Most small business owners do not think of themselves as automation candidates. Automation feels like something that belongs in large enterprises with dedicated IT teams and six-figure software budgets. The reality is different, and the economics have changed dramatically in the last two years.
n8n is an open-source workflow automation platform that runs on your own server. It connects hundreds of apps and services through a visual interface, with the option to write custom code when needed. Unlike Zapier or Make, there is no per-execution pricing model. You deploy it once to your AWS environment and it runs unlimited workflows forever. No ongoing subscription required.
What workflows can you actually automate?
The best automation targets share three characteristics: they are repetitive, they involve moving data between tools, and they take longer than 5 minutes each time they are done manually. If a task meets all three criteria, it is almost certainly automatable.
Lead qualification and CRM routing
When a prospect submits a form, an n8n workflow can check if they already exist in your CRM, score them against your ideal customer profile, route the lead to the right sales rep, send a personalized acknowledgment email, and create a follow-up task, all in under 60 seconds, without any human involvement. Your team only sees qualified leads that have already been enriched with context.
Invoice processing and accounts payable
Receiving invoices as PDFs? n8n can trigger on an email attachment, extract line items using an AI model (OpenAI or Claude), match them against purchase orders in your accounting software, post approved entries automatically, and flag mismatches for human review. A process that took 2–3 hours per week becomes a 10-minute exception review. Error rates drop near zero because the AI does not misread or manually transpose figures.
Client onboarding
New client signs a contract? A single trigger can kick off: account creation across every tool they need, a personalized welcome email sequence, kickoff meeting scheduling, tool access provisioning, and notifications to every relevant team member. Manually, someone needs to remember all 8 steps. Automated, they happen the same way every time, including at 11pm on a Saturday.
Weekly and monthly reporting
Every Monday, someone on your team probably pulls numbers from Salesforce, your project management tool, your analytics platform, and your accounting software, then pastes them into a spreadsheet and emails it to stakeholders. This entire process runs automatically with n8n. An AI-written summary of key changes can be included. Your stakeholders receive the report whether or not anyone remembered to run it.
Order and inventory management
Reorder thresholds trigger purchase orders automatically. Order confirmations sync back to your inventory system. Fulfillment updates flow to your storefront. No spreadsheet chaos between your supplier, warehouse, and customer-facing systems. Just connected, consistent data across every tool.
n8n vs. Zapier vs. Make: the honest comparison
Zapier is the most widely known automation tool, and for simple two-step workflows it is an excellent choice. But as your needs grow, the costs scale quickly: $50/month at the starter tier, $600+/month at business scale. More importantly, your data passes through Zapier's infrastructure, a concern for businesses handling sensitive customer or patient information.
Make (formerly Integromat) is more powerful than Zapier with a visual scenario builder, but it is also SaaS-based with ongoing per-scenario pricing. You are paying month after month, indefinitely, for automation that runs whether you actively manage it or not.
n8n self-hosted on your AWS environment costs essentially nothing to operate after the initial setup. There is no per-execution pricing, no connector limits, and no data leaving your infrastructure. The tradeoff is that it requires more setup than a SaaS tool, which is exactly the work we do for clients.
What does "self-hosted" mean in practice?
n8n runs as a containerized service on your AWS infrastructure, typically on ECS Fargate alongside your other applications. It connects to a managed RDS database for workflow state and credentials storage. The n8n interface is accessible through a private URL or VPN so only your team can reach it.
Once deployed, it runs indefinitely with no ongoing maintenance beyond occasional version updates. Your credentials are stored in your own infrastructure. If n8n the company ceased to exist tomorrow, your automations would keep running.
How to identify your first automation target
The typical starting point is identifying your single highest-ROI automation target: the process that takes the most cumulative time per week and involves the most manual copying of data between systems.
A simple exercise: ask every person on your team to track manual, repetitive tasks for one week and estimate the time spent on each. The top item on the resulting list is almost always the right first target. Most businesses start with lead management or reporting, achieve quick ROI, and expand from there.
If your team is running more than 90 minutes per week of manual data movement between systems, the economics of a one-time automation build are almost certainly in your favor, usually within the first 60–90 days.