Not receiving community edition license key

Questions
1

Hi, I’m running n8n v2.8.3 self-hosted with Docker on Windows. I clicked “Unlock selected paid features for free” in Settings → Usage and plan, and the UI showed “Your license key is on the way”, but I never received the email. I tried with two different email addresses (Gmail and QQ Mail) and neither received anything. Could you please help me get the activation key? My email: btnvren@gmail.com

Describe the problem/error/question

What is the error message (if any)?

Please share your workflow

(Select the nodes on your canvas and use the keyboard shortcuts CMD+C/CTRL+C and CMD+V/CTRL+V to copy and paste the workflow.)

Share the output returned by the last node

Information on your n8n setup

  • n8n version:
  • Database (default: SQLite):
  • n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main):
  • Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app):
  • Operating system:
2

Hi @evazhuang Welcome to the community!
Consider using a different EMAIL and that would work, and for checking that your community addition is valid and registered you can always open Usage and plans from settings and you would see it will say registered at the top.

3

hey welcome, this is a known issue that pops up from time to time with the community license emails not actually getting delivered. You’ve done the right thing by posting your email here, usually an n8n team member will see the thread and can help sort out the key manually. In the meantime double check that your n8n instance has proper outbound internet connectivity to n8n’s servers, and maybe try requesting again with whatever email is set as the instance owner in your n8n settings if that’s different from what you used.

6

Hi everyone,

I hope this is the right place to ask — I’ve been going through this thread and facing a similar issue.

I recently subscribed to the n8n Starter plan, but unfortunately I never received the email containing my license key. I’m trying to enter it into my local n8n instance, but without the key I’m stuck.

Could anyone advise on how to trigger a resend of that email, or what steps I should take to retrieve my license key?

Thanks in advance for your help, I really appreciate it!

7

Hi @j.brusselle I think you are a bit confused, N8N Starter Plan is for n8n CLOUD, basically on n8n cloud you do not need anything local just visit the link and start using n8n and everything is on cloud infrastructure powered by n8n:

And now if you want to actually get your self hosted instance to be registered consider getting yourself a free license key from:

And once you have it registered or facing some issue with it read this:

hope this helps.

8

Hi,

Thank you for the clarification — that makes things much clearer.

So to confirm my understanding: I’m running a self-hosted registered Community Edition instance. I now understand that the Starter and Pro plans are Cloud-only and cannot be applied to a self-hosted setup.

My use case is simple: I want to create guest/member users who can only trigger and consume existing workflows — not build or edit them. Based on what I’ve read, this requires the workflow sharing feature, which is only available on Business or Enterprise self-hosted plans.

Could you confirm the following?

  1. To share workflows with non-builder users on a self-hosted instance, I indeed need the Business or Enterprise plan?
  2. Once subscribed, will I receive an activation license key that I can apply directly to my existing self-hosted instance to unlock those features?

Thanks in advance for your help!

9

@j.brusselle as far as i am understanding you, you need those users to actually use those flows instead of actually knowing what exists, or edit those, for now do not need an enterprise or business license to do so, you can just curate the flow in such a way so that users just need a LINK to interact with the whole by either USING n8n form which i recommend or for advanced you can use WEBHOOKS, and then just let users have the public URL of the form so they can interact with it.

for subscription, you just need to download and setup self hosted n8n or n8n cloud, and just start using it, for Self hosted n8n you can just setup that in your preferred way:

And then just follow this once n8n self hosted setup is done:

and for the features you will get some features available on n8n self hosted community version, although if you want enterprise features you gotta get the license :smile:

Read this for n8n cloud plans break down:

For now i think if your only goal is to let users leverage the flow you can just setup the n8n form as a trigger and continue your flow. Let me know if i can help you in that.