n8n

Workflow automation you host yourself. R21 moved its client automations onto a self-hosted n8n box in August 2026 and retired the hosted account behind them. It sits at the centre of the connector stack.

Read the licence before calling it open source

n8n is fair-code under the Sustainable Use License. The source is public and you may self-host it for internal use, but it is not OSI-approved and it restricts reselling n8n itself as a service.

The GitHub API reports the licence as NOASSERTION, which is what "Other" looks like through an API — so a script that reads a licence field and prints a badge will show you something confident and wrong. This entry names the licence in full for that reason, and the distinction is not academic for an agency: "we self-host it to run your automations" is inside the licence, and "we resell hosted n8n" is not.

Why the move, honestly

Pricing shape, not features — and the shape differs by vendor, which is worth getting right rather than waving at "hosted automation is expensive."

The platform R21 actually migrated off was Make, which bills per operation, where an operation is a module run. A scenario polling a mailbox every fifteen minutes therefore costs on every poll, including the empty ones, and empty polls are most of them.

Zapier's model is different and it is worth naming correctly. Zapier bills tasks, and its documentation states plainly that triggers never use tasks — polling is free there, as are filters, paths and steps that error. Only successful actions count. So Zapier's cost driver is the volume of work completed, not the frequency of checking.

Self-hosted, neither meter runs. The workflow costs whatever the server costs, whether it fires once a day or four times an hour.

R21 measured its own consumption before migrating rather than assuming, and found it was paying for a ceiling well above what the workflows actually used. That is the shape of a per-operation model, not a fault in any vendor.

(Corrected 2026-08-24: an earlier version of this entry attributed the poll-costs-money behaviour to Zapier. That is Make's model, not Zapier's. On a site whose product is checkable claims, a wrong claim about a named vendor's pricing is exactly the defect worth publishing the correction for.)

What self-hosting actually costs

The bill goes down and the responsibilities go up. This is the part that does not appear in a pricing comparison:

• Uptime is yours. A hosted scheduler that stops firing is someone else's incident. A box that stops firing is yours, and the failure is silent — nothing runs, and nothing tells you nothing ran.
• Backups are yours. Workflow definitions and credentials both live on that machine.
• Upgrades are yours, including the ones that change node behaviour under workflows you have not looked at in months.

The monitoring you have to build to trust a self-hosted box is a real project, not a footnote. It is worth it at R21's volume across a fleet of client automations. It would not be worth it for three workflows.

Verified against the GitHub API on 2026-08-23: 201,969 stars, licence NOASSERTION ("Other").