While n8n is amazing for the odd office automation and giving semi-technical people an enormously powerful tool to get things done, it seems it can’t really replace a real backend, and mostly because of the n8n team choices than any technology.

We were trailing it and wanted to essentially switch our entire backend to it - and technically it seemed to be able to do the job, but their licensing turned out to not be a fit.

For a moderately used app we very quickly burned through their “executions” that were allotted by our license - and that’s where we host it ourselves, configuring and paying for the servers, load balancers, key value store and database, with its failovers and backups.

So the license was to use it on top of all that, and even their highest enterprise license was cutting it close, and if you “run out” of these executions, the service just stops working …

And all of that would have been fair if it was hosted, but sounds ludicrous to me for something we self host.

I think it is an incredible piece of tech, but just not suited for a dynamic startup, and once we spent the time to code up the alternative paths for our use cases, it no longer made sense to use n8n at all, as we mostly solved all the problems it was helping us with.