What self-hosting n8n costs
Self-hosting n8n's Community Edition is free; you pay for the server. A 4 GB server, the size n8n ran its own single-instance benchmark on, costs $6.49 a month on Hostinger's n8n VPS (KVM 1, renewing at $11.99) or $24 on DigitalOcean. n8n's own Business plan, sold only for self-hosting, costs $800 a month billed yearly for 40,000 executions.
Servers for n8n
| Server | vCPU | RAM | A month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger KVM 1 (n8n preinstalled) | 1 | 4 GB | $6.49 renews at $11.99 |
| Hostinger KVM 2 (n8n preinstalled) | 2 | 8 GB | $8.99 renews at $14.99 |
| Hostinger KVM 4 (n8n preinstalled) | 4 | 16 GB | $12.99 renews at $28.99 |
| Hostinger KVM 8 (n8n preinstalled) | 8 | 32 GB | $25.99 renews at $49.99 |
| DigitalOcean Basic Droplet | 1 | 512 MiB | $4 |
| DigitalOcean Basic Droplet | 1 | 1 GiB | $6 |
| DigitalOcean Basic Droplet | 1 | 2 GiB | $12 |
| DigitalOcean Basic Droplet | 2 | 2 GiB | $18 |
| DigitalOcean Basic Droplet | 2 | 4 GiB | $24 |
| DigitalOcean Basic Droplet | 4 | 8 GiB | $48 |
| DigitalOcean Basic Droplet | 8 | 16 GiB | $96 |
Hostinger: “All plans are paid upfront. The monthly rate reflects the total plan price divided by the number of months in your plan.” DigitalOcean lists an hourly and a monthly price; this is the monthly one. Before taxes. Not listed: Vultr, because its pricing page shows a security verification to automated browsers; Linode (Akamai), because its pricing page answers automated browsers with Access Denied; Hetzner, because its cloud page didn't show prices as readable text.
How big a server you need depends on your workflows. n8n's documentation says: “n8n doesn't restrict the amount of data each node can fetch and process. While this gives you freedom, it can lead to errors when workflow executions require more memory than available.” Its published benchmark ran a single instance on an AWS c5a.large with 4 GB of RAM (“n8n setup: Single n8n instance (running in main mode, with Postgres database)”).
n8n Cloud or self-hosted, by executions a month
| Executions a month | n8n Cloud | Community, self-hosted | Business, self-hosted |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2,500 | $20 Starter (Cloud) | Server only from $6.49 | $800 up to 40,000 |
| 10,000 | $50 Pro (Cloud) | Server only from $6.49 | $800 up to 40,000 |
| 40,000 | $120 Pro (Cloud) | Server only from $6.49 | $800 up to 40,000 |
| 100,000 | – | Server only from $6.49 | $1,726 up to 100,000 |
A month, billed yearly, before taxes. An execution is one run of a workflow, however many steps it has. “–” under Cloud: no published Cloud plan covers that many executions. The Business plan's smallest tier is 40,000 executions.
Is self-hosted n8n free?
The Community Edition is: n8n's pricing page calls it “the free edition. This is what n8n runs without a license key.” The Business plan is a paid licence for self-hosted n8n, and Enterprise is quoted. On your own server, updates and backups are yours to run.
n8n Cloud pricing in detail · n8n execution limits · n8n vs Zapier · n8n alternatives · compare every platform by cost per run
Sources: n8n pricing, n8n performance benchmarking, n8n memory errors, Hostinger n8n VPS, DigitalOcean Droplet pricing, checked 2026-10-06.
Prices checked against each platform's official pricing page on .