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Comment by lvl155 | Hacker News Reader

It pains me to see all these “node” based automators charging you an arm and a leg. I can’t wait till people see the obvious and just replace them with a few prompts to Claude Code or similar.

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I self-host n8n and get a ton of mileage out of it. Doesn't cost me a dime.

Do you use APIs with n8n? Just curious. If you do, then you might want to factor in the cost of using those as well, including privacy implications.

In my limited testing, I found n8n to be heavily focused on cloud API use, from their onboarding quick tutorial to the collection of provided nodes, I found adapting them to strictly local use something of a chore.

There are a lot of nodes that are pre-built to interact with cloud APIs, but you effectively have an HTTP client available that can reach out to any endpoint. In my case, yes, I make use of cloud APIs and realize the trade-offs wrt privacy. You can hit any internal services you like assuming they're reachable from your n8n server

Doesn't cost a dime to host n8n? Or is this only for personal use?

It doesn't cost a dime to host n8n. They even have a docker image prebuilt that you can just pull and play.

It doesn’t cost a dime to host n8n as long as you are only using it internally. If you offer it commercially, then you will have to negotiate a commercial license.

https://docs.n8n.io/sustainable-use-license/#what-is-and-isn...

Oh, play. Yes, of course.

For production use, it will cost money one way or another.

What n8n gives is a nice gui. They’re going after the people who use Zapier, not the people who use Claude code

true. but the whole point of n8n is that it can call other endpoints. you can use claude code to build those endpoints and just have n8n orchestrate calls

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