I've spent the last year migrating away from cloud automation platforms. Here's why I chose n8n and never looked back.

The Cloud Lock-In Problem

Make (formerly Integromat) is powerful. Zapier is convenient. But both lock you into their pricing models, their rate limits, and their vision of what automation should be.

When you're running dozens of workflows processing thousands of operations daily, those constraints add up fast. And more importantly—you lose control.

Why n8n?

n8n is open source and self-hostable. That means:

• No artificial operation limits
• Run workflows on your own infrastructure
• Full data sovereignty
• Extend with custom nodes
• No vendor lock-in

The Setup

I'm running n8n on a VPS with Docker. Total monthly cost: $12. The equivalent functionality on Make would be $200+/month.

Self-hosting isn't for everyone. But if you care about control, cost, and customization, it's worth the learning curve.

Real-World Use Cases

My n8n instance handles everything from Reddit content aggregation to AI model orchestration to newsletter generation. Workflows that would be impossible or prohibitively expensive on cloud platforms.

The key is treating automation as infrastructure, not as a service. Build it once, run it forever, modify it freely.