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Comment by janober | Hacker News Reader

Thanks a lot for creating this tutorial!

I am the creator & CEO of n8n. If anybody has any questions simply ask. Happy to answer!

Your license, as I can read it, intends to prohibit profiting from your software by either (1) including it in their product, or (2) hosting it and selling its functionality. So for example, if a user wants to have some kind of Spotify import feature built into his online music-management service, he is not permitted by this license to build n8n into his paid service. (Correct me if I am wrong on this interpretation.)

But I think you will get a lot of demand for including this product in various workflows in an integrated way. Are you planning on releasing an API license, or some such?

Yes, that is correct. If you use n8n as a backend or part of your backend that is totally fine. What is not permitted is to use n8n code to offer some kind of automation service.

Very reasonable and generous to allow someone to generate revenue with your tool as a backend component as long as they’re not offering a verbatim automation SaaS service with a clone of your code. Kudos and thank you.

We actually want that people use n8n as a backend and want to improve that further in the future and write more about it. We do not have to make money with literally everybody that uses our code. But if a good way to describe the service (or module, ...) is "automate X" then a license would be required. That we think is fair and makes sure that n8n is long term sustainable. And after all, is that also in the interest of the people/companies building on top of us.

I'm currently using Integromat for some personal stuff, but I'd like to self-host so I came across n8n. All I need is a Google Sheets trigger, which I do see is in the works [0], then I'll probably have a go at it.

[0] https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/pull/1154

Google services are sadly a little bit complicated to create Trigger-Nodes for. Much more than ANY other ones. Some of the fun things are that they require to verify the domain you use as callback URL (which so makes it for example impossible to use our tunnel) or that the webhooks expire?!?! Anyway, I hope we will have it ready soon and you can so start using n8n!

I see, yes I was surprised Google didn't have any simple to use triggers for sheets.

That is actually just the start. Wait till you want to integrate Google Services into your app/service and you require the wrong scopes. Then suddenly it is not just complicated it also gets expensive as they require a security audit which costs between $15k and $75k.

Hi, I really don’t want to sound lazy but might as well ask the creator: where does n8n cloud fit compared to Pipedream or Autocode? I use pipedream a lot but curious if n8n is an alternative or solves something else.

Some of the advantages of n8n.cloud compared to Pipedream/Autocode are (disclaimer do not know any of them too well): - Easy to use but powerful even without coding skills (but even more possibilities if you can code) - Build complex workflows easily and fast via a node-based editor - Split data into different branches and merge them again - No lock-in (you can take your workflows anytime and run n8n yourself where ever you want) - Peace of mind that if the company (n8n) would ever go out of business you would not lose all your work as you would still be able to run it yourself - Amazing community that helps each other and improves n8n on a daily basis

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