Sorry for the late reply, but was a few days out on vacation, and I knew writing this answer will take longer.
@EricSGS Maybe there is also a big misconception about n8n. When I started to build it, my goal was never to build the cheapest solution (or, to the very extreme the “free solution” as it is maybe seen by some), my goal was to build the most powerful and best solution! I did not literally spend thousands of hours to save other people or me $50 per month on a Zapier/Make/Workato/tray… bill (it is for sure nice, but honestly nothing that excites me), rather did I do it because things were simply not possible in other solutions. So there are for sure some use cases (for example, very many small workflows that do not run often) where Zapier and others turn out to be cheaper, maybe even much cheaper. That is OK, and if people move for that reason to another solution, I can live with that, but obviously would prefer if they would not. What I, however, really hate, is if people move because something can not be done in n8n but in the other solutions.
Currently, we serve for sure also a lot of users that are mainly looking for a free solution. n8n is working very well for those people, and it should. What is, however, important to understand, is that those are not the people we target with our proprietary features. The right version for them is the free community version. The Team plan is rather for organizations that run important production workloads and have multiple people that want to collaborate. The Enterprise plan is probably self-explanatory.
I can understand that not everybody wants to pay or wants to pay less. That is totally OK, but those people should not concentrate on, or be sad about the very few features that are proprietary and they can not use for free. They should be rather happy about them as those few features are the ones that will allow them to keep on using n8n for free. Because with them we can become a sustainable company. Only if we are able to build a profitable company, will n8n stay around and not just improve the product (free & paid), we can also keep on giving support, improve docs,… and everything else.
About the point of having to build, troubleshoot and host workflows. I honestly fail to see how paying for n8n is different to any other software product out there. When people pay for Photoshop, they do not do that because it automatically edits the images, nor do people pay for Word because it writes a letter for them, they pay for the convenience the tools offer. Same with n8n. Nothing that can not be done with n8n can not also be done by a custom script. But writing, maintaining, hosting, … those scripts are also not fun and take a lot of time and resources (if people are even able to do that). That is where n8n offers the convenience and what they pay for, at least if they choose to. If $5 per month per workflow is too much or too little really depends on the use case. But as mentioned above, do I still believe that if it is not worth $5 per month, maybe it is not worth having that workflow.
Sure running multiple instances of n8n, one paid and one free is one of the multiple things that can be done to circumvent having to pay or having to pay too much. But as also mentioned above, will that likely simply improve your workload. If you see your time as free, and possible downtime or other problems are nothing you worry about, that could make sense for you personally.
With the trigger nodes. The “Execute Workflow Trigger” node does not count.
@dickhoning That I already answered above.
It has to do with 1. not having updated the cloud plans yet (but we will) and 2. the cloud plans having an additional limit on the number of executions.
Welcome to the community @Pascal
Seems to be the same point as @dickhoning made, and so did answer above.
Regarding paying per app. Yes thought about it before, but honestly do not like it. Do not see any clear advantage to the per-workflow pricing, which I think is much simpler. The last thing I want is that people are excited to build a new workflow and then get asked to pay more every time they add a new node. Also want to point out that other companies do not seem to charge only for that, they rather charge for steps + premium apps (which are only available in higher plans). That is something I could potentially also imagine in the future, at least for enterprise apps.
@mcnaveen Thanks! Yes, exactly, that is the plan.
@jfcaringi Thanks, and also happy new year! Honestly do not see a problem there. Everything you will need for your personal and hobby stuff you should get in the free community edition. After all, will you be working on them alone, and the collaboration feature is not required. Also, other features like LDAP, audit logging, … are things that are not required for personal projects.