n8n Pricing Explained (2026): Cloud vs Self-Hosted, and What It Really Costs a Singapore Team

How n8n pricing works, in sixty seconds

n8n pricing has two halves that people keep confusing. There is n8n Cloud, the hosted product that n8n GmbH sells by subscription, and there is the self-hosted Community Edition, which you download and run yourself for no licence fee. Everything in this post is about the real cost of each one for a Singapore business, in Singapore dollars, with the euro figures dated so you can tell when they have moved.

The disclosure first. finyki builds and hosts n8n workflows for clients as part of our workflow automation work. We have no affiliation with n8n GmbH, no reseller margin, and nothing changes for us whether you pick Cloud or run it on a laptop. We also build on Make and Zapier when they fit better. The tool choice itself is handled in our n8n vs Zapier vs Make comparison, so this post assumes you have already landed on n8n and want to know what it costs.

n8n pricing is execution-based: one run of one workflow is one execution, regardless of how many steps it has. That is the unit n8n Cloud meters. Zapier and Make count per task or per operation, where every step a workflow takes consumes a unit. A 30-step enrichment workflow that fires 1,000 times a month uses 1,000 executions on n8n and 30,000 units on a per-task tool. That single difference explains why n8n looks cheap at volume, and why its plans run out of room in different places from its competitors'.

Self-hosted n8n on the free edition does not meter executions at all. You pay for the server and for the person who keeps it alive. That second line is the one every "n8n is free" article leaves out.

Is it free to use n8n?

Yes, with conditions. The n8n Community Edition is free to download, free to run and free indefinitely. There is no trial clock on it. It is "fair-code" rather than open source in the strict sense, and the n8n license that governs it is the Sustainable Use License.

What the licence allows, in plain terms (not legal advice; read the licence file in the n8n repository before relying on it): you may use, modify and run the software "for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use". Running your own lead routing, invoice matching or CRM sync on it, inside a company that makes money, is internal business use. That is free.

What it does not allow: distributing n8n or providing it to others unless you do so free of charge and for non-commercial purposes. If you want to sell n8n hosting, white-label the editor inside your own product, or offer "automation seats" built on it to paying customers, you are outside the free licence and into a conversation with n8n's sales team. Source files marked .ee in the codebase are Enterprise-only and are not under the free licence at all.

Can I use n8n for free for life?

For internal use, yes. Nothing in the licence expires. Two caveats. The licence can change for future versions, though you keep the version you downloaded under the terms it came with. And "free" here means free of licence fees. The hosting bill in the self-hosting section below never goes away.

Is n8n free if it is self-hosted?

The Community Edition is. The n8n self-hosted Business and Enterprise plans are not: they are paid licence keys that switch on SSO, separate environments and Git-backed version control on your own server. The table below shows where that line sits.

n8n cloud pricing in 2026, converted to SGD

These are the figures on n8n's pricing page as of 8 October 2026, converted at about SGD 1.48–1.50 to the euro, where the rate has been over the past year, rounded up to 1.50 for planning. n8n reshuffles its tiers from time to time, so treat the euro column as the source, the SGD column as a planning number, and check the current pricing page before you sign.

Four things the page does not make obvious:

• "Billed annually" means paid annually. The page's billing toggle says annual saves 17%, so paying monthly works out at roughly €24 and €60 (about SGD 36 and 90) for Starter and Pro.
• Prices exclude tax. Singapore's GST is 9%. How it lands on an overseas software subscription depends on your GST registration, so ask your accountant rather than assuming zero.
• The Cloud ladder tops out at Pro. Business is self-hosted only, with a waitlist for a Cloud version at the time of writing. Outgrow Pro's 10,000 executions on Cloud and your next published step is Enterprise pricing or running the software yourself.
• n8n Cloud runs in the EU. The pricing page states hosted data is stored on servers in Frankfurt, Germany, and there is no Singapore region on the public plans at the time of writing. For many SMEs that is irrelevant. For anyone whose client contracts say "data stays in Singapore", it is the whole decision.

Why is n8n so expensive?

It is an odd question to ask of a tool with a free edition and a SGD 30 entry plan, but it is one of Google's People Also Ask questions for this search, so here is where it comes from. Three places.

