Activepieces Self Hosted Pricing: Plans and Costs 2026
Oct 23, 202614 min read
According to StackRates, the Community Edition costs $0 in licence fees. The metered unit on the paid plans is the credit: Free gives 1,000 a month, Plus is $20 for 10,000, and Team is $200 for 50,000, meaning you'll select based on anticipated monthly consumption.
Overage runs $0.007 per credit, making it expensive to exceed your plan's credit allocation.
For self-hosted enterprise, Ultimate and Embed, sales sets the price.
Below is each plan's monthly price and included credits. Read the sales-quoted rows as the ones where your requirements, not a rate card, set the number.
| Plan | Monthly price | Included credits |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1,000 |
| Plus | $20 | 10,000 |
| Team | $200 (includes 25 users and SSO) | 50,000 |
| Self-hosted enterprise / Ultimate | quoted by sales | quoted by sales |
| Embed | from $36k a year | from $36k a year |
At $0.007 a credit, 10,000 extra credits add $70, according to Community's analysis, so Team's overage stays modest.
The jump that matters is the move from a rate card to a quote. Users, credit volume, deployment model and support level drive that quote, so know which of those is yours before the call.
If you self-host, you run Activepieces on your own infrastructure with the free Community Edition, so the licence is $0 but servers, upgrades and uptime are yours.
That's enough if you need none of SSO, committed support, scale terms or embedding. If you do need one, you're in sales territory.
Confirm everything on the pricing page before budgeting, because the figures above are the published self-serve rates and they can change. For self-hosted enterprise, SSO beyond Team, Ultimate or Embed, go to the sales form with your trigger already identified.
Every Activepieces plan compared in one table
Free, Plus and Team can be bought without talking to anyone. Ultimate, self-hosted enterprise and Embed all go through sales, and that split decides how long your purchase takes.
Sales-quoted figures are left out except Embed's published from $36k a year. The table below shows each plan's price basis, credit allowance, user limit, SSO, overage and purchase route, and it comes from the vendor's pricing page.
| Plan | Price | Included credits | Users | SSO | Overage rate | How to buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | No charge | Small monthly allowance | Listed on pricing page | No | None; upgrade instead | Self-serve |
| Plus | Flat monthly fee | Larger monthly allowance | Listed on pricing page | No | Per-credit rate | Self-serve |
| Team | Higher flat monthly fee | Largest self-serve allowance | Capped seat count | Yes | Per-credit rate | Self-serve |
| Ultimate | Quoted by sales | Quoted by sales | Quoted by sales | Quoted by sales | Quoted by sales | Sales form |
| Self-hosted enterprise | Quoted by sales | Quoted by sales | Quoted by sales | Quoted by sales | Quoted by sales | Sales form |
| Embed | from $36k a year | from $36k a year | from $36k a year | from $36k a year | from $36k a year | Sales form |
Once your workflows run often, the overage column matters most, since the credit is the metered unit.
Self-serve plans
On these three plans, your bill is a flat monthly fee plus any credits beyond the allowance, so costs stay predictable within your plan's limit.
That makes cost a calculation you can run yourself: count your workflow runs, estimate credits per run, and compare the total with each tier's allowance.
SSO first appears at Team, so if single sign-on is your only trigger, Team's the cheapest place it exists.
Sales-quoted plans
With no public price on Ultimate, self-hosted enterprise or Embed, the quote is built from what you tell sales. Expect it to turn on four inputs: how many users you have, how many credits you consume, how you deploy, and what support you need.
If you arrive knowing those four, the conversation is a negotiation instead of a discovery call.
Use the pricing page for the self-serve plans and the sales form for the rest.
If you are running this arithmetic for your own team, see what the same workload costs on Activepieces.
When the free Community Edition is enough
When your team is small, your automations are internal, nobody requires SSO, and your own engineers can run the server, the free Community Edition is enough. Once any of those fails, the licence stops being $0 and goes to a sales quote.
Cases where free is enough
You still pay for the server, the database, upgrades and whoever gets paged when a flow stalls, even though the licence fee is zero.
That makes the free edition a fit only when those costs already sit inside a team you employ. Three signs point that way:
You still pay for the server, the database, upgrades and whoever gets paged when a flow stalls, even though the licence fee is zero.
- The automations are small and internal: moving data between your own tools, notifying a channel, syncing records for your own staff.
