n8n Cloud vs Self-Hosted on AWS: The Real Cost in 2026

n8n is one of the best open-source workflow automation tools available, but how you run it has a bigger impact on your bill than most people expect. The decision comes down to a single design choice in n8n Cloud’s pricing: it charges per workflow execution. Self-hosting the Community Edition has no such meter. Here’s what that actually costs in 2026.

Pricing verified June 2026 against n8n.io and AWS us-east-1 on-demand rates.

n8n Cloud pricing at a glance

Plan	Monthly	Executions	Hosted in
Starter	$24	2,500	EU (Frankfurt)
Pro	$60	10,000	EU (Frankfurt)
Business	$800	40,000	EU (Frankfurt)

Prices shown at monthly billing; annual is roughly 17% less. The numbers look reasonable until you understand how executions accumulate.

The execution trap

n8n Cloud counts every workflow run as an execution, including polling triggers that check and find nothing. A single trigger polling an API every five minutes runs about 8,640 times a month. That one workflow blows past the Starter plan’s 2,500-execution limit before it does any real work, pushing you to Pro. Add a second polling workflow and you’re rationing.

Self-hosted n8n has no execution meter at all. A workflow that polls every minute costs exactly the same as one that never runs: nothing beyond the server it lives on.

What self-hosting actually costs

The n8n Community Edition is free and has unlimited executions, all 400+ integrations, and code nodes. You pay for a server. On AWS, a production-grade setup runs roughly:

Software: $0 (Community Edition), or about $47/month if you use a managed appliance that handles hardening, TLS, and updates for you
Compute: a t3.small is about $15/month; t3.medium about $30/month
Storage: a few dollars for EBS

So a real, durable n8n instance lands around $65–80/month all-in with no execution limits, or close to free if you assemble and maintain it yourself.

Cost scenarios

Solo builder, ~1,500 executions/month. n8n Cloud Starter at $24 wins. Low-volume, webhook-driven work is exactly what it’s priced for. Don’t overthink it.

Small team, polling + CRM sync, ~25,000 executions/month. Cloud exceeds Pro’s 10,000 cap, pushing you to Business at $800/month. A self-hosted instance is roughly $72/month all-in. That’s about $8,700/year saved.

Agency, 100,000+ executions/month. Cloud Business plus overage buckets. A t3.medium self-hosted instance handles this for about $80/month, saving well over $8,000/year, more once Cloud overages stack up.

Data residency

n8n Cloud hosts exclusively in Frankfurt, Germany. That’s fine for GDPR, but a problem if you need US data residency or VPC isolation. Self-hosting in your own AWS region and VPC is the only clean answer when residency is a requirement.

When n8n Cloud is the better choice

Pick Cloud if you have low execution volume with webhook triggers, no one comfortable in an AWS console, or you want n8n’s own support team on the hook. Managed cloud is a legitimate product. It’s just priced for convenience, and the execution meter punishes exactly the high-frequency workloads automation is best at.

If you poll, sync on schedules, or expect growth, the math flips to self-hosting fast, and you keep your automation data and execution entirely in your own account.