“So how much does this cost?” is the first question in every meeting and the one fewest pages answer with numbers. Here are ours, broken into the three cost lines every automation project has: the platform, the build and the maintenance.
1. The platform: €0 to €30 a month to start
| Option | Cost per month | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| n8n self-hosted | €5–20 (the server) | No licence cost; unlimited executions; you maintain the machine |
| n8n Cloud | €20–24 | 2,500 executions, updates and backups included |
| Make | ≈$10–16 | 10,000 credits; every module in the scenario consumes |
| Zapier | ≈$20–30 | 750 tasks; every action step counts |
For a small business automating its first two or three processes, the platform line almost never exceeds €30 a month. The platform is not the cost: knowing what to build on it — and keeping it from falling over — is.
2. The build: what it costs to set up properly
A specific process — orders, reminders, email triage — is usually in production two to three weeks after the flow is validated. The price depends on how many tools are connected, how many exceptions exist and how much business logic lives inside; that is why we work with a fixed-price proposal after the diagnosis, not an hourly rate. The honest reference: a well-scoped first project sits in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands, and grows with scope.
3. The maintenance: from €60–90 a month
APIs change, tokens expire and processes evolve. A production flow needs monitoring, retries and someone who answers when something jams. In our model cases that line starts at €60–90 a month per process; without it, the automation that works today is the incident of six months from now.
The rule to know whether it pays off
Multiply the weekly hours repetitive work takes by 46 working weeks and by the hourly cost of whoever does it. Six hours a week at €25/hour is €6,900 a year. If the total first-year cost — platform, build and maintenance — sits clearly below that figure, the automation pays for itself; our homepage has a calculator to run the numbers with your own data.
- Not worth it: processes that change every month, volumes of a handful of cases, decisions that depend on unwritten context.
- Almost always worth it: copying data between systems, classifying and routing incoming items, reminders and follow-ups, recurring reports.
- Platform prices are from August 2026 and change: check the official page before deciding.