New plan, no active workflow limits: introducing n8n new pricing

Announcements
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Hi everyone, Jan here.

I’m excited to share some big news about n8n’s pricing. Over the past few months, we have been working on ways to make automation more accessible to everyone, whether you are a solo builder, a growing startup, or part of a large enterprise team.

Starting today, we are rolling out two major updates:

Every plan now includes unlimited users, workflows, and steps

We’ve decided to remove the limit of active workflows on all our plans. Now you can build as much as you want, without feeling restrained. You only pay when your workflow runs.

We are introducing a new self-hosted Business Plan for growing teams.

It is perfect for teams moving automation into production but not ready for Enterprise. It includes Git version control, SSO, environments, and queue-mode scaling, all at a price that grows as you do.

With these changes, our goal is to make it easier to adopt AI and automation, and to give builders of all sizes the freedom to create, test, and scale without friction.

You can see all the new details here: n8n Plans and Pricing - n8n.io

To make sure these changes apply to yo

Can’t wait to see what you build next.

Jan

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Nice one Jan :raising_hands:

This is a big change, no more limits on workflows is perfect.

The Business Plan looks solid too, especially with Git and queue scaling. Good to see something in between self-hosted and full Enterprise, will have to try soon for my prod workflows.

Appreciate you all making it easier for people like me to keep building and scaling stuff :oncoming_fist:

Nice one :slight_smile:

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One thing thats not clear is - are you removing queue mode from community edition?

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Queue mode is still available as it always has been, that is just a mistake on the website that will be resolved soon. Thanks for letting us know :folded_hands:

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Yes queue mode is very powerful! I recently made a full tutorial on it https://youtu.be/IKF7Tv9ZD5A?si=d14FSEq1KP8UU62y

check the tutorial section to see how you can even setup custom workers :partying_face::raising_hands:

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I appreciate the transparency and the work you are putting into making automation more accessible. That said, for many of us running self hosted instances, the pricing shift still feels disconnected from how we actually use and resource n8n.

In my case, I am managing multiple self hosted instances with heavy optimization to keep them efficient. We already invest in our own infrastructure and scaling, so paying per execution on top of that often feels like being charged twice for the same capacity. A model that better reflects the self hosted reality, maybe more aligned to features or support rather than usage, would go a long way toward keeping people like me on board.

I want to see n8n succeed, and I think there is a middle ground that supports your growth while not pricing out power users who have been advocates from the start.

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Sorry but making business self hosted edition limited is just plain dumb. We use our own computing power and n8n servers are not used. It is like adobe charging you every time you use the picking color tool. Change your business model for self hosted

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Good news, I have a question: if I have a workflow that includes a wait node, and my Starter plan is limited to 5 concurrent executions, does that mean that if I have 5 people in a wait node, no new workflows will run until those wait nodes are completed?

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I’m still trying to wrap my head around the price and execution use:

  • So let’s say I have a nightly trigger for a workflow and this workflow runs a loop 10 times triggering a sub workflow. Is this charged 11 times or 1 times with the new price structure?
  • Does it make a difference if I make the sub workflows run in parallel? (by enabling that they shouldn’t wait)

In the second case I understand if I am charged for 11 executions as they are run in parallel, but in the first case, to my understanding, it is one single job that just makes use of sub workflows to maybe get around memory issues, so since these prices are supposed to be fair, I really hope my first example is charged as 1 execution even though it’s 11 workflows.

I would of course prefer if both are seen as just 1 execution.

I think it would be nice if you could share some example workflows where you demonstrate what makes them costly and what doesn’t.

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We’ve been using n8n for some time now and were preparing to upgrade to Enterprise once our startup license expired in a couple of months. Unfortunately, the recent pricing change makes that impossible for us under the new execution-based model.

Here’s our situation:

  • Current usage: ~10 million executions/month (~330k/week) on a self-hosted setup (we cover all infrastructure costs)
  • Current cost: ~$400/month for n8n + infrastructure
  • Estimated new model cost: ~$107,000/month - over 250× higher

From a business perspective, this isn’t a reasonable transition path. No one in their right mind would pay that much. Charging per execution means we’re effectively paying twice for the same scale - once in infrastructure and once in license fees.