1. The jump from Pro to Business. Pro is about SGD 75 a month. The next published tier is about SGD 1,000 a month and only runs on your own server. If a twelve-person team needs single sign-on or a separate staging environment, the price rises roughly thirteen-fold for features that come free on most SaaS tools of that size. That cliff is where the word "expensive" starts.
2. Concurrency, not executions. Starter allows five executions at once. A webhook that fires in bursts (a form that gets forty submissions the minute a campaign goes out) queues behind that limit. In our experience teams upgrade to Pro for concurrency long before they get near 2,500 executions.
3. The self-hosting bill nobody counts. A team goes self-hosted "because it is free", then discovers someone spends an afternoon a month on it. The next section prices it.

Measured against Zapier and Make at B2B volumes, n8n is usually the cheap option.

What self-hosting n8n actually costs in Singapore

This is the section the affiliate blogs skip, because their reader is a hobbyist and ours is a business. Below is the n8n hosting bill we would put in front of a Singapore operator who asks "what if we just run it ourselves?" The ranges are our typical experience across client deployments, not quotes.

The three ways to self-host

• A VPS in a Singapore region. DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode (Akamai) and AWS Lightsail all have Singapore locations. n8n runs in Docker with Postgres on the same box and Caddy or Traefik handling TLS. The simplest and cheapest path, and the one most of our clients under fifty staff end up on.
• Cloud Run, or its equivalents, in asia-southeast1. Serverless containers sound ideal, but n8n is not a serverless workload: it needs at least one always-on instance for cron and webhook triggers, plus a managed Postgres beside it. The security story is cleaner and the bill is higher. If you are already on GCP, our guide to Google Cloud for B2B teams covers where Cloud Run earns its keep and where it does not.
• Managed by someone else. An agency or a contractor runs the box, does the upgrades and gets the alert at 2am, for a flat monthly fee. finyki does this for clients, which is the disclosure from paragraph two again.

The honest reading of that table: the server is the cheapest line on it. For a team doing under 10,000 executions a month with no residency requirement, n8n Cloud Pro at about SGD 75 is cheaper than self-hosting on any route once you count the hours. Self-hosting wins when executions climb toward the Business tier (self-hosted anyway), when the hours are already spent on other infrastructure, or when a residency requirement takes Cloud off the table regardless of price.

What are the limitations of self-hosting n8n?

Price is the easy part. These are the n8n self hosted limitations that bite a Singapore SME, in the order we see them cause trouble.

• You are the SRE. No SLA, no status page, nobody else's pager. If the disk fills on a Saturday night, lead routing is down until Monday.
• Upgrades are frequent and occasionally breaking. n8n ships releases every week or two. Pin a version, read the release notes, upgrade on a schedule and keep a restore path.
• The encryption key is the whole thing. Every stored credential is encrypted with your instance's encryption key. Lose it and every API connection has to be re-authorised by hand. Back it up separately from the database, in a secrets manager, not in a Slack message.
• Gated features. The Community Edition has no SSO, no separate environments, no Git-backed versioning, no external secrets store and no log streaming. For a team of three that is irrelevant. For a team that needs an auditor to sign off, it is the reason the Business licence exists.
• Scaling is your job. A single instance handles a surprising amount, but bursty webhooks or heavy binary data (PDFs, images) need queue mode with Redis and workers, a different architecture from one container on a VPS.
• Backups are manual until you make them not manual. Postgres dumps, nightly, to a bucket, tested by actually restoring once.
• The licence boundary. You can run it for your company. You cannot run it for your customers as a paid service without a commercial licence from n8n.

Can n8n be hosted locally?

Yes, in both senses of the word, and the two get confused.

Locally as in "on a machine in our office"

n8n runs on a laptop or an office server through Docker in minutes. For building and testing, fine. For production it is usually a bad idea: webhooks need a public URL (n8n's built-in tunnel is for development only), the machine has to stay on, and office broadband is not what your invoice pipeline should depend on. Build locally, deploy to a server.

Locally as in "inside Singapore"

This is the question that matters for business buyers. The PDPA does not require personal data to stay in Singapore; its transfer limitation obligation requires that data sent overseas receives a comparable standard of protection. What usually does require in-country hosting is a client contract, a sector regulator's expectations, or a security questionnaire from an enterprise customer that says "Singapore or Asia only". In those cases n8n Cloud, which runs in the EU, is out, and a self-hosted instance in a Singapore region (any of the VPS providers above, GCP's asia-southeast1 or AWS ap-southeast-1) is the answer. You control where every execution log and every credential sits.

