and it is priced in a way to maximize the profit for n8n, totally ignoring the community.
Now imagine parallel a second graph for how sustainable it is. On the left, running out of money within a week, and on the right is where the maximum amount of profit gets generated.
The trick and the hard part is not just to maximize “love”, the trick is to find the spot where both are as high as possible. But it has to be past the sustainable point, because the “sustainable part” is black & white, it either is or is not.
I assume the above should not be very controversial. What is more complicated and not as straightforward is for sure where that point is. To do that, we use as mentioned above data (which also includes conversations and input from the community/users) + experience (internal & external).
Is sad to hear that you move to Zapier, especially considering that you now pay the same as for n8n cloud, where you would have much more executions/tasks. Zapier is a great product, but also one with a very different focus. As mentioned in other posts, we do not want to be the cheap/free Zapier alternative, we rather want to be the most powerful tool out there. So it is possible that there was also a mismatch from the beginning. If you have one day more complex use cases where Zapier is not a good fit anymore, I hope you consider n8n again. For now, have a good time with Zapier, and happy automating!
@engowen Thanks a lot. Yes, that are all things we are considering working on. Generally, do larger companies value that they can self-host for security and data-privacy reasons, the power and the focus on more technical users, and how customizable and extensible n8n is.
Generally, I will stop to try to answer every comment, even if it is hard for me. Not because I do not care (I hope at least that is clear by now), it is instead because it is very time-consuming (after all, is there just one me, but many people in the community), and it seems like it does not have the impact I would like it to have. Like that, I have more time to focus on other things which have a bigger, more prolonged impact, and in the end, actions are more important than words.
And to be clear, I will keep on reading every comment as I always did, and each of them will be considered when we make decisions. So I encourage and ask everybody to keep on sharing their thoughts as they help us a lot and show us where we are doing good and where bad. Through that, we can learn and make better and more informed decisions. Thanks!
Thank you @jan for your thorough response.
Moving from Zapier to n8n would be irresponsible on my part in n8n’s current state (i.e. less mature, fewer integrations, more expensive), but I still would love to support your project with a small monthly contribution, as long as that allowed me to take a peek at all the new, exciting, non-enterprise features. My thinking is there must be a lot of DIY developers like me excited about n8n’s potential that would like to help it grow and become competitive against Zapier and alike.
And adding a “fans tier” between your current free and start tiers would actually fit right in your “not black & white” way of thinking, not the other way around.
Besides that, are there so many companies required to be self-hosted? I am not an expert, but the current cloud landscape makes me think that “air-gapped” systems are extremely rare nowadays.
@joeldeteves i just was reading this and was wondering what your current state is? Are you still on n8n?
May be i don’t get it but wasn’t or isn’t it just a business discission/calculation you needed to make? If you need a lot of different multistep workflows and not a lot of tasks then zapier would be a better option. But if you need to run a lot of tasks and can work with the amount of workflows provided n8n would be a better option.
I did implement a n8n on a ecommerce project on the free version that had about 20 workflows and with some tweaking it did run run 450k tasks a month. With Zapier this would cost me 2K a month. I am thankful for Jan and his team making this possible.
And i take it you already thought of this but couldn’t you merge multiple workflows in 1 workflow? Or are they so different?
Or use the Execute Workflow, with custom created JSON or file? Should solve your problem.
In our case it is a pretty easy decision Zapier starter with 20 active zaps, $30/mo, n8n pro with 15 active workflows, $50/mo. I was intrigued by the self-host, DIY approach of n8n, but business wise it is headed in the wrong direction.
Keep in mind @dp1791 that even on lower SaaS tiers, n8n is almost all of the time more affordable than Zapier. Zapier gives you 750 tasks/ mo for 20EUR. But what is a zapier task?
From Zapier’s own site: " if your Zap has an action to create new Google Contacts, each contact that is created will count as one task." That means pulling in 100 spreadsheet rows, filtering them via an IF, and uploading to another sheet is… 300 tasks!!
So with Zapier’s 20EUR/mo plan, you could run that workflow about 3 times before you’re at your plan limits. With n8n’s Start plan, you could run that workflow 2,500 times before reaching your limit. So even if your usecase involves 1x item of data (1x row/ contact/ deal etc), you minimum need 2x steps to do something useful. So again on Zapier’s Starter plan, that’s only 375 executions of the most basic workflow (where again, in n8n’s 20eur/ mo plan it would be 2500 execs).
Let’s assume you have only simple workflows, takes 1 “thing” and does 3 steps (trigger, filter, load somewhere):
Zapier 20EUR/mo plan: 250 executions = 0.08EUR / exec
n8n’s 20EUR/mo plan (yearly, otherwise 24EUR): 2500 executions = 0.008 EUR
in a simple usecase, n8n cloud is 10x times cheaper. That will only grow the more complex your workflow is (so could easily be 20-100x cheaper).
That is a funny example that I would never implement as you suggest but I am sure you can find similar bad usage examples for n8n too 
In our case Zapier it is just cheaper and better, it is a no-brainer.
Would love to know more about your implementation of Zapier. I cannot think of a single real usecase where it would be cheaper.
For the Better part that is of course preference so that is up to you.
Nothing fancy, just a few dozens forms active at different times of the year which trigger different zaps with google sheets, gmail, quickbooks, and other simple steps. We have a couple of zaps with python and webhooks steps for more complex tasks. Forms have usually several dozens entries during each active period. Simple and easy to maintain.
So Each form is a flow? And they arent always active?
Don’t see a reason why n8n would be more expensive really.
$60 (15 active workflows) > $30 (20 active zaps)