What Self-Hosted n8n Really Costs, Line by Line

“Self-hosted n8n costs $6 a month” is the VPS line of an invoice with six more lines on it. Most of them are $0 — but not all, and one of them costs more than the server.

Here are three complete builds, itemised.

Build 1 — Hobby: 1–3 workflows

Almost everything is free at this size, and that’s not a trick. Postgres runs as a container alongside n8n on the same server. Caddy handles TLS in two lines of config. Backups are included. The only genuine additions to the VPS are a domain and about two hours of your time.

If someone quotes you $50/month for this, they’re selling you something.

Build 2 — Prosumer: 10 workflows with webhooks

Two lines appear here, and both are optional in a way worth understanding.

Daily rather than weekly backups, $6.00. At ten live workflows you have real configuration invested, and a week is a long time to lose. This is the point where the upgrade starts being worth it.

Object storage, $5.00. If your workflows move binary data — PDFs, images, attachments — you don’t want it on the VPS disk, where it competes with the database and fills the volume. DigitalOcean’s Spaces is $5/month for 250 GiB and 1 TiB of transfer, with overages at $0.02/GiB storage and $0.01/GiB transfer. If your workflows are pure JSON, skip this line entirely.

Note what still isn’t here: Redis. Queue mode isn’t a function of workflow count, it’s a function of concurrency, and ten workflows on schedules don’t need it.

Build 3 — Agency: 20+ workflows, client SLAs

This is where the invoice stops being trivial, and where the interesting decision sits.

The line that costs more than the server

Managed PostgreSQL is $15.15/month for 1 GiB of RAM. The 4GB VPS in Build 1 is $11.99.

You are paying more for a database with a quarter of the memory than for the entire server it would otherwise run on. This isn’t specific to n8n — the same arithmetic decides the bill for any self-hosted app with a database behind it, where DigitalOcean’s production-tier Postgres runs $30/month against a $24 droplet. Add managed Redis at $15.00 and the two together are $30.15/month — more than double the base VPS.

Both can run as containers on hardware you already have, for nothing.

So why would anyone pay it? Three reasons, and only the third is usually good:

1. Failover and point-in-time recovery. If a client’s workflows stop when your database does, managed hosting buys you a recovery story you’d otherwise have to build.
2. You don’t want to be the DBA. Backups, upgrades, tuning and connection limits become someone else’s problem. That’s a real transfer of work, not just of risk.
3. Someone else’s compliance requirement. If a client contract specifies managed, backed-up infrastructure, this is the cheapest way to satisfy it.

If none of those apply, run Postgres and Redis on the worker node and take the agency build to $55.98/month. That’s a 35% saving for an afternoon of setup, and for an internal instance it’s the right call.

What each build is actually buying

For context: n8n Cloud’s Business plan is €667/month — about $720 — for 40,000 executions. The agency build above is 8.4× cheaper and has no execution cap at all beyond what the hardware sustains. We ran that comparison properly in self-hosted n8n vs n8n Cloud, where the crossover sits around 10,000 executions a month.

The lines people add that they shouldn’t

A reverse proxy service. Caddy is free, and its config for this is two lines. You do not need a paid ingress product in front of a single n8n instance.

Paid monitoring. Free tiers cover a handful of endpoints at the frequency one instance needs. Revisit when you have an on-call rota.

A separate Postgres node in Build 1 or 2. Below agency scale, n8n and Postgres coexist happily on one box. Splitting them early buys complexity, not resilience.

Log shipping. journalctl and log rotation. Both free, both sufficient until you have several machines.

The lines people skip that they shouldn’t

Postgres from day one, even in Build 1. n8n defaults to SQLite, and switching later doesn’t bring your data — n8n’s own docs describe the Postgres switch as “meant for a fresh instance, not an in-place migration.” It costs nothing to start on Postgres and a rebuild of every workflow and credential to change your mind. Our Docker Compose guide has a working stack.

Execution pruning. n8n retains execution data by default — 14 days and 10,000 executions — which will fill a small disk on a busy instance. Free to change, and the most common cause of a full volume.

The encryption key, set deliberately. N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY encrypts stored credentials. If n8n generates one for you and you later rebuild without that volume, every credential is unrecoverable. Free to do right, expensive to get wrong.

