Every UK business I talk to about automation lands on the same question within the first ten minutes: what does n8n actually cost? The marketing page says $20. The Community Edition is free. Self-hosting is "basically free". Each is technically true, and each hides a different cost. This guide lays out the honest numbers for the five most common n8n setups UK small and mid-size businesses actually use — so you can pick the one that matches your situation and stop guessing.
Figures below are verified against n8n.io/pricing in April 2026 and our own Hetzner and DigitalOcean invoices. Where I quote monthly costs for clients, it is from their actual billing, with permission. If you'd rather have a UK n8n agency set this up and run it for you, that's what we do.
The five ways UK businesses actually pay for n8n
n8n lists three Cloud plans. In real use, there are five patterns:
Any UK business with a developer in-house or an agency partner
Non-technical teams under 2,500 executions/month
2,500–10,000 executions/month, zero ops capacity
10,000–30,000 executions/month, SSO needed
SMBs who want self-hosted economics without the ops
n8n Cloud pricing — every tier, in pounds
| Plan | Price (USD) | Price (£ ex-VAT) | Executions | Active workflows | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $20/mo | ~£16 | 2,500 | 5 | 1 |
| Pro | $50/mo | ~£40 | 10,000 | 15 | 3 |
| Business | $120/mo | ~£95 | 30,000 | Unlimited | 10 |
| Enterprise | Custom | From £500 | Custom | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Self-hosted real pricing — including the bits nobody lists
Self-hosting is not "free". It is "£5 of hosting plus a few hours of your time". Here is the honest cost breakdown for a production-grade UK deployment:
| Line item | Who pays | Typical cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| VPS (Hetzner CX22) | Hetzner | €4.51 / ~£3.80 | 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe. EU-hosted. |
| Domain name | Registrar | £10/year | One-off for .co.uk. SSL via Let's Encrypt is free. |
| Automated backups | Hetzner / Backblaze B2 | €0.90–£4/mo | Nightly snapshots. Non-negotiable for production. |
| Monitoring (uptime + alerts) | UptimeRobot / Better Stack | £0–£20/mo | Free tier usually sufficient for small deployments. |
| SMTP email (notifications) | Mailgun / Resend | £0–£15/mo | Free tier covers most SMBs. |
| Initial setup (DIY) | You | 3–6 hours | One-off. Docker, SSL, backups, first workflow. |
| Initial setup (agency) | Agency | £400–£900 | One-off. Includes hardening and handover docs. |
All-in, expect £5–£12/month in recurring costs plus a one-off setup (yours or an agency's). Compared to n8n Cloud Pro at £40/month, that is around £400/year in pure hosting savings and no per-execution worry.
n8n vs Zapier on cost: the pricing model, not the sticker price
People compare n8n and Zapier on headline price and miss the thing that actually moves the bill: how each one counts usage. Zapier charges per task, meaning every single action inside a Zap. n8n charges per execution, meaning one whole workflow run, however many steps sit inside it.
Say a workflow reads a form, creates a CRM contact, sends a welcome email and pings Slack. On n8n that's one execution. On Zapier it's four tasks. Multiply that across a few thousand runs a month and the gap gets wide. The more steps your workflows have, the cheaper n8n looks and the more Zapier stings.
| What you're billed on | n8n | Zapier |
|---|---|---|
| Unit counted | Workflow execution (whole run) | Task (each action) |
| 4-step workflow, 3,000 runs/mo | 3,000 executions | 12,000 tasks |
| Entry Cloud plan | ~£16/mo (Starter, 2,500 execs) | Per-task tiers that climb with steps |
| Self-host option | Yes, ~£5/mo VPS, no per-task fee | None |
That last row is the real kicker. Self-hosting n8n drops per-run pricing altogether: you pay for the £5 box and run as many executions as the hardware copes with. Zapier has no self-host equivalent, so the meter never stops. For the full feature-by-feature breakdown, read the n8n vs Zapier UK comparison. Prefer we run it for you? Our pricing is fixed and public.
Total cost of ownership — side by side
Your actual monthly cost — Cloud vs self-hosted
n8n counts one workflow run as one execution, regardless of how many steps. Most small-business workflows run 150–400/day, roughly 5,000–12,000/month.
Numbers assume a UK small business on n8n Cloud Starter or Pro vs self-hosted on Hetzner with nightly backups. LLM estimate uses ~500 tokens per AI step at current OpenAI pricing.