The concern isn’t just about cost - it’s about the mindset and the vibe. The new model forces high-volume self-hosted users to spend time reducing executions, finding technical workarounds, or exploring alternatives instead of simply paying a fair, predictable subscription. In our case, we were ready to commit to Enterprise at a sustainable flat monthly rate, but the new approach leaves no viable upgrade path. Instead of “let’s build more with n8n,” our team will now be thinking “how do we avoid running workflows in n8n”. That’s a lose-lose in my opinion.

A constructive alternative could be to:

  • Offer a flat-rate “Unlimited Executions” plan for self-hosted customers who manage their own infrastructure
  • Provide tiered execution pricing with realistic thresholds for high-volume automation businesses

We value n8n’s capabilities and would prefer to continue growing with your but under the current structure, we’d be forced to either re-architect extensively or migrate to a different platform.

I hope this feedback is useful, because there’s a win-win option here that allows n8n to grow revenue while keeping high-volume users on board.

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Y’all: as a self-hosted user who tells SO MANY PEOPLE to use n8n instead of alternatives, I’m literally looking for excuses to throw money your way. What are you doing. Like offer global variables for $5/user as an addon or something so I can pay you guys money to help sustain you. This paid self hosted plan is overwrought. You’re overthinking it. Set up a patreon, offer nice qol things to self hosted users for adhoc pricing. We all want to pay you money, but you continue to insist on making it complicated.

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I work in a medium size logistic company in their integration department, we provide Order Management, Transport Management and Warehouse management software for big food chain. We have around 125 workflows which runs EACH between 200 and 5000 times a day. We are well passed the 10 millions execution per month every month for around ~850$ per month. What would be the cost with n8n? 100 000$ a month?!

Even the highest tier on self host seem ridiculous.

I am not complaining or anything, just speaking my thoughts. We were exploring n8n at work for some feature we don’t have, especially the AI agents, but the pricing it totally unrealistic for our need, and I am afraid to say that we will not move forwards.

Still love n8n for my very small personal needs

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Yeah this is like that moment you get so excited that the best tool, now under HEAVY competitive pressure is going to respond brilliantly and keep their spot as the early mover…. and they do something that is tone deaf to the market. It’s heartbreaking. You want to throw money at them, you want them to win, to stay on top, to push back the competitors… and you step back and watch them make a move that will trace back to their downfall. You wonder if VC took over strategy or founder fear kicked in. I truly truly truly hope you reverse this… talk to your super users and super fans on how to monetize them at a higher rate (that’s easy btw and the answers are already in this short thread) while also expanding to the broader market/user. You had the no/low code integration market in your hands, but somehow find a way to open the door for the competition to carve out marketshare while simultaneously sending your superusers out to find ways to better utilize subpar products with superior licensing. Greatest product with the most friction filled licensing for business. Please invest in a better mastermind or strategic consulting before it’s too late. It may already be. Definitely will be in a few months if nothing changes. Love you guys! Hoping for some more strategic thinking upstairs :folded_hands:

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Very sorry to hear that some of you are not excited about the new pricing. That is sadly the thing with pricing, no matter which metric is chosen, one group will be unhappy (for valid and good reason). It was sadly the same when we charged per active workflow, where users wanted execution-based pricing. It makes perfect sense, no pricing is perfect. If you price by one thing, it is excellent for X but breaks Y. If you charge by something else, you fix Y, but it breaks for X.

I can, however, assure you that we did not make that decision lightly. Many people were involved, we had a lot of conversations with users, crunched a lot of data, and spent a lot of time on it.

