Question about licensing

1

I am a freelance consultant building software for my clients. Can you please clarify if I need to buy a commercial license for the following situation

  1. I self host n8n in my own server or buy n8n cloud, my customers have no access to the platform
  2. I write workflows using n8n involving my customers’ applications using their API keys for their businesses
    For example, connecting my customer’s github to their Slack
  3. They only see the result of the workflow and have no access to the platform itself.
2

Welcome to the community @Ashwin_Vasudevan!

Generally, are both the hosted n8n instance and also the n8n.cloud instance meant for internal usage. That means that if you want to use them for anything else you would have to contact us.

Creating custom workflows for your customers and charging for them, is allowed and does not require a separate license anymore (as we recently changed our license). What is however not allowed is offering it hosted as a product.

To give an example.
Allowed: Charge a customer to create a custom workflow that automates their Twitter Campaigns and they are then running that workflow on their own n8n instance or on their own n8n.cloud account.

Not allowed: Creating a workflow that automates the Twitter Campaigns of users, hosting it on your servers, and charging users for that automation. In this case, it is not Consulting and Support anymore, it is rather offering a hosted version of n8n.

I hope that makes sense.

If not, you can fill anytime the form here and set up a call.

3

Thank you for the clarification. Quick question, in the premise illustrated above, If I have a n8n.cloud account for my company and host my client’s workflows in my cloud account, will I still need a commercial license?

4

That has then actually less to do with the license of n8n itself, rather with the Terms of Service of n8n.cloud as they only allow it to be used for internal usage. This is actually the case for most SaaS offerings.

So what is needed is either:

  1. A commercial n8n license to offer a hosted n8n solution for your customers
  2. Each of your customers needs their own n8n.cloud account