n8n Self-Hosted Pricing: The True Monthly Cost in ₹ (2026)
"Is n8n free?" Yes, if you host it yourself. "n8n self hosted pricing" is still one of the fastest-rising n8n searches in India, because free software and free to run are not the same thing. This post adds up what self-hosting actually costs in rupees, using what I run for my own and client workflows.
Last checked: 19 October 2026. Prices change, so treat the ranges as a guide and check your provider before you buy.
The short answer
| Setup | Monthly cost (₹, approx.) | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Your own laptop or home server + Cloudflare Tunnel | ₹0 (plus electricity) | Learning, personal automations |
| Small VPS (2 GB RAM) | ₹400–700 | A few workflows, low traffic |
| Comfortable VPS (4 GB RAM) + backups | ₹800–1,500 | A small business running n8n daily |
| n8n Cloud Starter | €20/month billed annually (~₹2,000+) | Teams who never want to touch a server |
The software is ₹0 in every self-hosted row. Everything else is infrastructure.
What "free" n8n actually includes
n8n's self-hosted Community Edition is on GitHub and has no execution limit: run as many workflows, as often as you want. What it lacks are company features like SSO, environments (dev → prod), and advanced user permissions. Those live in the paid self-hosted Business plan, which is €667/month billed annually on n8n's pricing page. Companies under 20 employees can get 50% off Business with the start-up plan.
Most Indian small businesses never need Business. If one person builds the workflows and nobody asks for SSO, Community Edition is enough.
The licence rule agencies miss
n8n uses the Sustainable Use License (fair-code), not MIT. Running it for your own business, or building workflows for a client on their server, is fine. Offering "n8n hosting" to customers as your own paid product is not allowed without a commercial agreement. If you're an agency, put n8n on the client's server and bill for the workflows, not for access to n8n.
Line item 1: the server
n8n itself is light. The official Docker image idles at a few hundred MB of RAM. What uses memory is what your workflows do: big JSON payloads, file processing, AI nodes holding long prompts.
A 2 GB VPS usually costs ₹400–700/month and a 4 GB one ₹700–1,200/month, whether that's Hetzner, Hostinger, DigitalOcean's Bangalore region, or an Indian host. Hetzner is often the cheapest per GB of RAM. Indian regions (Mumbai, Bangalore) give lower latency, which matters for WhatsApp bots and barely matters for nightly reports.
Use Postgres, not SQLite
n8n defaults to SQLite. For anything you depend on, run Postgres in the same compose file. It costs nothing extra and survives heavy execution logs better.
Line item 2: GST on foreign providers
If you pay a foreign VPS company in EUR or USD, expect 18% GST on top. It is either charged on the invoice or, if you're GST-registered, paid by you under reverse charge. A €8 server is really about €9.44. Add your card's forex markup (often 2–3.5% on debit and credit cards) too.
Indian hosts invoice in rupees with GST shown, and many accept UPI. That's easier for a business that needs clean books.
Line item 3: domain and HTTPS
n8n.yourbusiness.in.I use a Cloudflare Tunnel because it also solves Jio/Airtel CGNAT when n8n runs at home. Full setup: n8n + Cloudflare Tunnel.
Line item 4: backups
This is the cost people skip, and then they lose 40 workflows when a disk dies.
docker exec n8n n8n export:workflow --all --output=/home/node/backups/workflows.json
docker exec n8n n8n export:credentials --all --output=/home/node/backups/creds.json
Keep the N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY somewhere safe. Without it, exported credentials are useless. I go through volume backups in detail in backing up Docker data volumes; the same method works for n8n.
Line item 5: AI and API usage
If your workflows call an LLM, that is usually your biggest variable cost, and it's the same whether n8n is self-hosted or on cloud. A support bot doing a few thousand short replies a month on a small model costs a few hundred rupees. A research workflow summarising long PDFs costs much more. To bring it to ₹0, run a local model with Ollama on the same box, but then you need a much bigger server.
WhatsApp messages sent through Meta's API are also billed separately. See WhatsApp Business API pricing in India.
Line item 6: your time
Self-hosting means you upgrade n8n, watch disk space, and fix it when it's down at 9 PM. Budget about an hour a month once it's stable. If that hour is worth more to you than the ₹1,000–1,500 difference to n8n Cloud, pay for Cloud.
Worked example: a 10-person trading business
Daily IndiaMART lead capture, WhatsApp follow-ups, a Google Sheets sync, and a nightly sales report to Telegram:
4 GB VPS (Indian host, incl. GST) ₹900
Automated backups ₹180
Domain (₹900/yr ÷ 12) ₹75
Cloudflare Tunnel ₹0
n8n Community Edition ₹0
-------------------------------------------
Infrastructure ≈ ₹1,155/month
The same volume (about 3,000 workflow runs a month) would go over n8n Cloud Starter's 2,500 executions and push you to Pro at €50/month billed annually. On Zapier it would cost far more, because Zapier bills every step, not every run. I compare all three in n8n vs Zapier vs Make for Indian small businesses.
When self-hosting is the wrong call
Checklist
docker-compose.yml (or podman-compose)N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY stored outside the serverWant n8n set up on your own server with backups and monitoring already in place? Get in touch.
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