Is self-hosting free for internal company use with simple workflows?

Questions
1

Hi everyone,

I’d like to confirm the licensing for our use case before we proceed.

We plan to self-host the Community Edition on our own infrastructure and use it strictly within our company. All workflows will be built and deployed only on our own internal server — they won’t be exposed or distributed outside our organization. The workflows are fairly simple and serve our own internal operations only. We are not redistributing or reselling n8n, and we won’t be embedding it in any product offered to external customers.

For this kind of internal-only, self-hosted usage, is there any license fee or cost we need to pay to n8n? Or is the Community Edition free for this purposes?

2

Hi @Nakyoung_Kim

From your description, it is free. No license fee or cost will be incurred for this type of usage

3

Yes Nakyoung_Kim, you can use if you don’t monetise it or any commercial activity.

4

Confirmed, for the exact use case described (internal, self-hosted, no sharing with third parties), there are no costs. The n8n Sustainable Use License explicitly permits this.

One thing to keep in mind for the future, in case your use case changes: As soon as you host n8n for external customers (i.e., let other companies use your n8n instance) or embed it in a product you sell, the license no longer applies. The exact wording can be found here: n8n/LICENSE.md at master · n8n-io/n8n · GitHub , it’s worth bookmarking before your use case grows.