n8n: Workflow Automation Without Zapier's Invoice

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:30:00 +0000

Zapier bills by the “task” — every single action a workflow performs, counted and metered like an API you’re renting by the call. Run a workflow that checks a feed, filters it, and posts to three places, and you’ve spent four tasks before you’ve automated anything more interesting than a Tuesday. I hit the ceiling on a free Zapier plan doing something genuinely trivial — mirroring form submissions into a spreadsheet and a Discord webhook — and went looking for the self-hosted equivalent. n8n is that equivalent, and it has been running unattended on a small VM for over a year doing the sort of glue work that used to mean writing a cron job and a Python script every time I wanted two services to talk to each other.

Webhooks - vo.rs

n8n: Workflow Automation Without Zapier's Invoice