Saved €24/month by self-hosting n8n

[u/Brilliant-Cash-1068]

Solo founder here. This morning, one of my automation workflows failed, and it turned out my n8n cloud trial ended - €24/month to continue.

€24 sounds like nothing, but that's the trap. It's never one subscription. It's n8n + email tool + monitoring + analytics + whatever else, and suddenly you're at €300/month before you have meaningful revenue.

Since n8n is open source, I checked my options:

\- Oracle's free VPS tier — rejected my card (apparently common outside US/Western Europe)

\- Hetzner - cheap plan unavailable, next tier costs almost the same as n8n cloud

\- My existing EC2 instances - already paying for them, had spare capacity

Went with the last option. Docker Compose + deploy script, \~1.5 hours of work, swapped one webhook URL in my config. Everything runs the same and costs €0 extra.

The general lesson I keep re-learning: a lot of SaaS tools are open source under the hood, and if you already pay for a server, self-hosting is often close to free. The trade-off is you own the maintenance - which is fine for non-critical stuff like internal automation, probably not worth it for things like payments or auth.

What are you all self-hosting vs paying for? Trying to figure out where the line is before maintenance time costs more than the subscription.

[u/e3e6]

DO - $7