One nuance that catches people. The n8n box being in Singapore does not keep the data in Singapore if the workflow then sends it to a US-hosted CRM or a model API. Residency is a property of the whole pipeline, not of the orchestrator, and scoping it means listing which nodes may talk to which endpoints.

n8n cloud vs self hosted: the decision rule for a Singapore team

Here is the rule we use on scoping calls. Three inputs: team size, data-residency need, and whether anyone wants to own the box.

Pick n8n Cloud when

• fewer than ten people touch the automations;
• no contract or regulator requires in-country hosting;
• you are under roughly 10,000 executions a month;
• nobody wants to be the admin, and you want to be live this afternoon.

At SGD 30–75 a month it is the cheapest honest option for this profile.

Self-host when

• a contract, a regulator or a security review requires Singapore hosting;
• execution volume is heading toward the Business tier, where self-hosting is required anyway;
• you already run infrastructure, so the ops hours are marginal;
• you want model calls, binary files and customer data never to leave your own network;
• you want to pin versions and control your own change windows.

Have someone run it for you when

• the residency need exists but nobody internal will own the server;
• you want the self-hosted cost ceiling with the zero-ops feel of Cloud;
• the automations are revenue-critical (lead routing, billing, client reporting) and a quiet failure costs more than the fee.

This third option is the one we sell, so discount our enthusiasm accordingly. The test is the two-hour rule above, and we apply it against ourselves: if a client has a competent ops person with spare hours, we tell them to self-host and keep the money.

A worked example. A fifteen-person Singapore B2B services firm runs lead routing, invoice matching and a weekly reporting job, about 4,000 executions a month, and one enterprise client's master services agreement requires Singapore hosting. Cloud is out on residency alone. On a VPS the cash cost is SGD 30–70 plus two to four hours a month; if their ops lead already looks after a few servers, that is the answer. If nobody there runs servers, the honest options are a managed box or not automating the client-facing pieces yet. Before any of that, check whether those workflows are worth automating at all; our guide to workflow automation ROI has the payback maths.

Is there a free alternative to n8n?

The most common free alternative to n8n is n8n: the self-hosted Community Edition. That is the honest answer, and it is why this is usually a hosting question in disguise.

If the Community Edition fails for you on licence grounds (you want to resell or embed it), the realistic options are Activepieces, an open-source builder with a similar feel and a smaller connector catalogue; Windmill, developer-first, with flows written in Python or TypeScript; and Node-RED, Apache-licensed and older, with roots in IoT rather than business integrations. Zapier's and Make's free tiers are capped low enough to be trials, not plans.

We do not recommend changing tools to save SGD 75 a month. Rebuilding twenty workflows and re-authorising every credential costs more than a year of Pro, several times over. If you are still choosing between the three big names, go back to the comparison post. If you have already built on n8n, the only question worth your time is where it runs and who keeps it up.

When self-hosting n8n stops making sense

The pattern we see most often in Singapore SMEs: a founder or ops lead self-hosts n8n in month one, on a VPS, in an afternoon. It works for eight months. Then the person leaves, or an upgrade breaks a node, or the disk fills, and nobody else knows where the encryption key lives. The automations are silently off for three weeks before anyone notices the leads stopped arriving in the CRM.

Signals that it is time to change how n8n is run:

• nobody can name the owner of the instance;
• more than one incident a quarter, or upgrades more than six months behind;
• an auditor or an enterprise client asks for SSO, audit logs or environment separation;
• the workflows now touch billing, payroll or client deliverables.

Three fixes, in rising order of cost. Move to Cloud, if residency allows: workflows export as JSON and credentials are re-entered, a day's work for a modest instance. Buy the Business licence (about SGD 12,000 a year) if what you need is the gated features and you have the ops capacity. Or hand the box to someone who runs n8n for a living. What a build and a retainer cost in SGD is laid out in our post on what AI automation costs in Singapore; hosting on its own is a fraction of those numbers, and we will say plainly if Cloud at SGD 75 is the right answer for you instead.