n8n Raises $180 MILLION 🤑

For those who don't know, N8N is similar to make.com to Zapier. This is an automation tool. You basically have a start. You say if somebody sends me a message, if if I get an email or if somebody uses the form on my website, then do a following task, anything. And what is super duper cool uh that you can do with not just N8N but any like automation tool nowadays is that you can add an AI agent. Anyway, so that is N8N and they just raised $180 million uh in an evaluation of 2.5 billion. So it's there that that's that's I'm going to send my friend because uh big number big number and they want to hire him. Yeah. 2.5 billion for an automation tool and now chat GPT well uh open AI is entering this game. Exactly. Uh which is auto automating tasks agentic tasks and with N8 so far you can do like more I believe but chat open AAI is probably also going to uh add more to whatever they are um building right now. I'm using N8N mainly because it's self-hosted. So, it's on my own server. Well, Headzner, and it's super cheap. It cost me like I believe like seven bucks and I don't have to pay extra per operation. So, typically with these tools, each time that you run your automation, you pay uh but when it's on your own server, you just pay your monthly rate. And if you have too many automation it you're you know you will see that your server cannot handle it. So you have to upgrade but you essentially pay uh much much much less uh in most cases. So it's a super cheap open source baby open source. I think I have a video on how to set up an N server on your own server by the way. And I'm so happy that open source is winning here. Like I mean make.com and Zapier they are so expensive especially Zapier is extremely expensive. I think n cloud is 30 bucks a month. So n is also expensive if you just buy it from them. But if you host it anywhere you can host it on hner and hner is like so unbelievably cheap. Like you can get a server that would work just fine for four bucks. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, I think I pay six bucks or even 12 like dollars for my digital ocean docker image that hosts this. But ho, yeah, that's good. Saying all that like n is is an interesting place because like yes, it's very very powerful. Yes, it's the uh sort of the perfect kind of storm of AI agents and then what you can do with them because you can integrate it with so many more things. you have so much more control like you have to wait for well you don't have to wait for an integration but like Zappia for instance you wait for those integrations and then you can use the tool whereas this you can like attack you know you can send stuff to APIs not that you can't do that on Zapia especially now but n were the kind of leaders in all this so they're an interesting spot and what relevance do they have I don't know but series C at 180 million shows that they've got a lot of relevance there's probably a lot in the pipeline that they are they've presented in their in their pitch decks that has people excited. So, um yeah, I mean that's I don't know how they make money. Is it only through self-hosting? Well, not self like hosting it for you essentially. Yeah. Cloud. Yeah. Yeah. Cloud. Yeah. That's where most of their money comes from. I think we me and my mate Kieran were talking about this. I think they've got that. I think they build enterprise tools as well, but um you know realistically the tool is built like you get minor updates all the time. There's no there's never going to be a massive overhaul. And that's where I was like well what is left for this tool? It's just scale. They've just got scale. I don't know. There's probably more to it. They probably want to build like a more agentic stuff. Maybe simplify things. Maybe automation for automations. That's what I'm saying. you know, they've got the MCP server, which I think could be improved a little bit. It's quite hard to spin up an A thing through MCP, but um especially on self-hosted as well. I think it's easy with cloud, but self-hosted, you've got to you I think you've got to create an automation for MCP to then connect with the with the other automations. Anyway, um but yeah, I think there should there could be some um there's room here to challenge OpenAI's agent kit or the agent builder to just a more friendly, you know, version of N that is just a bit more like Zappy, a bit more like make, bit more like agent builder. Um but who knows? Yeah. And for if anyone is interested in getting this and but you don't want to go through hosting stuff and N8 itself is too expensive, you can like one of the best deals that I've seen is through Hostinger. Like Hostinger gives it to you and they host it for you. So they do everything and it's just it's still cheaper than any anything else. So you can get uh the smallest version for five bucks a month. It's just so so cheap. You can get started and as you scale, if you have a lot of automation, it's a good thing and you probably are making money and you can scale. Um, saying that if anyone I've got referral links for Hostinger, so probably even cheaper again. So, you get like 100 bucks or something like that or 25 bucks or something. So, you get even cheaper again. This is part of a larger conversation on my show Command AI which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web.