Migrating 23 Make Scenarios to Self-Hosted n8n: a 3-Week Breakdown
Anonymized retrospective of a DTC ecommerce brand migrating 23 Make scenarios to a self-hosted n8n instance over three weeks. Tooling cost dropped from $348/month on Make Teams to roughly $12/month on a Hetzner VPS, but credential and webhook recreation consumed about 40% of total project time.
The Bottom Line: Migrating from Make to self-hosted n8n cut tooling cost from $348/mo to about $12/mo for a DTC ecommerce client, but credential and webhook URL recreation consumed roughly 40% of the three-week project — the right call for high-volume scenarios, the wrong call for fewer than ~10 simple Zaps.
The Client and the Starting Point
A DTC ecommerce brand selling skincare across Shopify, Klaviyo, Gorgias, and a 3PL warehouse running on ShipStation. The team was 11 people, with one operations lead owning automation. Over two years they had built up 23 Make scenarios covering order routing, abandoned-cart handoffs, refund-tag automation, ShipStation-to-Shopify sync, Gorgias macro triggers, and a few experimental campaigns. They were on Make Teams at $348/month and were running at roughly 240,000 operations/month, comfortable but trending up.
The driver for migration was not cost. It was a single repeated incident: a Make rate-limit timeout silently dropped order tags during a flash sale, and the team needed deterministic retry semantics they could fully control. They asked us to evaluate self-hosted n8n as the new substrate.
Plan vs Reality
We scoped three weeks. Week 1: stand up n8n on a Hetzner CX21 VPS, port the five highest-volume scenarios, run dual-active for verification. Week 2: port the remaining 18, validate side-by-side, cut over. Week 3: clean up, document, train the operations lead.
Week 1 went mostly to plan. n8n on Docker behind Caddy, Postgres for execution data, daily restic backups to a Hetzner Storage Box. Five scenarios ported, all green by Friday.
Week 2 ran long. The blocker was unexpected: not the logic, the connections.
What Took 40% of the Project Time
Each Make scenario depended on a pile of OAuth credentials, webhook URLs registered with third-party tools, and ShipStation API keys with specific scopes. None of those carry over. Every Shopify webhook has to be re-pointed at the new n8n endpoint. Every Klaviyo and Gorgias OAuth has to be re-authorized. Each ShipStation API key has to be regenerated. We logged the time: 38% of total project hours went into credential and webhook recreation, double-checking scope, and verifying nothing was being delivered to the old Make endpoints. There is no shortcut.
The second time-sink was data-shape drift. Make's built-in iteration and aggregation modules behave slightly differently from n8n's SplitInBatches and Merge nodes around empty arrays and null fields. Three of the 23 scenarios had subtle behavior that depended on Make's specific semantics. We rewrote those flows rather than try to mimic Make's edge cases.
Editor's Note: We deployed self-hosted n8n on a single Hetzner CX21 (~$5.83/mo for the VPS, plus a Storage Box for backups, total around $12/mo) for an 11-person DTC skincare brand. Twenty of the 23 ported scenarios moved over without logic changes; three had to be rewritten because of differences in how Make and n8n handle empty arrays. The honest caveat: the operations lead now spends ~45 minutes/week on VPS upkeep (n8n upgrades, backup verification, log review) that simply did not exist on Make.
What Worked
- Cost. Direct tooling cost fell from $348/month to about $12/month. At 240k operations/month the difference compounds quickly.
- Retry control. n8n's explicit retry-on-fail with exponential backoff replaced the silent Make rate-limit behavior. Verified by replaying a controlled rate-limit storm.
- Versioned workflows. All 23 scenarios live in Git as JSON exports, deploy via a small CI step. Rollbacks are now a
git revertaway. - Local development. The operations lead now runs n8n locally to test changes before pushing to production. That was not possible with Make.
What Did Not Work
- Make Datastores have no clean n8n equivalent. We replaced them with Postgres tables, but that added a dependency the operations lead did not previously have to think about.
- Make's built-in error notifications are better. n8n requires you to wire your own Slack/email notifications on failure. We standardized on a single error-handler workflow but it took a half-day to design.
- Cold-start latency on n8n is higher when an executor process spins up. For low-frequency scenarios it does not matter; for the order-tagging scenario triggered on every checkout, we kept a worker warm.
