n8n Pricing in Australia: What It Really Costs

n8n Cloud starts at €20 a month, about A$32, and self-hosting costs nothing in licence fees. That is the short answer, and it is also the answer that gets Australian businesses into trouble, because the plan price is rarely the number that decides the bill. The number that decides the bill is how many executions you run and what you are calling from inside them.

Here is what each option actually costs, and what changes the total.

n8n Cloud plans

n8n bills in euros. The AUD figures below use €1 = A$1.62, the rate on 25 September 2026, so treat them as indicative. Your card statement moves with the exchange rate.

Plan	Billed annually	Billed monthly	Executions/mo	Concurrent
Starter	€20 (~A$32)	€24 (~A$39)	2,500	5
Pro	€50 (~A$81)	€60 (~A$97)	10,000	20
Business	€667 (~A$1,082)	Quoted	40,000	Higher
Enterprise	Contact sales	Contact sales	Custom	200+

Two things are worth pulling out of that table.

Users and workflows are unlimited on every plan. You are not buying seats. A sole trader on Starter and a 40-person business on Starter pay the same €20, because the only thing that scales the price is executions. For a small Australian business that is unusually friendly pricing, and it is the main reason n8n reads cheaper than per-seat tools once more than one person touches the automations.

Annual billing saves about 17%. Starter is €20 annually against €24 monthly, Pro is €50 against €60. On Pro that is roughly A$260 a year, which is real money for the sake of committing to a tool you were going to keep anyway.

The gaps between tiers are not only execution counts. Starter keeps 7 days of execution logs and 1 day of workflow history. Pro gives you 30 days of logs and 5 days of history. Business is where SSO, SAML, LDAP, log streaming and separate development, staging and production environments appear. If your reason for upgrading is “I need to see what went wrong last fortnight”, you are buying retention, not capacity.

The bit that actually sets your bill: what counts as an execution

An execution is one run of one workflow. Not one node, not one step, not one record. n8n’s own wording is “unlimited steps”, so a 60-node workflow that calls three APIs and writes to two databases costs exactly the same as a three-node workflow that moves a row into a spreadsheet: one execution.

That makes the cost model much easier to model than Zapier’s per-task billing, and it rewards the opposite design instinct. On Zapier you break work into small zaps. On n8n you consolidate.

According to n8n’s documentation, these do not count towards your quota:

1. Manual runs. Testing from the editor while you build is free.
2. Sub-workflow runs. When a workflow calls another with the Execute Sub-workflow node, only the parent execution counts. You can factor a monster workflow into a dozen tidy sub-workflows without paying a dozen times for it.
3. Error workflow runs. A workflow set as your error handler does not bill.
4. Polls that find nothing. A polling trigger counts only when it finds new data.
5. Webhook requests that fail before the workflow starts. Malformed or rejected requests are free.

And these do:

• Every Schedule Trigger firing, regardless of outcome. This is the one that catches people. A workflow polling every five minutes, all day, every day, is about 8,640 runs a month before a single useful thing has happened. That alone blows past Starter’s 2,500 and most of Pro’s 10,000, for a workflow that is mostly finding nothing.
• Every inbound webhook request that activates the trigger.

So the cheapest thing most Australian businesses can do to their n8n bill is not switch plans. It is change a schedule trigger from every five minutes to every hour, or replace it with a webhook so the other system tells you when something happened instead of you asking 288 times a day.

On exceeding your quota, n8n’s pricing page says workflows keep running without interruption and overage charges may apply. Published overage pricing exists at the Business tier, at €4,000 for an extra bucket of 300,000 executions. Worth knowing before you assume a runaway loop will simply stop.

Self-hosting: the real numbers

The Community Edition is free to download and run. There is no licence fee, no execution cap and no user cap. What you pay for is a server.

Basic shared-CPU pricing, using DigitalOcean’s published rates converted at US$1 = A$1.42 (25 September 2026):

Server	USD/mo	AUD/mo	Suits
1 vCPU, 1 GB	$6	~A$9	Testing, a handful of light workflows
1 vCPU, 2 GB	$12	~A$17	A realistic small-business starting point
2 vCPU, 4 GB	$24	~A$34	Steady production load, several concurrent runs
4 vCPU, 8 GB	$48	~A$68	Heavy AI workflows, queue mode

Hetzner and Vultr sit in the same range. A tenner a month runs a serious amount of automation, and the server does not care whether you push 500 executions through it or 500,000. That is the entire self-hosting argument in one sentence.

Two honest caveats.

1 GB is not enough for AI work. n8n holds workflow data in memory between nodes. Pull 5,000 rows, run them through an AI node, hold the responses, and a 1 GB box will run out of memory mid-run. Start at 2 GB, and go to 4 GB before you go to production with anything that processes batches.

The server is the small number. The real cost of self-hosting is your time: upgrades, database backups, SSL renewal, watching memory, and being the person who fixes it when a workflow the business now depends on stops at 2am. If that is an hour a month you genuinely do not have, A$81 for Pro is cheaper than A$17 for a droplet.

Can you use the free version in your business?

Yes, to run your own business. The Community Edition ships under n8n’s Sustainable Use License, which grants free use for your own internal business purposes. A sole trader, a 30-person agency and a large enterprise are all equally entitled to automate their own operations on it without paying n8n anything.

The limit is on building a business out of n8n itself. You cannot resell it, host it as a service for your customers, or ship a competing automation platform on top of it. Charging clients to build n8n workflows for them is fine, which is the position most Australian automation shops operate from, including us.

If you need SSO, log streaming, external secrets or multiple environments on a self-hosted instance, those are licensed features and you are back to talking to n8n about Business or Enterprise.

What the pricing page does not include

Three costs live outside the plan price, and on most real projects they add up to more than the plan.

AI model calls. Every OpenAI, Anthropic or Google call inside a workflow is billed by that provider, not by n8n. An agent workflow doing document summarisation at any volume will typically cost more per month in model calls than the n8n subscription it runs on. Model spend is the number to forecast first, and it scales with tokens, not executions.

Paid tiers on the apps you connect. Plenty of Australian SaaS only exposes its API on a higher plan. The automation is only as cheap as the cheapest tier that gives you the endpoint you need, and finding that out after the build is an unpleasant surprise.

Infrastructure beyond the box, if you self-host. Running queue mode for concurrency means Redis, and a serious instance means an external Postgres database rather than the default SQLite. Both are separate line items.

Which one should you actually pick?

Situation	Pick	Roughly
Testing whether automation is worth it	Cloud trial, then Starter	A$0, then ~A$32/mo
Under 2,500 executions, no in-house technical help	Cloud Starter	~A$32/mo
2,500 to 10,000 executions, want logs you can debug with	Cloud Pro	~A$81/mo
High volume, someone technical on hand	Self-host	~A$17-34/mo plus time
Customer data cannot leave your infrastructure	Self-host	~A$34/mo plus time
Need SSO, environments, audit-grade retention	Business or Enterprise	From ~A$1,082/mo

The pattern we see most often with Australian small businesses: start on Cloud Starter because the point of the first month is to find out whether the automation is worth having, not to save A$15 a month on hosting. Move to self-hosting later if volume justifies it, and only if someone is genuinely going to own the server.

If you are still deciding between platforms rather than between n8n plans, n8n vs Make and n8n vs Zapier compare the tools themselves, and what is n8n covers how the thing works before you price it.

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WhatWill AI is an n8n automation agency building and running automations for Australian small businesses. Book a call and we will tell you honestly which plan your workload needs, or whether you need n8n at all.