n8n for small businesses: cloud costs, self-hosting and who should maintain it

What n8n Cloud costs

n8n’s pricing page lists these plans:

The page offers a monthly billing toggle and says annual billing saves 17%. All plans include unlimited users, unlimited workflows and every integration, according to n8n.

Starter includes 5 concurrent executions and forum support. Pro adds more shared projects, up to 50 concurrent executions, admin roles and workflow history.

Business plan (self-hosted only). n8n lists a Business plan at €667/month (billed annually) for companies with under 100 employees needing collaboration and scale. According to n8n’s pricing page, it is currently only available for self-hosted n8n, not on n8n Cloud. It adds SSO, multiple environments, Git-based version control and queue mode.

The free trial, according to n8n, includes 1,000 executions, needs no credit card, and has a 180-second execution timeout.

How executions work

n8n says an execution is “a single run of your entire workflow”, regardless of the number of steps or the amount of data. A ten-step workflow that runs once is one execution.

To estimate your needs, n8n suggests:

• Scheduled workflows: a daily schedule is about 30 executions a month. One that runs every 5 minutes is roughly 8,600 to 8,900.
• Webhook workflows (for example a website form): one execution per form submission.
• Chatbots: conversations per week multiplied by messages per conversation.

The schedule example matters. A workflow that checks something every five minutes can use far more executions than one that waits for events. Ask whoever builds your workflows to use triggers rather than frequent polling where possible.

Self-hosting: free licence, not free to run

The Community Edition is a self-hosted version of n8n available on GitHub. The licence costs nothing, but you still need:

• a server or cloud hosting account, paid monthly
• someone to install updates and security patches
• backups, monitoring and a plan for when the server goes down
• a person who knows what to do when a workflow fails at 2am

n8n also notes that Business or Enterprise features on a self-hosted instance need a licence key that pings n8n’s licence server daily, and that telemetry is collected by default, though you can turn it off.

For most small businesses without in-house technical staff, n8n Cloud is the simpler starting point. Self-hosting makes sense when you have a specific data residency requirement or a technical partner who will genuinely own it.

Where your data lives

According to n8n, hosted plans store data in the EU, on servers in Frankfurt. If you self-host, data sits wherever you put it. Either way, you are still responsible under UK GDPR for knowing what personal data passes through your workflows. Our AI and customer data checklist covers the questions to ask.

Who should maintain it?

This is the question most buyers skip. Automations break when an app changes its API, a password expires or a form field is renamed. Before anything goes live, agree:

1. Who owns the account. The subscription and API keys should be in your business’s name.
2. Who gets the error alerts. A named person, not a shared inbox nobody reads.
3. What happens on failure. Retries, a fallback, or a manual process.
4. Documentation. A short description of each workflow, what it touches and why.
5. Support terms. If an agency built it, what does ongoing support cost and how fast do they respond?

How it compares

If you are also considering Make or Zapier, read n8n vs Make vs Zapier for UK small businesses, or our side-by-side on a single lead-handling workflow in Make vs n8n. You can find Make at make.com and Zapier at zapier.com.

Need help setting this up?

If you would rather have someone build and look after your n8n workflows, browse n8n agencies and experts in the UK. Ask each one who will own the account, how they handle errors and what ongoing support costs.