n8n Pricing 2026: Real Costs and Is There a Discount Code?

If you searched for an n8n discount code, here is the short answer: there is no public coupon. n8n runs an affiliate programme, not a voucher programme, and the sites offering “n8n promo codes” are affiliate landing pages collecting a commission on a signup you were going to make anyway.

There are four legitimate ways to pay less, and one of them takes the bill to zero. This guide covers all four, what each Cloud tier actually costs per workflow run, and the point where self-hosting stops being a hobby and starts being an obvious financial decision.

Along the way we found a contradiction between two of n8n’s own pages that could cost you €8,004 if you buy on the wrong assumption.

What does n8n actually cost per workflow run?

n8n bills by execution, not by step. One run of a workflow is one execution whether it contains three nodes or three hundred, which is genuinely better value than the per-operation pricing most competitors use. But the headline tier prices hide something odd.

n8n Cloud pricing per execution, annual billing. Business is the most expensive tier per run.

Pro is the value tier at €5.00 per thousand executions. Business, at €667 a month, works out at €16.67 per thousand — three times the unit cost of the plan below it.

Stranger still: n8n’s own pricing FAQ states that Business overage is charged at €4,000 for an additional 300,000 executions. That is €13.33 per thousand. Exceeding your Business quota is 20% cheaper per execution than staying inside it.

That is not a pricing error you should exploit — overages get invoiced 45 days later and sales will call you — but it does tell you something useful. You are not paying for capacity on the Business plan. You are paying for features.

Is there an n8n discount code?

Four routes, and only one involves an actual code.

The four legitimate ways to reduce an n8n bill.

1. Annual billing — 17% off, no code needed

Switching from monthly to annual billing takes 17% off any Cloud plan. It is applied at checkout automatically. This is the only discount most people will ever qualify for, and no coupon site is required to obtain it.

2. The Start-up Plan — 50% off Business

This is the one real discount code. n8n’s pricing FAQ answers “Do you offer a discount for startups?” with “We do” and directs you to a Start-up page to retrieve a discount code. The qualification is fewer than 20 employees, and the discount is 50% off the Business plan — taking €8,004 a year down to roughly €4,002.

If you are a small company genuinely considering Business, this is worth the application. If you are an individual, you will not qualify.

3. Community Edition — 100% off

The self-hosted Community Edition is free and includes almost the complete feature set. Unlimited executions, every integration node, and no licence cost. We will come back to what it lacks.

4. Registered Community — free, and almost nobody knows about it

This is the most under-publicised item in n8n’s documentation. Registering your self-hosted instance with an email address gets you a free licence key that unlocks three additional features: folders for organising workflows, debug in editor, and custom execution data.

It costs nothing. Settings, then Usage and plan, then Unlock. Most self-hosting guides never mention it.

What does the €8,004 Business plan actually buy?

This is the question that matters, because the Business plan is self-hosted. You provide the server. You handle updates. You own the uptime. So what are you paying for?

Community Edition against the Business plan. Both run on your own hardware.

Nine features. SSO with SAML and LDAP, projects, environments, Git version control, external secrets, log streaming, external binary storage, multi-main mode, and workflow and credential sharing.

Note what is not on that list. Queue mode — horizontal scaling across multiple worker instances — is included in Community. So is standard logging. So is every integration node. The free edition is not a crippled demo.

The limitation that actually breaks teams

It is not the execution count. It is sharing. n8n’s documentation is explicit: on Community Edition, only the instance owner and the user who created a workflow can access it. There is no sharing of workflows or credentials.

For one person, that is irrelevant. For three people who need to hand a workflow between them, it is the whole ballgame. That single line is the real dividing line between free and paid, and it is buried in a documentation footnote rather than stated on the pricing page.

n8n’s own pages contradict each other on SSO

While verifying the feature list we found a direct conflict between two pages on n8n.io.

Two n8n pages, two different answers about which plan includes SSO.

The pricing page lists SSO, SAML and LDAP under the Business plan. The security page states that SSO, SAML and LDAP are available with n8n’s Enterprise plan.

Those cannot both be true, and the gap between them is the difference between a €667 monthly subscription and a sales conversation.

Our reading is that the pricing page is correct: n8n’s documentation explicitly calls the pricing page “the source of truth”, and the docs’ own edition comparison also lists SSO among the features unlocked by Business. The security page appears to be stale.

