n8n Sustainable Use License Commercial Use: 2026 Guide
Oct 26, 202614 min read
In this illustrative case, a six-person agency gets a one-line email from a client's lawyer asking whether the n8n behind a paid product is licensed, and the question lands harder because the team had never stopped to read the terms, having chosen the tool the way many small shops do, by following whatever the last project used instead of weighing it against alternatives like Activepieces.
The n8n Sustainable Use License is the source-available license that governs n8n, letting you use and modify it for your own business or for paid client work, but not sell n8n itself, or access to it, as a product or hosted service without a separate commercial agreement.
Nobody at the desk can answer it from memory, and that's the failure: they judged the licence by how the tool feels, not by what they sell.
The client's licence question
Direct answer: what commercial use the licence allows
The licence allows paid client work and bars reselling n8n itself. An agency may build, run and maintain workflows for a client's internal business use and charge for that labour.
Nobody at the desk can answer it from memory, and that's the failure: they judged the licence by how the tool feels, not by what they sell.
It may not charge for access to n8n, or host it so others pay to use it as a service.
This wording was current on 26 October 2026, and the licence text can change, so reread it before you sign anything.
What the licence is, and fair-code versus open source
You can read the source, self-host it and modify it: the Sustainable Use License allows all of that, but commercial use carries limits. It is the licence n8n publishes its code under, and n8n calls this model fair-code.
Strictly speaking, fair-code is source-available, not open source in the Open Source Initiative sense, which permits resale.
Don't plan on that changing. In Open Source License Risk's relicensing research, only 2 projects added an open source option after starting source-available.
Teams that need a permissive licence for a resold product can look at Activepieces, whose core is MIT-licensed, before committing.
How the agency self-hosts n8n for the client
In this example, the agency self-hosts one n8n instance and builds the client's automations on it. The client pays a monthly fee for a product that runs on those workflows, and the client's own customers never log in to n8n.
That's the one the licence tolerates. It would stop being safe the moment the agency billed for the n8n instance itself, or let customers use it directly.
This takes minutes, not a project: automate it in Activepieces free.
What the licence permits and what was built
Use n8n for your own business and build workflows for clients as paid work; the licence permits both. It doesn't permit selling n8n itself, whether as hosting, access or an embedded product.
Across the agency's work there were four setups, and they sit on different sides of that line. The table shows where each falls and what the licence page says about it.
| Setup | What the agency did | What n8n's licence page says | Inside or outside the line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Client workflows | Built and maintained automations for clients, billed for the work | Internal business use is allowed, and consulting on or building workflows for others is treated as a service you provide | Inside |
| Client portal | Put a front end over n8n so clients could trigger and monitor their own automations | Charging for access to n8n's functionality, or wrapping it as your product, needs a separate agreement | Outside unless the portal is a thin layer and n8n is not what is being sold |
| Hosted instance clients log in to | Ran one n8n instance and gave clients their own logins to it | Hosting n8n for others, or charging for that access, is not covered by the standard licence | Outside |
| Enterprise-licensed features | Used features that sit behind the enterprise licence on a community install | Those features need a paid enterprise licence key | Outside until licensed |
Only the first row was clearly fine, and it was the one the agency was nervous about. The other three were the actual exposure.
If you build the workflow, run it on infrastructure you control and the client pays for the outcome, the licence covers you. It covers your own operations too, and that is the agency model most people picture. The client is buying your labour, not n8n.
Ask what the invoice is for. If clients pay for access to an instance, or the product they use is n8n with your logo on it, you are selling n8n.
If you use enterprise features, you need a licence key; if you embed n8n inside something you sell, you need a separate commercial agreement. n8n quotes both on request, so ask before you build on either.
What the licence check cost
When the licence check comes after the build, it costs the rebuild hours. It also costs the weeks the client waits, and at the rates below that's a four-figure bill before any n8n fee.
What the n8n licence audit found and cost
Constructed for illustration, not a real client: suppose an agency finds, three weeks into a build, that its plan sells access to a hosted n8n instance. It spends 20 hours auditing the workflows and rewriting the delivery model, and the client waits two weeks.
