I was paying n8n Cloud $20 a month for the Pro tier. Eight workflows, mostly daily syncs. Nothing crazy.

Then I looked at the execution counter. I was at 14,200 executions for the month. Pro caps at 10,000. Next tier up: $50 a month. For workflows that mostly just call APIs and write to a database.

So I spent a Sunday afternoon migrating to self-hosted. Here's what I learned.

n8n Cloud pricing in 2026 (the math nobody shows you)

n8n Cloud's pricing is execution-based, not user-based. Real numbers from their site:

Tier Price Executions Active workflows

Starter $20/mo 2,500 5

Pro $50/mo 10,000 15

Enterprise Custom Custom Unlimited

The catch is that "executions" counts every workflow run. A daily sync that runs 30 times a month uses 30 executions. A webhook-triggered workflow that fires 50 times a day uses 1,500. Eight workflows running a few times a day each adds up faster than you'd think.

If you have AI-heavy workflows (LLM calls, embeddings, vector search loops), executions stack even faster.…