[JimDabell]

> I assume because you were not running it for internal business only but were attempting to distribute or white label/SaaS it?

Yes, we wanted our customers to be able to set up integrations themselves. We didn’t care about white labelling it, we just needed to a) modify it, b) self-host it, and c) use it commercially. Something that open source is ideal for.

> Isn’t $50k about 3-4 months of one dev’s time (assuming fully loaded costs)?

Yes but that means absolutely nothing if you don’t have the budget for it, or even if you do have the budget for it but there are more valuable things for your developers to work on, or if you do have the budget for it but it isn’t worth that much. In our case the value provided by n8n wasn’t anywhere near $50k/yr. And, more to the point, $50k/yr is $50k/yr more expensive than open source. It would have been worth using if it had been open source, but it wasn’t worth using at that price.

[toomuchtodo]

Right, so it prevented freeloading. It’s working as intended. Still usable for those who want to eject from the hosted platform, but if you make money from it, n8n should get paid for that value. You’ve proved the point of why open source would’ve been a suboptimal license for them to use.

Open source was intended as free as in speech, not free as in beer. “Open source because I don’t want to pay something” is…not great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre

[JimDabell]

> if you make money from it, n8n should get paid for that value.

We weren’t really expecting to make any money out of it. We already have a Zapier integration that our customers were using. We just wanted things to be a little bit easier for our customers. Does this have an indirect impact on our profits? Sure, I guess marginally. Enough to justify a $50k/yr license fee? Nope, not even remotely close. Our customers can carry on using Zapier.

> You’ve proved the point of why open source would’ve been a suboptimal license for them to use.

They didn’t get paid either way, the only difference was we send all our customers to their competitor now. Which also isn’t open source, of course, but Zapier has the brand recognition and reach n8n doesn’t. Everybody knows Zapier, a lot of customers ask for it specifically. Nobody asks for n8n. I don’t want to make the “you’ll get paid in exposure” argument, but in practical terms, the only difference to n8n in our particular case was they had a chance to stop us sending customers to Zapier. They never had the opportunity to earn money from us directly, only to get us to stop sending customers to their competitor.

If n8n want to license their product in that way, that’s up to them. It’s totally their right to do so. But it’s not open source and this is a big issue for some potential users here. Discussion about that belongs here, especially when people are saying that it’s open source.

> Open source was intended as free as in speech, not free as in beer.

You’ve misunderstood that. Open source and Free Software includes both. Open source was originally promoted as the commercially-attractive alternative to Free Software.

[toomuchtodo]

Great to hear you’re sending customers to Zapier, thanks for the context.

[JimDabell]

I don’t have specific numbers to hand, so assume any percentages below are inflated placeholders.

Let’s say 10% of our customers explicitly ask for Zapier integration because they are already Zapier customers. A further 20% have the expressed need for some third-party automation that we don’t directly support, but is supported through Zapier. And a further 30% could benefit from it but have no idea this kind of thing even exists. 0% ask for n8n. 0% have even heard of n8n.

Well we need to build the Zapier integration to keep that 10% happy. Now that we have that integration, we can turn to the 20% that need something like this and tell them to sign up for Zapier, and then they will be happy too. Then we can publish how-to articles and give a nice surprise to the other 30%, who will also go and sign up to Zapier.

There’s friction here. Some customers will fit in Zapier’s free tier and others will have to pay extra. The process for hooking Zapier up to our product is clunky. And every time the customer wants to change some aspect of their automation, they have to leave their product dashboard and go to an external service.

The goal was to self-host n8n so that customers could keep doing everything within our product. Most of the 10% existing Zapier customers would carry on using Zapier; some would switch. We wouldn’t need to send customers over to Zapier to keep the 20% of users asking for something like this happy, and the how-to articles would help the other 30% without sending them to Zapier as well. Some of our customers would save money by not having to pay Zapier, for others it would make no difference. Our customers would be able to manage their integrations without going off to some third-party site.