At the $75 per hour that n8n Developers lists for ad hoc work, the audit costs $1,500.
On n8n Developers' volume package, at $60 per hour, that makes it $1,200. On its monthly retainer, at $40 per hour, it is $800. The same mistake costs nearly twice as much when found by someone you hire on the spot.
Published n8n prices against the agency's workload
Two options were open to the agency, and the workload it actually runs is automations built for paying clients.
The self-hosted community edition has no licence fee, you pay for the server, and there's no published execution cap because your server sets the limit. You run it, and paid client work is allowed while reselling n8n itself is not.
On n8n Cloud, Starter costs €20/month billed annually or €24 billed monthly. It has a limit of 2,500 executions.
n8n runs it, so the question of you reselling hosting doesn't arise. The licence position is the same on both, and only the cost and the operator change.
Prices checked 26 October 2026. At 2,500 executions, a handful of busy client workflows will exhaust Starter within the month, so check your volume before picking it.
If you want more than these two options, such as embedding n8n in a product or reselling it, there's no published price I can quote.
Ask in writing before the build starts, and keep the answer with the contract.
You can follow the rest of this with the builder open. Start free, no card.
What licence details the team misread
Nobody opened the licence, and that is how the team made four separate mistakes, each mapping to a specific term in the Sustainable Use License. Taken in order, they show where a written question to n8n would've saved the project:
- Assumed source-available meant free for any use. The clause limits use to your own internal business purposes.
- Trusted a forum answer over the licence text. The licence permits no reading that a thread can widen.
- Conflated consulting with reselling. The licence covers building for a client, but not selling access to n8n itself.
- Kept no record of which instance served which client. Without one, you can't show the line between the two.
Why self-hosting n8n doesn't mean resale rights
It read as permission: readable source code and no licence fee on the download. The licence grants use for internal business purposes, and it doesn't grant the right to offer n8n as the thing the customer pays for.
The team never asked what they were selling, only whether they could install it.
Consulting gets confused with it here too. Building and maintaining workflows for a client is paid work the licence allows. Charging a client for a hosted n8n they log into is a different product.
The team described both as "n8n for clients" in their own proposals, so nobody noticed the shift.
Trusting a forum answer over the licence text
Someone in a community thread said client work was fine. That was true for one arrangement and the team applied it to another.
A forum post is a stranger's reading of a contract they didn't sign, and it carries no weight if n8n disagrees. The licence text, plus a written reply from n8n, is the only record you can point to.
Not knowing whose data ran on which instance
When the question finally came up, nobody could say which client's workflows ran on which instance, or who held the admin login.
Knowing what's running is not the same as knowing what you're allowed to charge for it, and admin visibility only gives you the first.
A simple register of instance, client, host and billing basis would have exposed the problem in the first month, not the eighth.
The pre-build licensing rule
No n8n instance gets built until a named person has written down who logs into it and whether n8n itself is part of what we sell. The register entry only counts once that answer is on file.
A ruling request is only as good as the check behind it, so the check is written and owned.
Because it looks like internal tooling, everyone assumes the workflow is internal. That is the failure mode: judging by feel. The licence cares about what we sell, not how the product feels. The check runs in this order:
- Name the owner. One person, not a team alias, signs the check and answers for it.
- Ask who logs in. If the client's staff open the n8n editor, that's a different situation from us running workflows on their behalf.
- Ask whether n8n is part of what's sold. Paid client work is one thing; a package where the client is effectively buying access to n8n is another.
- Log the instance in the register.
- If steps 2 or 3 are unclear, escalate to n8n sales with the register entry attached. An unclear answer isn't a yes.
- Re-check the licence documentation quarterly.
Steps 2 and 3 do the real work.
Tracking n8n instances and re-checking licence terms
Five things go in each register entry: the owner, the client, who has logins, what the contract says we are delivering, and the date of the last documentation check.