When n8n Cloud is actually worth the extra money
Cloud is the sensible path. Self-hosting will bite you on the first backup failure.
n8n Cloud is audited. Self-hosted is your own responsibility — longer due-diligence process.
Cloud is a predictable line item. Hosting bills drift; cloud bills do not.
Starter at £16 is a rounding error. Prove the workflows work, then migrate to self-hosted when the bill starts to sting.
The breakpoint — when to migrate from Cloud to self-hosted
Rough rule we use with clients: when the n8n Cloud monthly bill crosses £40–£60, the maths tips in favour of self-hosting. A full Cloud-to-self-hosted migration takes a working day of engineering for most teams — no drama, no downtime. We put the new instance behind a staging hostname, paste workflow JSON across, verify each flow, then flip DNS.
Hetzner CX22 with Docker Compose
Caddy or Nginx plus Let's Encrypt
Workflow JSON and credentials from Cloud
Paste into self-hosted, refresh OAuth tokens
Smoke-test top 10 flows in parallel
Update webhook URLs, cut Cloud off
The hidden costs nobody warns you about
If your workflows call GPT-4 or Claude on every run, token cost quickly exceeds platform cost. Budget £20–£200/month extra depending on volume. Cheap GPT-4o-mini often does 80% of what you need.
Not an issue at SMB scale. Becomes visible past 50,000 executions/month on some VPS providers. Hetzner is generous here; AWS and DigitalOcean less so.
Third-party connectors lag behind core releases. One in twenty updates breaks a community node for a few days. Pin versions in staging.
2–4 hours of maintenance for a self-hosted instance: security patches, backups verified, occasional workflow fix. Budget this properly.
n8n Cloud exports to JSON so migration is clean. Some credentials need re-entering manually. Plan a day for the cutover.
These sit behind a commercial licence on self-hosted. If you genuinely need them, Enterprise tier is the right choice — do not try to recreate them.
Is n8n worth it — the real question
Cost is the wrong framing. The right question is: how many hours a week are your team doing things a workflow could do? A typical Chester or Manchester SME finds 8–12 hours of tedium a week that automates cleanly — lead routing, invoice chasing, support triage, stock alerts, onboarding drip emails. At the UK median hourly cost, that is £200–£400 of time reclaimed per week. Any plausible n8n cost is paid back by the end of the first month.
I have never had a client migrate away from n8n once it was running properly. I have had many migrate from Zapier to n8n and stay. The full Zapier vs n8n comparison goes into why.
UK-specific considerations
- Data residency: host in Hetzner Falkenstein (Germany) for standard GDPR needs, or on a UK VPS (Mythic Beasts, Krystal) if your contracts require UK-only data.
- VAT: n8n Cloud charges USD ex-VAT. UK VAT (currently 20%) is added on your invoice. Reclaim it if you are VAT-registered.
- Working-day support: n8n Cloud support is US-hours biased. Our UK clients on self-hosted get faster resolution from our team than Cloud support tends to provide anyway.
- Currency swings: your Cloud bill fluctuates 2–5% a month on exchange rates. Self-hosted costs in EUR are also exposed, but smaller absolute numbers mean less visibility.
- Invoicing: n8n Cloud raises invoices in USD. Some UK accounting software (Xero, QuickBooks) handles this cleanly; some flag it as an anomaly. Check before signing up.
Frequently asked questions
Picking the right option — by business profile
| Profile | Recommended tier | Expected monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Solo founder, 5–15 workflows | n8n Cloud Starter | £16 |
| Small agency, moderate technical comfort | Self-hosted on Hetzner | £8–£12 |
| Growing SME, zero ops capacity | n8n Cloud Pro | £40 |
| Mid-market, 20,000+ executions | Self-hosted managed | £80–£200 |
| Regulated industry (finance, NHS) | Self-hosted UK VPS + agency ops | £150–£400 |
| Enterprise with SSO + SLA | n8n Enterprise | £500+ |
Want self-hosted economics without the ops overhead?
We run n8n instances for UK clients on Hetzner, from £60/month all-in — server, SSL, nightly backups, monitoring, and 2 hours/month of workflow help. Fixed fee, UK support, cheaper than Pro at meaningful volume.
Related reading
n8n workflow automation — beginner's guide · n8n vs Zapier UK comparison · Our managed n8n service
