My company supports open source software in libraries. Our general approach is that we use and contribute to the community versions, and do our best not to fork the code (and when we do, we put it on our GitHub).
For us, the ‘secret sauce’ (aside from our passionate commitment to stellar service) is mostly our internal deployment and infrastructure support scripting, which allows us to host at scale. There is nothing in this tooling that couldn’t be manually done by anyone else, but the orchestration and automation let’s us focus our time on service.
If possible, I would recommend/request that any paid enhanced features of a hosted N8N be done in a similar way… where hosted N8N ‘connects the dots’ in a meaningful way that benefits paid customers. Anyone else could host and configure the system to do the same thing (but not as a for-profit service, without a license), but it would be an ‘exercise left to reader’ kind of task. Is it worth it to re-engineer audit logging, for example? That’s a question for the institution to ask themselves.
Phrased another way, I hope that implementing certain functionality wouldn’t be blocked for un-paid users; it would just be a project for them to undertake locally instead getting it ‘out of the box’.