- Nobody asks for SSO. People can sign in with ordinary accounts, and no security review demands your identity provider.
- In-house ops can run it, meaning someone owns deployment, backups and upgrades and is content to read the docs rather than file a ticket.
If all three hold, a sales conversation buys you nothing. Stay on the free edition and put the budget elsewhere.
Signs you have outgrown Community Edition
None of the triggers below is about volume of flows. They're about requirements that the free edition doesn't cover, and each one moves you into a quoted licence:
- Your security team requires SSO or governance controls before anyone logs in.
- You want to embed automation inside a product your customers use, rather than run it for your own staff.
- Your organisation expects a vendor to answer when something breaks, with someone accountable beyond a community forum.
One signal is enough. Unlike the metered self-serve plans, where a credit count sets the bill, these triggers decide which licence you need before you count any usage.
Name which one applies, because that's what you carry into the sales form, and it shapes the quote more than any guess at your volume.
What each plan costs at realistic usage
Until you reach roughly 35,700 credits a month, credits drive the monthly bill. Past that point Team's flat $200 beats Plus with overage, because Plus's extra credits cost $0.007 each.
The cases below price Free, Plus and Team at 800, 15,000 and 80,000 credits, and the cheapest plan changes at each volume.
Low volume: 800 credits
At 800 credits, Free costs $0 because its 1,000-credit allowance covers you, so paying $20 for Plus buys headroom you're not using. Team at $200 would cost 10 times Plus for the same flows, indicating this plan carries a substantial premium that requires strong justification.
Upgrade only when you start hitting the Free ceiling.
Mid volume: 15,000 credits
At 15,000 credits, Plus runs $20 plus 5,000 overage credits at $0.007, which is $35, so $55 in total. Team stays at $200 because 15,000 sits well inside its 50,000 allowance.
Past roughly 35,700 credits a month, Team's flat $200 is cheaper than Plus with overage, so a team that needs only credits has a reason to buy Team. Buy Team here only if you need its 25 users and SSO, because without these capabilities, the premium pricing makes no business sense.
High volume: 80,000 credits
At 80,000 credits, Plus costs $20 plus 70,000 overage credits, or $510. Team costs $200 plus 30,000 overage credits, or $410. Team is $100 cheaper and also includes SSO and 25 users, so at this volume the upgrade pays for itself.
The crossover point
If your volume sits near 35,700 credits, the two plans cost the same on credits alone, and the decision moves to seats and SSO.
Worth checking against a plan that does not meter every step: one credit covers a whole run on Activepieces.
Hidden costs and limits that surprise self-hosters
Once seats and SSO have decided the plan, what remains is everything the licence doesn't cover: the server, the people who keep it running, and the caps that push you into a quote.
Self-hosting infrastructure and maintenance costs
A bare VPS costs less than a lunch: hosting runs from VPSDime at $5 a month and OVHcloud at $5.35 to HostHatch at $6.
Paying someone else to run it costs roughly four times the cheapest box, with Opsily managed hosting at $20 and Miget's full stack at $25. That gap buys you out of the work below.
The costs outside the licence are:
- a server, about $5 to $25 a month for 2 vCPU and 4 GB
- a database, which you host or pay for separately
- upgrades you apply and test yourself
- backups you configure and verify
- engineer time for all of the above
- support, which a self-hoster doesn't get by default
- user caps and credit overage on paid plans
The server is the smallest line here. Engineer hours are the one that grows, so price them before comparing a $5 box with a $25 managed one.
Team, at $200 a month, includes 25 users and SSO. Past 25 users, or if you need SSO beyond what Team covers, you leave the published price list.
Activepieces bills credits above the 50,000 included at $0.007 each, and the meter is the run: a ten-step flow burns the same credit as the two-step workaround it replaced, where Zapier's per-task billing charges for every step.
Self-hosted enterprise and Ultimate are quoted by sales, and so is Embed, which starts from $36k a year. The quote moves with user count, credit volume, deployment model and support level.
The SOC 2 programme is in progress, so don't treat it as a certification when your security review asks.
How Activepieces pricing compares with n8n and Zapier
After the security review, the cost comparison turns on what each platform meters: Activepieces bills credits (1,000 a month on Free, 10,000 on Plus at $20), n8n bills executions, Zapier bills tasks, and only the first two can be self-hosted.
