Would a tool that monitors self-hosted n8n workflows and alerts on failures be useful to you?

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I’m considering building a small tool that monitors your self-hosted n8n workflows and alerts you instantly (Discord/Telegram/email) when an execution fails or hangs — because healthchecks.io/Cronitor don’t understand n8n’s semantics (which node broke, which workflow). Would this be useful to you? What are you currently paying for monitoring, if anything?

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Hey @Thomas42-maker, while you wait for a response, here are some things that might help:

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@achamm, @Emmas - you’ve helped with similar issues before, can you take a look?

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Welcome @Thomas42-maker!

Yes, this would be useful - most people patch together n8n’s built-in Error Trigger workflow with something else because it only fires on hard failures, not hangs or partial/silent failures inside a workflow.

A few gaps I’d want a purpose-built tool to cover:

  • Per-node failure context (which node broke, with the actual error payload), not just “workflow X failed”
  • Detecting long-running/stuck executions, not just crashed ones - a workflow stuck in “running” for an hour often means a webhook never resolved or an external API is hanging
  • Distinguishing expected errors (e.g. a Slack rate limit you already retry on) from real ones, so you’re not alerted on noise

Right now most self-hosted users I’ve seen wire the Error Trigger to a Slack/Telegram node manually and call it done, but it breaks down once you have 20+ workflows since you lose per-node visibility. If your tool can read execution data directly (via the API or DB) and correlate node-level failures with workflow context, that alone would beat rolling your own.

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Thanks, this is exactly the kind of detail I needed. Quick follow-up: would you (or people you’ve seen) actually pay for this as a subscription, or is it something you’d only use if it were free/open-source? And roughly how many workflows does someone need before this pain becomes serious enough to pay for?

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From what I’ve seen, most self-hosted users won’t pay until they hit 15-20+ production workflows, that’s usually when manual monitoring stops scaling and a missed failure actually costs money or trust with a client. Below that, people lean on free options (Error Trigger + Slack, or Uptime Kuma push) since the pain isn’t big enough yet. On pricing, a low-cost subscription (10-20 USD/month) beats one-time or open-source for this kind of tool, because ongoing alerting/monitoring feels like infrastructure people expect to pay recurring for, similar to Uptime Kuma Cloud or Better Stack. I’d focus your free tier on catching people right before that 15-20 workflow threshold, then convert them once they feel the pain.

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