Thanks a lot for your feedback. That is all great to know!
Totally agree, the ratio between cloud and self-hosted is totally off! As you pointed out correctly, does it have to do with us limiting those plans around executions rather than workflows. Over time we will harmonize the plans.
But what do you mean by the ratio of $25 for 5 workflows is also off? That is literally $5 for a workflow?!?! If a workflow does not save at least 10x that amount of money/time a month I would argue it is not worth having in the first place. I also assume that the most active n8n workflows will be saving much more than 10x that amount per month. And totally honestly, if people do not receive much more value than the equivalent of probably a Starbucks visit with a friend ($25), we have a really huge problem at n8n and should probably close down.
About your 15-minute example of being lazy. It for sure does not give the above-mentioned 10x but it really depends on how much you value your time and/or what you are paid. Esp. also what other things you could be doing with that time instead. But for now, just staying on the salary side of things and doing the math. As long as somebody earns more than $20/hour it is for sure still worth it. Ff somebody earns $60/hour it is 3x, plus knowing that things do not get forgotten, they are done in a reliable fashion and taking the mental load off.
And just to make it clear. The version (the community version) you and everybody else are running right now, is still free and unrestricted and will stay that way. Meaning as many workflows, triggers, users, and executions as you want. We will obviously also keep on releasing new versions with a lot of improvements moving forward. It is really just if you upgrade to the paid version which includes additional features (like collaboration). Only that version is restricted by active workflows. So it will for sure always stay very cost-efficient and nothing has to change unless you actively change to that version.
Regarding what metric we are charging for. There was actually incredibly much internal discussion around that, and a lot of time and thinking went into it. Should it be executions, workflows, active workflows, users, operations (similar to Zapier/Make), … . There are for sure reasons for each of them and also very good reasons against them. If we take executions, for example. There seems to be a very clear relationship between the number of executions and the value people receive. On the other hand, executions are not always equal. Somebody may use n8n to process logs and so needs multiple millions of them in a 3-node workflow, somebody else, on the other hand, processes some high-value enterprise deals with 50 steps and just requires 10 every month. Like that n8n becomes suddenly incredibly cheap (way too cheap) for organizations with one use case but unpayably expensive for organizations with another one. Meaning suddenly n8n could not be used anymore for those. (but also think generally still think 5 Euros for each is still very cheap)
So why else active workflows? It has some other very great advantages:
- It correlates very clearly with value. No matter what people do, it is one “task” which provides value
- It is very easy for users to predict how many they will need. If you have executions/operations it is often very hard to do so, esp. with operations. It often requires a lot of math and thinking to figure that out beforehand.
- If the plan limits are reached nothing bad happens (no interruptions, which is important for us) to your active workflows. With executions/operations they suddenly stop working. Literally, just one user has to configure one of their workflows wrong, which then triggers a lot and all others will then stop working once the plan limit got reached. With active workflows, on the other hand, is the worst thing that can happen that a user can not activate a new workflow.
You are also right that the way we charge will potentially cause people to make bad workflow-building decisions esp. if they want to avoid paying more. People always become very creative if they want to save money. That, however, does not work out the most time well for either side. They then maybe avoided paying us $25 more per month but spent hours every month supporting badly built workflows that become on top unreliable. That is sadly the case no matter what metric we use.
What do you mean with “Also, where do workflows that are meant to be triggered by n8n itself fall into this paradigm”?
If we would not charge for the ones that are meant to be triggered by n8n (which sounds like a valid definition of an active workflow) we would not have anything we would charge for. So those are for sure included. What is not included, are not active workflows that get executed manually.
Hope all of that makes sense!