Read the unit column first, because a credit, an execution and a task don't count the same work. The table shows each unit, whether you can run the software yourself, and where paid pricing starts.
| Pricing unit | Self-hosting | Free tier | Entry paid price | Best suited to | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Activepieces | Credit | Yes, Community Edition | 1,000 credits a month | $20 a month (Plus) | Teams that want self-hosting or a cheap cloud start |
| n8n | Execution | Yes, fair-code licence | Free self-hosted; cloud is a trial | From €24 a month, billed annually | Technical teams building complex branching workflows |
| Zapier | Task | No | 100 tasks a month | $19.99 a month | Non-technical teams that want the widest app catalogue |
Those two come first, because the unit and the free tier decide how fast you leave the cheap end.
Pricing unit and free tier
Zapier's Professional plan, per WorkflowMath, costs $19.99 a month for 750 tasks, which is about 2.7 cents per task. At 2,000 tasks it's $49, so a team that merely outgrows the entry tier pays more than double.
At 50,000 tasks Zapier costs $289, and at 100,000 tasks $489, so you get better per-task pricing at higher volumes. The unit cost falls to roughly 0.5 cents, but the bill is still about $5,900 a year.
Every step in a workflow counts as a task, so your annual cost depends directly on how many steps your workflow includes.
An n8n execution is a whole workflow run, however many steps it has. That makes long workflows cheaper there than on a per-task meter.
Zapier has no self-hosted option, so your only lever is the plan tier. Activepieces and n8n both let you run the free edition on your own servers, and Activepieces's Community Edition is the MIT-licensed core, which swaps licence fees for infrastructure and maintenance.
The paid licences for SSO, support and scale are where the quotes begin.
What to do before you contact Activepieces sales
Work out which trigger you hit (monthly credits, user count, SSO, or deployment and support) before you ask for a quote. Those four inputs are what the quote is built from.
The vendor meters usage in credits, so the credit count comes first and the price follows from it.
Each step in the checklist below tells you whether you can stop at a self-serve plan, and they run in the order that narrows the answer fastest.
- Add up the runs your flows make in a typical month, then add headroom for growth. If the total fits a self-serve plan, you may never need a sales call. If it overshoots, you're paying per credit beyond the plan, and a quote may be cheaper.
- Include everyone who builds or edits flows, contractors too. A user count above what a self-serve plan covers is a sales trigger on its own.
- Write down which identity provider you use and whether you need anything beyond basic single sign-on. A short, simple list may fit a self-serve tier. Anything beyond that goes to sales.
- Choose between hosted and self-hosted. The free Community Edition carries no licence fee, but a self-hosted enterprise licence is quoted, and the support level you want changes the number.
- The pricing page covers self-serve plans. The sales form covers self-hosted enterprise, SSO beyond the Team plan, Ultimate and Embed.
With those answers written down, the sales call becomes a short confirmation of figures you already hold, and you can tell quickly whether a quote is reasonable.
Frequently asked questions
After a prepared sales call, four small questions are left, and each has a short answer.
Is self-hosted Activepieces free? Yes, the Community Edition is the MIT-licensed core and carries no licence fee, with unlimited flows as on every plan, so your cost is the servers, storage and engineering time needed to run it.
A self-hosted paid licence is a different product. It's quoted by sales, and the quote depends on user count, credit volume, deployment setup and the level of support you want.
Does Team include SSO? Yes, SSO is part of the Team plan. A team that needs single sign-on and fits within Team's user and credit limits can buy it self-serve from the pricing page.
If your identity requirements go beyond what Team covers, or you need to run self-hosted with enterprise controls, that moves to a sales conversation.
What happens when I exceed my credits?
Past your plan's allowance, usage is billed per credit at a metered overage rate, which is published on the pricing page. The credit is the unit being counted, so the useful check is how many credits your busiest workflows burn in a month.
Compare the overage on that volume with the cost of the next plan up. If you regularly go over, the higher plan is usually cheaper than paying overage every month.
How much does Activepieces Embed cost?
Embed is quoted by sales and is priced as an annual contract, not a monthly self-serve plan. It applies when you're putting automation inside your own product for your customers, rather than using it internally.
How many customers or users you expect to serve, the credit volume behind them, how you deploy it and the support you need all move the quote. Bring those four numbers to the call.
Related reading
References
Running the numbers
See what the same workload costs here.
Free forever plan, and every paid plan self-hosts at no extra cost.
See pricing Talk to sales
