n8n Pricing in 2026: Every Plan and What You Really Pay

n8n Cloud costs €24 a month for Starter (2,500 executions) or €60 for Pro (10,000 executions) on monthly billing, or €20 and €50 a month if you pay annually. The Community Edition is free to self-host, and the self-hosted Business plan starts at €667 a month billed annually. You pay per workflow execution, so a 20-step workflow costs the same per run as a 2-step one.

n8n plans and prices in October 2026

Pro also has a 50,000-execution tier at €144 a month on monthly billing. Business is self-hosted only for now, with a waitlist for a hosted version, and its pricing FAQ puts overage at €4,000 for each extra block of 300,000 executions. All of these figures come from the official n8n pricing page.

• Starter, 2,500 executions€24
• Pro, 10,000 executions€60
• Pro, 50,000 executions€144
• Business, 40,000 executions€800

From the n8n pricing page, checked October 18, 2026. Annual billing saves about 17 percent.

The two Cloud plans also differ in limits that matter once workflows get busy:

Every plan includes unlimited users, unlimited workflows and every integration. New Cloud accounts can start with a 14-day trial capped at 1,000 executions.

What counts as an execution

An execution is one run of a whole workflow, no matter how many steps it has or how much data it moves. Only production runs count, meaning runs started by a trigger in a published workflow. The exact rules are in n8n's execution docs:

• Schedule triggers count every time they fire, even when there is nothing to do.
• Polling triggers, such as the Google Drive Trigger, count only when they find new data.
• Webhooks and forms count once for each request that starts the workflow.
• Free of charge: manual test runs in the editor, sub-workflows called by another workflow, error workflows and malformed requests.

So a contact form with 150 submissions a month uses 150 executions, whether the workflow behind it has 3 steps or 30. Schedules are where people get surprised. Here is what a single scheduled workflow uses in a 30-day month:

30

when it runs once a day

720

when it runs every hour

2,880

when it runs every 15 minutes

8,640

when it runs every 5 minutes

Simple arithmetic based on n8n's rule that a Schedule Trigger counts every time it fires.

That last line alone is more than three times Starter's allowance. If the schedule only exists to check for something new, a polling trigger that counts only when it finds data is far cheaper.

To estimate your own total, follow these steps:

1. 01

   List

   Write down every workflow you plan to run

2. 02

   Count

   Note what starts each one: a form, an email, a schedule

3. 03

   Multiply

   Turn that into runs per 30-day month

4. 04

   Buffer

   Add 30 percent for busy months

5. 05

   Match

   Pick the smallest plan above your total

Cloud vs self-hosted: the real costs

The server is the cheap part. DigitalOcean's Basic droplets start at $4 a month for 512 MiB of memory and $12 a month for 2 GiB, and n8n's DigitalOcean guide says a basic shared CPU plan is enough for most usage.

The real cost is your time. n8n releases a new minor version most weeks, and the same guide recommends self-hosting only for experienced users, warning that mistakes can lead to data loss, security issues and downtime.

The free edition also leaves out team features such as projects, workflow sharing, SSO and Git version control, according to n8n's edition comparison. Registering it with your email unlocks folders and a few debugging extras at no cost.

Costs that don't appear on the price tag

01AI model usage

AI nodes bill separately, through your own API key or n8n's prepaid Gateway credits on Cloud Starter and Pro.

02Assistant credits

n8n Assistant, the AI helper that builds workflows from a chat, draws on a monthly allowance, and you can buy more when it runs out.

03Run time caps

A single run on Starter can last 5 minutes. Long AI or file jobs may push you to Pro, where the cap is 40 minutes.

04Concurrency

Starter runs 5 executions at once and queues the rest, which matters when a webhook gets busy.

05Your time

Updates, backups and fixing broken workflows are real hours, even when the software is free.

Which plan fits your business size

These are example workloads to show the method, not averages. Your own count from the steps above is what matters.

If you are unsure between two plans, start on monthly billing for the first month. Switch to annual once your Insights dashboard shows a steady number.

How to keep your n8n bill down

1. Batch work inside one run. A loop over 200 rows in one run is one execution; 200 separate triggers are 200.
2. Prefer triggers that only count when there is news. Polling triggers that find nothing are free, while schedules count every time.
3. Move shared steps into sub-workflows. Only the parent run counts.
4. Pay annually once you are sure. It saves about 17 percent on every Cloud plan.
5. Check the Insights dashboard monthly. It shows your production executions, so you can spot a runaway schedule early.
6. Unpublish workflows you no longer use. A forgotten schedule keeps counting every time it fires.

Before you commit, compare the same workflow priced on other tools in n8n vs Zapier vs Make, or see how n8n stacks up against seven more options in the best AI automation tools.

?Quick check0 of 2 correct

A workflow has 25 steps and runs 400 times a month. How many executions does it use?

A10,000B400C25

Which of these does not count toward your execution limit?

AA Schedule Trigger that fires and finds nothing to doBA manual test run in the editorCA webhook request that starts the workflow

What to do next

List the workflows you want to run and estimate their monthly executions with the steps above. If the total sits under 1,000, the 14-day trial is enough to build and test all of them before you pay anything.

If you have never built one, start with the n8n tutorial for beginners. For a guided path through lead and email automations, our AI automation course is in early access.