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N8n raises $180M

blog.n8n.io

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Re: N8n raises $180M

#141

Post by portaouflop »

sneak wrote: post #126
hirako2000 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

n8n in my experience using it for 2 years now, and compared to similar solutions as there are many doing quite the same thing: it is just a very good product. It's stable. It has a gazillion integrations out of the box and is architectured as a module system so it's easy to create your own. It is very community centric, with community workflows and also integration modules people kindly publish on GitHub. Oh, it's op…

n8n is not open core/open source. it is not free software at all.

It’s close enough for me

Re: N8n raises $180M

#142

Post by scosman »

skrtskrt wrote: post #109

Here come the HN comments from people that work at closed source companies or companies that profit off the free labor of open source devs, wailing and gnashing their teeth that it's not the purest form of open source blessed by Stallman himself and therefore is radioactive and doomed to fail.

Don't forget praising a completely closed competitors with zero sense of irony.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#143

Post by hobofan »

JimDabell wrote: post #123
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #98

For me the Math isn’t Mathing. Hiring 50 fairly well paid developers is roughly $15M/year, maybe more if one insists on SV compensation which always seem a bit absurd. $240M total funding is a lot of money. They’ve only been around for about 5 years and probably didn’t start out fully staffed. So they’re basically covered for the next 10-15 years even if they had zero sales ? Having 500 employees won’t speed things u…

Once you hit product-market fit for a SaaS, engineering becomes a smaller proportion of your spending and you start hiring and spending a lot more on sales and marketing. If you know you can earn more than a dollar for every dollar you spend on customer acquisition, you throw as much money as you can at acquiring customers.

n8n is already very obviously marketing + sales driven, which is where there valuation originates and where the money will go to.

Of course that valuation makes sense if you've seen the insane prices they charge.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#144

Post by hobofan »

hu3 wrote: post #101
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #98

For me the Math isn’t Mathing. Hiring 50 fairly well paid developers is roughly $15M/year, maybe more if one insists on SV compensation which always seem a bit absurd. $240M total funding is a lot of money. They’ve only been around for about 5 years and probably didn’t start out fully staffed. So they’re basically covered for the next 10-15 years even if they had zero sales ? Having 500 employees won’t speed things u…

Since their betting on AI integration, I'm guessing a good part of their spending will be on GPUs/Cloud. Specially if they go the PaaS/SaaS AI route.

The AI integrations are bring-your-own-key, so they have 0 GPU/AI-Cloud spend (outside of their dev/test work).

For their Business (self-hosted) plan, they have essentially 0 cost per customer.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#145

Post by Hobadee »

vini wrote: post #137
seer wrote: post #133

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…

It seems crazy to me that they impose imaginary limits on the self-hosted version, you can have a server that can handle more executions, but the license won't allow it.

I can see an argument of "well it typically bogs down and stops being performant at X, and we don't want to get a bad rep because people abuse it, so we don't allow anything over X", but that should still be negotiable if you can show you have plenty of horsepower.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#146

Post by [deleted] »

JimDabell wrote: post #127
moralestapia wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're being strict, Windmill is also not FOSS. This is not an argument in favor of n8n.

If you clone the Windmill source from GitHub and build it, that’s AGPL. If you enable the enterprise feature flag or use the Docker image, the result is source available. I think it’s fair to call Windmill open source. It’s using the open core model for commercialisation. Just because you publish open source it doesn’t obligate you to make all the code you write open source.

[deleted]

Re: N8n raises $180M

#147

Post by ishikawa »

What surprised me the most was to know the company is from Germany. That shows that with a good product you don't need necessarily to be in the US.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#148

Post by scns »

Hobadee wrote: post #145
vini wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems crazy to me that they impose imaginary limits on the self-hosted version, you can have a server that can handle more executions, but the license won't allow it.

I can see an argument of "well it typically bogs down and stops being performant at X, and we don't want to get a bad rep because people abuse it, so we don't allow anything over X", but that should still be negotiable if you can show you have plenty of horsepower.

I understood it as a total amount, not how many executions at the same time.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#149

Post by j45 »

seer wrote: post #133

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…

It's an orchestration tool. Backends are a lot more than just orchestration.

There are alternatives to n8n depending on your stack of what is being orchestrated. Node-red, and others have quietly existed for a very long time, similar to how n8n existed for a good while before being discovered by the AI world.

Re: N8n raises $180M

#150

Post by nirav72 »

I’ve used n8n for local adhoc automation. They had a nice desktop version and had this neat option to export the flow and run it standalone. They got rid of the desktop version. Not sure if there is option to run standalone flows now without hosting the entire n8n app in a container.
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