Admin visibility tells you who has accounts. It doesn't tell you what the client believes they bought, so the contract wording goes in the entry too.
If the wording has moved, the entry is reopened. That is what the quarterly re-check is for: rereading the licence text and comparing it to each entry.
On Monday, assign the owner. List every n8n instance currently running, including the ones nobody remembers starting. Put each through the questions above and write the answers down.
Anything you can't answer in one sitting goes to n8n sales, and it goes before the next build starts, not after.
Where Activepieces fits when the product embeds workflows
If n8n sales tells you your product counts as reselling, Activepieces keeps its core under an MIT licence, with the 744 integrations in the same open source repository, so the reselling question has a written answer you can read; if you only build workflows for clients, nothing below's a reason to switch.
Of six rival automation tools, four use an OSI-approved licence and two are proprietary. That split means "source available" and "open source" aren't interchangeable labels, and a tool's look and feel tells you nothing about which side it sits on.
Read the licence file for each tool you shortlist, not the marketing page.
For ordinary client builds, where you configure workflows on a server you control and bill for the labour, the licence isn't the deciding factor. Pick on the nodes, the hosting model and your team's habits.
License distribution across components and editions
The community edition is MIT-licensed, the least restrictive of the four OSI-approved licences in that comparison.
The LICENSE file in the activepieces/activepieces repository puts the core under MIT and the packages/ee/ directories under a separate commercial licence, so the boundary is written down rather than negotiated.
Anything already released under MIT you can run, fork, resell or embed without asking anyone, which is exactly what n8n's source-available licence withholds for n8n itself. Selling a hosted builder to your customers doesn't need an exception there.
Take from the table that the cheapest row isn't automatically the permitted one for a product; it shows what each option permits for embedding and what it costs to get there.
| Option | Licence | Can embed builder for customers | Cost basis | Source and check date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| n8n self-hosted | Sustainable Use License | No; reselling n8n itself is excluded | Your own infrastructure | n8n licence text, checked 2026-10-26 |
| n8n Cloud | n8n's hosted terms | Not as a resold product | Subscription | n8n terms, checked 2026-10-26 |
| Activepieces community | MIT | Code licence is permissive | Your own infrastructure | Activepieces, checked 2026-10-26 |
| Activepieces Embed | Commercial | Yes, as the sold feature | From $36,000/year | Activepieces, checked 2026-10-26 |
Whichever row you land on, get the embedding terms in writing before the next build starts.
What licensing questions need answers
The rows above don't settle five questions. The answers come from n8n's licence text and docs as read on 26 October 2026, so recheck the current wording before you sign anything.
Using n8n for your own business is free for internal business purposes. The licence lets you use and modify n8n to run your own company's processes, including commercial ones. What it restricts is making n8n itself the thing a customer pays for.
If you are a consultant, you can charge clients to build n8n workflows. n8n's licence guidance names consulting and support services as permitted, so billing for design, build and maintenance of workflows is fine.
You cross the line when the client is effectively paying for access to n8n rather than for your work. If your invoice would read the same without n8n's name on it, you're on the safe side.
Open source it isn't. The Sustainable Use License is a source-available, "fair-code" licence, and it doesn't meet the Open Source Initiative definition because it restricts commercial use.
You can read and modify the code, but the permissions are narrower than MIT or Apache. Procurement teams that require OSI-approved licences will reject it, so say so up front.
Do I need an enterprise licence to run n8n for several clients?
It depends on the arrangement, and the docs don't give one blanket answer. A separate instance in each client's own environment, built by you as a service, sits closer to consulting.
One instance you host and clients log into sits closer to offering n8n as a hosted service.
Separately, features in n8n's enterprise-licensed code need a paid key whoever uses them. Ask n8n sales to confirm in writing which case your setup is.
You can't resell or white-label n8n under the Sustainable Use License. Reselling, rebranding, or embedding n8n in a product you sell needs a separate commercial agreement with n8n.
Treat any plan that depends on the client never seeing n8n as a plan that needs that agreement first.
Related reading
References
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