Overview n8n is the open source workflow automation platform that treats "run this yourself on your own server" as the default, not the escape hatch. It launched in 2019 as a self hostable alternative to Zapier and has spent the years since evolving into the most capable code optional automation tool on the market — visual DAG builder, 400+ integrations, native AI nodes, custom JavaScript inside any workflow step, and a Fair Code license that lets you run it on a $6/month VPS with zero operational limits. The pitch is simple enough that it sounds too good to be true until you use it: everything Zapier does, everything Make does, plus code nodes for the cases the visual builder cannot express, plus you own the deployment. There is no per task metering when you self host. A workflow can run a million times a month for the cost of the server it lives on. And because n8n is built as a Node.js application with a real database backing it, the workflows are not toy grade — they are production infrastructure with logs, retries, credentials management, and multi user access. The catch is that self hosting is not free in the "no work required" sense. Someone has to set up the server, keep it patched, back up the SQLite or Postgres database, and troubleshoot the occasional weirdness. This is a modest amount of ops work — an experienced developer can have n8n running on a $6 Hetzner box in twenty minutes…