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’.
I strongly believe that debugging should be free. Making things work - is the first thing. If things doesn’t work or make them work is problematic, I won’t have a thing to earn/save money on, nothing to pay from.
Just a random idea, might be no good and definitely in the short term does not make money but here it goes anyway.
You already have some courses. But what if there were some more courses designed for younger education, high school, college etc and you had a free education tier on n8n.cloud
Chat with some teachers and get a quick 10 hour course curriculum made up for them to give to students.
Get em in young!
24/7 live response priority support for a monthly fee
Marketplace of paid n8n flows where n8n power users can sell templates (n8n takes a commission, naturally)
Selling guest post space for new SaaS tools that would like to write articles in an n8n blog as a way to promote their service & also drive SEO juice to their tools
White-label n8n plans for resellers to promote n8n as an add-on tool for their customers (the whitelabel agency market is enormous - I know this firsthand as my clients are agencies)
Enterprise deals with uptime guarantees and SLAs that can allow for massive deployments / self-hosted deployments of n8n (for self hosted we’re talking kubernetes, grafana, the works) - these deals could be worth millions to the right customer
This is the sort of thing that would cause me to drop the platform completely, or download and use a really old version and never update it. Not having to pay per iteration or result number, is the main reason I migrated my flows to n8n instead of other pay per iteration or pay per item platforms.
Payment should really stick to the cloud version for iterations or results, not the self hosted version, or for clear enterprise features across the board.
Saw this didn’t get a direct reply. Just wanted to say @Ian_Walls that whatever paid functionality we release; we would not expend effort to prevent users from rolling their own functionality (as you mentioned, at their own risk + time).
With all the awesome stuff on the roadmap, I can’t imagine working on ways to limit the community’s creativity in lieu of shipping something actually useful. One of the coolest things about the n8n community is how y’all tweak and extend our loving automation tool and we would not want to extinguish that flame
There is nothing to be said against paid add-ons. n8n should also be further developed in its own interest and that costs money.
Apart from paid add-ons: What if n8n is (additionally) financed by crowdfunding like?
I would like to participate in the financing. But a pure paid variant (monthly fees) would not be profitable for me. But I would have no problem with an occasional donation, possibly dedicated for certain features or updates.
Surely you could call Berlin and ask how I can give you my money. But if you point to a simple donation option on the website, GitHub, frontend would certainly participate more.
Even if I find the annual donation calls of Wikipedia simply intrusive (1/3 of the page is covered with it), this would also be a way to point users to the need for funding. A simply banner with “We have 300k from 1 Mio for next year. Can you help us?” would be fine with me. Like the notification for new updates.
If the donations go well, you could leave n8n as a completely free version and not have to worry about what to pay for and what not.
There have been many examples of successful and not so successful open source projects that have passed the rubicon of sustainability.
Successful: WordPress
The business model is basically splitting .org from .com. WordPress.com includes a custom version hosted and charged for similar to n8n cloud. It is a fork no doubt but benefits greatly from the open source self hosted .org. The .com offers unique UI features, custom domains, enterprise VIP support, high end consulting and most importantly a hosted cloud version priced at various feature tiers. It’s a win win. Sounds familiar? The company behind WordPress, Automattic, is absolutely huge now and benefits greatly from this dual nature. It is a model for all open source projects that want to succeed and grow.
Not so successful: MovableType
This was the first real blogging cms platform that should have been the best. It preceded WordPress by years and was technically superior. It had a decent community until a decision was made to limit the license and creates all sorts of confusion and uncertainty around what the open source license lets you do. There is some history here and the technical nature of the platform was not nearly as important as the licensing for MovableType.
In short, it is not as much the technical differences that matter, but what the license of the open source model lets you do. Clarity is crucial. Not waffling on changes to the license is important too. Try GPL for open source and commercialize a fork of the open source with value added features, consulting and premium hosting/scaling. But keep the base project alive and don’t limit the innovation on the core project. The timing and decisions are important. There will be other open source automation platforms coming. The license and the vitality of the ecosystem is what matters.
Pro tip: WordPress self hosted has one click installs for every host on the planet. It’s like how the hosts get people to buy their hosting. Easy WordPress spin up.
Connect the dots with as many VPS hosts as possible to spin up n8n quickly with one click installs at DigitalOcean, IONOS etc etc. Making it easy to get n8n up and running will be huge for adoption in the long run. You can commercialize like this because the hosts will get new customers who want to run n8n for themselves and their clients.