One may easily think a decision is obviously bad, like this one. After all, many people are complaining about it. Therefore, we must be either stupid, ignorant, driven by greed, or a combination of all of these. But be aware that:

a) The people who are unhappy about something, will make their voices heard more and tend to be more vocal (as they have to do it, because they want it changed) vs. the ones who are happy with something (after all, they do not have to do anything, because what they want is already the case)
b) The number of “complaints” has to be seen relative to the user base. If a product has 100 users and 10 users complain, that is huge and very bad. If you have 1 million users and 1k complain, that is sadly not that much (0.1%). Those 1k unhappy users are obviously still important, have a valid point, and deserve to be heard, but rather it is simply impossible to make everybody happy when the group gets large enough. If you look at the divorce rates, you see that it is already hard for a group of two people.

So please believe me when I say that I genuinely think this is the right thing. I know it is not perfect, and it does not work for 100% of the cases (for some it fails now horribly), but it is still the right thing.

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@jan I understand you can’t make everyone happy with the pricing model you choose so it will work for some and not for others.

The challenge with this pricing model is that it makes many use cases at enterprise scale impossible.

  • Event-driven systems that use n8n as the integration layer between all other systems. These systems produce millions of executions for SMB systems as they often operate with microservices. For example a user signs up and the system produces UserCreated, UserUpdated, OrganisationCreated, TeamCrated events that get synced to CRMs, phone systems, etc.
  • Webhook processing: N8N listens to email events like postmark that produce up to a dozen events per email. Each webhook event gets listened to by n8n and triggers a simple status update
  • AI workflow automations like sentiment analysis, categorisation, etc or internal AI chatbots based on things like LibreChat / OpenWebUI + N8N produce multiple executions per interaction

I think these are more likely “enterprise” use cases so it might be worth considering things like:

  • advertising active workflow based pricing for enterprise
  • cap execution based pricing or make it increasingly cheaper at higher volumes (data integration saas businesses run this model).
  • offer an unlimited tier (you guys can probably work out with your customer metrics at what level people would switch vendors vs go on unlimited tier)
  • Add an add-on for unlimited webhook and event system (rabbitMq, amqp, etc) executions

You have a strong community that wants you to succeed but I fear pure-play execution based pricing will heavily limit or reverse your growth after the initial “sugar rush” and push people towards Google’s new product or Dify etc.

Hope this feedback helps.

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@jan I understand the difficulty of creating a pricing model that works for everyone, but as a self-hosted Startup plan user, I have some specific concerns I’d like to share:

The self-hosted + execution-based pricing paradox:

  • I pay for my own infrastructure (servers, storage, bandwidth)

  • Execution costs are already mine - I don’t understand charging again for something running on my infra

  • This creates double billing: I pay for the plan + pay my infra costs

40k executions/month is insufficient for real use cases:

  • I run ~3MM monthly executions in legitimate automations

  • 40k doesn’t even cover testing phases for many use cases

  • Event-driven systems (as @Eric_T mentioned) easily exceed this

Specific suggestions for self-hosted:

  • Consider a hybrid model where execution-based pricing only applies to cloud?

  • Or an “unlimited executions” add-on for self-hosted, since the infra is ours?

  • Maybe execution tiers with decreasing prices at high volume?

Practical reality: As it stands, I’ll have to cancel my Startup plan and revert to Community Edition. It doesn’t make sense to pay for executions that run on my own infrastructure.

Brazilian market perspective: As a user from Brazil, the impact is even greater due to currency conversion (USD → BRL). We have a large community of developers and companies here who would gladly pay for an accessible and fair self-hosted plan, but execution-based models make this unfeasible for our economic reality.

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@jan Nice to see the new plan that people can try few features in the enterprise plan.

But the important security features are only provided in the enterprise plan(for auditing, for multi dept.). I review past questions in this community and the posts on reddit. It seems very hard to reach the sales team. The “contact us” is like a blackhole : no response for weeks, even months.

Could I know if the enterprise plan is available to contact sales now?

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How do I activate the unlimited workflows or update my account? I still get this message when trying to do more than 5:

Workflow could not be activated:

Active workflow limit reached.

Then the link to ‘Upgrade My Account’ just shows I am on the Starter package, which says unlimited workflows. Do I need to upgrade and downgrade? Why isn’t it automatic?

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You have to upgrade to the latest stable version. I did this and it worked for me

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