You can see how this is a desirable thing for us to do. You can also see that the value to us is way, way, way below $50k/yr. We aren’t going to gain or lose any customers over this. The main difference for us is marginal UX improvements.

n8n received $0 from us. If n8n were open source, they would still receive $0 from us. The difference is that we wouldn’t be sending 50% of our customers to become new Zapier customers. n8n would have gained one small integration – us. There’s no point in us building an n8n integration when we have Zapier though, because nobody is asking for it and Zapier does everything we need and has more integrations. It’s also possible that we / our customers would add to the other n8n integrations if we needed them or contribute functionality or bugfixes, but again, that’s veering a little to close to the “payment in exposure” argument I dislike.

As I said before, if n8n want to play things this way that’s their prerogative. But somebody here was telling people that it’s open source when it’s not. It being open-source or not is a big deal for cases like ours; it’s not “purism”.

[toomuchtodo]

I suppose I don’t understand why you couldn’t build an integration with n8n solely with generic webhooks vs having to bring a copy of their software into your stack. You didn’t need a copy of Zapier to integrate with Zapier (although you mentioned it was a clunky integration, I’m sure the Zapier folks would be interested in feedback on how to improve there).

It sounds like n8n needs to offer a library under a different license to smooth this integration issue? Correct me if I’m wrong there.

Email in profile if you’d rather have the convo there. I’m very interested in smoothing the integration story for all workflow providers, and I misunderstood your use case that you were trying to bring the entire software app in to support your integration.

[JimDabell]

> I suppose I don’t understand why you couldn’t build an integration with n8n solely with generic webhooks vs having to bring a copy of their software into your stack.

It’s a better user experience for customers. They don’t have to sign up for some third-party service, they don’t have to pay for some third-party service, they don’t have to mess around with API keys or onboarding flows, they don’t have to go to a third-party service to configure how things work, they don’t have to manage their admins separately, etc.

Sure, we could integrate with n8n the same way we integrate with Zapier. But why would we? We already have Zapier for that. And our customers ask for Zapier. And they’ve heard of Zapier. And Zapier has more than 10x number of integrations. There’s no benefit for us to replicate what we already have with Zapier using n8n. The benefit of n8n was closer integration, but in order to get that we would have to spend $50k/yr which simply wasn’t worth it for us.

I don’t think the problem can be solved with a differently licensed library. n8n explicitly considered this use case and this is how they want things to work:

https://n8n.io/embed/

[shrubble]

Where does this "freeloading" meme phrase come from? Seems astroturfed.

Is a person that uses Linux or FreeBSD without paying for it also a 'freeloader'?

If someone wants to release their own code under any sort of license they have the freedom to do so.

[gettodachoppa]

>Is a person that uses Linux or FreeBSD without paying for it also a 'freeloader'?

A few times? No. All the time, without ever giving back? Yes. It's the truth.

It's not about money specifically, it's about contributing to the open-source movement in general. This movement is why desktop and server computing is as open as it is and we're not all renting our dev tools and OSes for a monthly fee to one of the dystopian tech giants.

It's like if you joined a commune where they provide you with a room and meals at no cost. They tell you you can stay as long as you want. If you're still there after 2 years, you don't think you oughta give something back?

[commoner]

Users of free and open source software also give back by contributing feedback, bug reports, and patches. They promote the software through word of mouth and offer support to other users, building a community that extends the longevity of the software. The FOSS movement encompasses more than monetary payment in exchange for software, and it is not "freeloading" to use software exactly as prescribed by the license the developers selected.

While n8n is not open source, n8n is at least upfront about its business model and does not falsely brand itself as open source, which is more than can be said about some other companies.

[gtewallace]

I've worked in open source for two decades and something that I've observed that I think is as close to a law (as in law of physics) as anything I've seen is the 90 | 9 | 1 ratio.

90 percent of any community - the Hacker News community, reddit, x, or any open source community - will be passive consumers.

9 percent will be contributors - as the reply below says, through feedback, testimonials, bug reports and the like.

1 percent will be creators - new features, innovations, fixes.

This is the way it is. "Freeloading" is a very very unfortunate term and I wish it had not been inserted into the popular lexicon. The creators of open source that I know WANT their software to be used.