But if SSO is the reason you are buying, get it confirmed in writing before you sign anything. A documentation page that has drifted is not a contract.

When does self-hosting actually save money?

A capable n8n instance runs on a modest server. Four vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM handles a substantial workload, and that costs roughly €12 a month at common European providers — about €144 a year.

Community Edition on a €12/month VPS against each Cloud tier.

Against Starter, self-hosting saves €96 a year. That is not enough to justify the maintenance burden. Pay for Cloud.

Against Pro, it saves €456 a year. Worth it if you already run servers, marginal if you do not.

Against Business, it saves €7,860 a year — a factor of 55. At that point you are not choosing between hosting models. You are deciding whether nine features are worth eight thousand euros, and for many teams the honest answer is that they need one of the nine.

The cost self-hosting does not remove

Your time. Someone has to patch the server, manage the reverse proxy for TLS, handle database backups, and be available when a webhook stops firing at 2am. n8n’s own security documentation is clear that self-hosters are responsible for encryption in transit and at rest — neither is automatic.

If that person is you and your time is worth anything, the saving is smaller than the table suggests. It is still large against Business.

Is n8n HIPAA compliant?

No public claim exists. We read n8n’s full security page and the pricing page, and here is what is actually published.

What n8n publishes on compliance, and what is absent.

n8n aligns to SOC 2 with annual third-party audits, makes a SOC 3 report publicly downloadable, and documents its GDPR position. Cloud data is hosted on Microsoft Azure in the European Union.

HIPAA is not mentioned anywhere on the security page, and no Business Associate Agreement is offered on any public page. For a US healthcare organisation, that absence is the answer: n8n Cloud is not positioned for protected health information.

Self-hosting changes the question rather than answering it. Running Community Edition on infrastructure you control means the compliance burden is entirely yours — the encryption, the access controls, the audit trail, the BAAs with your own vendors. That is a real amount of work, but it is at least possible, which hosted Cloud is not.

This is an absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence. n8n may negotiate terms with enterprise customers that are not published. If you need a BAA, ask sales directly.

Which option should you choose?

Your situation	What to pick	Annual cost
Learning, personal projects	Community Edition, self-hosted	~€144 (server only)
Solo, don’t want a server	Starter, billed annually	€240
Solo or small team, real volume	Pro, billed annually	€600
Team needing shared workflows	Business, or Start-up Plan if eligible	€8,004 or ~€4,002
High volume, technical team	Community + queue mode, self-hosted	~€144–€288
Regulated data	Self-hosted only, compliance on you	~€144 + your time

Frequently asked questions

Is there a working n8n coupon code?

No public one. The only discount code n8n issues is for the Start-up Plan, which requires qualifying as a company with fewer than 20 employees. Sites advertising n8n voucher codes are affiliate pages.

Is n8n really free?

The self-hosted Community Edition is free with no execution limit and no licence cost. You pay for the server it runs on. n8n Cloud is not free beyond the trial.

What is an execution in n8n?

One complete run of a workflow, regardless of how many nodes it contains or how much data it processes. This is more generous than the per-step or per-operation billing most competitors use.

Can I use n8n commercially for free?

The Community Edition can be self-hosted and used internally at no cost. n8n’s licence does place restrictions on reselling n8n itself as a hosted service — read the licence terms if that is your plan.

Does the Business plan include support?

No. n8n’s pricing FAQ states the Business plan is self-serve and that dedicated support with an SLA is Enterprise-only. Business customers use the community forum.

How many instances can one licence key cover?

Unlimited, per n8n’s pricing FAQ. Combined usage across every instance counts toward the same quota.

Where is n8n Cloud data stored?

Microsoft Azure, in the European Union. n8n’s pricing page specifies Frankfurt, Germany. No US region is currently published.

Does self-hosted n8n phone home?

Yes, if you are on a paid plan. The licence key must contact n8n’s licence server daily to stay active, and that ping includes execution counts. Telemetry is on by default and can be disabled.

Related guides

Sources

All prices, feature lists and compliance claims were read directly from n8n’s own pages on 7 September 2026 and are quoted in euros at annual billing. Prices change; check the pricing page before purchasing. Vibe Coder Journal accepts no affiliate commission from n8n and is not part of its partner programme.

n8n Pricing in 2026: What It Really Costs, and Whether a Discount Code Exists