Self-host n8n or pay Zapier forever?

We get asked this constantly, so here are the real numbers from three client migrations.

When Zapier wins

Under roughly 5,000 tasks a month with a handful of integrations, Zapier is genuinely cheaper and genuinely faster to stand up. Support for an obscure SaaS tool you just adopted is worth real money. Do not over-engineer this.

When self-hosted n8n wins

• Volume. At 30,000+ tasks a month the maths flips decisively.
• Data residency. Customer records never leave your infrastructure.
• Complex logic. Once a workflow needs a loop, branching and error handling, n8n's visual model beats a chain of Zaps.
• Ownership. A Zapier account can be suspended. A workflow on your VPS cannot.

Migration, in the right order

1. Export the existing Zaps — do this first, always
2. Stand up n8n on a small VPS, behind TLS, on a subdomain
3. Rebuild ONE high-volume workflow. Prove it works.
4. Migrate the rest in order of volume, not importance
5. Run both in parallel for two weeks
6. Cancel the Zapier plan last, not first

Things people get wrong

• Not putting n8n behind a reverse proxy with TLS.
• Not backing up ~/.n8n, which holds every credential and encryption key.
• Not setting up a dead-letter queue, so failures vanish silently for three weeks.