Where to run it

Hostinger is the basis for every build above — a one-click n8n template that removes most of the setup, weekly backups and a snapshot included rather than metered, and the best price per gigabyte among plans you can currently buy. The 4GB, 8GB and 16GB tiers map onto the three builds directly.

DigitalOcean supplies the managed Postgres, Redis and Spaces figures used here, and its metered services are the most transparently priced in this comparison — which is why they’re the worked example even though the compute is dearer at $24 for 4GB. Its tracked link isn’t working on our end, so we’ve named it without linking.

Hetzner is a natural Docker host and normally the price leader; check stock, because its cheap CX tier has been showing as unavailable and the CPX line is €19.99 for 4GB after its June 2026 repricing.

UltaHost is worth pricing if you want more cores per plan, and unusually its 2-year discounted rate is also its renewal rate rather than a step-up.

Cloudways is the option that removes the ops lines rather than the infrastructure ones — managed tooling over a rented server, billed monthly with no term. If the reason you’re reading a cost breakdown is that you don’t want to run this yourself, that’s the shape of the answer.

For sizing, best VPS for n8n covers the RAM brackets in more depth.

How we checked this

Compute prices are Hostinger’s published renewal rates — $11.99 for 4GB KVM 1, $14.99 for 8GB KVM 2 and $28.99 for 16GB KVM 4 — read in August 2026, along with its included weekly backups and one snapshot, and its $6.00/month daily backup upgrade.

Managed service prices are DigitalOcean’s published figures: managed PostgreSQL from $15.15/month at 1 GiB RAM, 1 vCPU and 10–30 GiB storage; managed Valkey/Redis from $15.00/month at 1 GiB; and Spaces object storage at $5/month for 250 GiB and 1 TiB transfer, with overages at $0.02/GiB storage and $0.01/GiB transfer.

The n8n Cloud Business figure of €667/month for 40,000 executions is from n8n’s own pricing page, converted at approximately 1.08. The SQLite-to-Postgres migration caveat, the execution-pruning defaults and the encryption key behaviour are from n8n’s own documentation.

The build definitions are editorial, not measured. “1–3 workflows fits in 4GB” and “20+ with client SLAs needs 16GB plus a worker” are conventional sizing brackets, and your payload sizes move them far more than your provider does. We have not run n8n at any of these scales and measured what a given box actually sustains — memory use in n8n is driven by how much data a workflow holds at once, which is a property of your workflows rather than of the tier.

The domain line is amortised at $1.00/month from a typical annual registration, and object storage assumes you stay inside the 250 GiB included allocation.

What we did not do: we haven’t priced your time. Setup runs two to four hours and maintenance around 30 minutes a month, which at professional rates exceeds several of these line items — we modelled that separately, and it’s the single largest omission from every invoice above.

The hosting links above are affiliate links. The two largest savings in this article — running Postgres and Redis yourself instead of managed, and skipping object storage if your workflows are pure JSON — earn us nothing.

FAQ

How much does self-hosted n8n cost per month?

$12.99 for a hobby instance, $26.99 for around ten workflows with webhooks, and $86.13 for an agency setup with a worker node and managed database — or $55.98 if you run Postgres and Redis yourself.

Do I need managed PostgreSQL for n8n?

Usually not. Managed Postgres is $15.15/month for 1 GiB, more than the entire 4GB VPS, and Postgres runs fine as a container on the same box. Pay for managed when you need failover, point-in-time recovery, or a client’s compliance requirement.

Do I need Redis for n8n?

Only for queue mode, which is driven by concurrency rather than workflow count. Ten scheduled workflows don’t need it; a busy instance dropping concurrent webhooks does.

Should I use SQLite or Postgres for self-hosted n8n?

Postgres, from day one. It costs nothing extra on the same server, and n8n’s documentation describes switching later as “meant for a fresh instance, not an in-place migration” — meaning you’d rebuild every workflow and credential by hand.

What’s the hidden cost of self-hosting n8n?

Your time — two to four hours of setup and about 30 minutes a month — which at professional rates exceeds most of the line items above. After that, daily backups at $6 and object storage at $5 are the two that surprise people.

Is self-hosted n8n cheaper than n8n Cloud?

Above roughly 10,000 executions a month, dramatically. The agency build here is $86.13 against $720 for n8n Cloud’s Business plan at 40,000 executions.

Do I need object storage for n8n?

Only if your workflows move binary files. Pure JSON workflows don’t need it, and $5/month buys 250 GiB when they do.