The Real Cost of n8n Self-Hosting: A 6-Month Breakdown
You often see a simple comparison when people discuss n8n Cloud vs self-hosting : “The cloud plan costs around $20 per month, while self-hosting is completely free.” The first part can be useful as a rough comparison, but the second part is technically true yet incomplete . Self-hosting n8n can be very inexpensive, but it isn't literally free. There are server costs, backups, maintenance, troubleshooting, and—most importantly—your time. I tracked the actual costs of running a self-hosted n8n instance for six months. Here's what I spent, how much time I needed to maintain it, and how it compared with using n8n Cloud. Setup Costs — Month 1 VPS server: I started with a basic DigitalOcean droplet at around $6 per month . The initial 1 GB RAM configuration was enough for a moderate workflow workload, although I eventually needed to upgrade it. Domain and subdomain: I used an existing domain and created a subdomain such as automate.mydomain.com...