- Documentation drift. During the migration, we discovered three scenarios were already broken on Make and had been failing silently for weeks. Migration did not cause that; it surfaced it.
Would We Do It Again
Editor's Note: For this DTC client, yes — the deterministic retry behavior and Git-versioned workflows mattered more than the cost saving. But we would not recommend this migration for a brand with fewer than ten scenarios. Below that threshold, Make's no-VPS, no-backup-config, no-OAuth-rewiring proposition almost always wins on total time-to-value, even at $9-29/month.
Caveats and Disclaimers
All numbers above are from a single project. Costs and behavior of Make and n8n may differ at other scales. As of May 2026, n8n is fair-code (Sustainable Use License); commercial restrictions apply for some hosted SaaS use cases. Verify the current license before standing up n8n for a multi-tenant offering.
Tools Mentioned
Make
Automate your work with visual workflow builder and AI agents
Workflow Automationn8n
Workflow automation for technical teams
Workflow AutomationActivepieces
No-code workflow automation with self-hosting and AI-powered features
Workflow AutomationAutomatisch
Open-source Zapier alternative
Workflow AutomationRelated Guides
Keystroke vs n8n in 2026: Agent-Built TypeScript vs the Visual Canvas
Keystroke, launched in July 2026 by Y Combinator W24 company Sprint Labs, is a code-first automation platform where AI coding agents write workflows as TypeScript in the user's repository. n8n, founded in 2019, is the most widely deployed source-available visual workflow platform, with 200,000+ users and a $2.5 billion valuation. This comparison covers the agent-authored versus canvas building models, durable execution, licensing (Elastic License 2.0 vs the Sustainable Use License), verified July 2026 pricing including Keystroke's usage metering, and the maturity gap between a days-old platform and an established ecosystem.
QuantumBPM vs Camunda 2026: Single-Binary Challenger vs the BPMN Incumbent
QuantumBPM (launched 2026, Coroid s.r.o., Slovakia) packages a BPMN 2.0 runtime and DMN 1.5 decision engine into one Go binary backed by Temporal and PostgreSQL. Camunda (Berlin, founded 2013) is the category incumbent: Camunda 7 (Apache 2.0, in maintenance) and the Zeebe-based Camunda 8 platform. This comparison covers product structure, architecture, DMN TCK conformance with recording dates, deployment, pricing, and vendor maturity, verified July 2026.
Inngest vs Temporal 2026: Durable Functions vs Durable Workflows
Inngest (2021, San Francisco) is a developer-first durable functions platform with TypeScript and Python SDKs, 50,000 step runs/month free, and Pro pricing from $99/month. Temporal (2019) is the heavyweight durable workflow engine with seven-language SDK coverage, Cassandra-backed scale, and Cloud pricing from roughly $200/month at low volume or $2.5-4.5K/month self-host. This 2026 comparison covers programming model, pricing, scale ceiling, and operational footprint.
Related Rankings
Best Durable Workflow Engines for Production in 2026
A ranked list of the best durable workflow engines for production deployments in 2026. Durable workflow engines persist execution state to a database so that long-running workflows survive process restarts, deployments, and infrastructure failures. The ranking covers Temporal, Prefect, Apache Airflow, Camunda, Windmill, and n8n. Tools were evaluated on production reliability, developer experience, scalability, open-source health, and documentation quality. The shortlist intentionally mixes code-first engines (Temporal, Prefect, Airflow) with hybrid visual platforms (Camunda, Windmill, n8n) to reflect how production teams actually choose workflow engines in 2026.
Best No-Code Automation Platforms in 2026
A ranked list of no-code automation platforms in 2026. The ranking covers visual workflow builders that allow non-engineering teams to connect SaaS apps, route data, and add conditional logic without writing code. Entries cover proprietary cloud platforms (Zapier, Make, Pipedream, IFTTT) and open-source visual builders (n8n, Activepieces). Scoring reflects integration breadth, pricing accessibility, visual editor ease, reliability and error handling, and self-hosting availability.
Common Questions
What should teams do now that Relay.app is shutting down?
Relay.app announced on 16 July 2026 that it is shutting down. Free accounts and all their data are permanently deleted after 15 August 2026 at 23:59 PT, and paid accounts after 14 September 2026 at 23:59 PT, with paying customers keeping full access at no charge until that date. Export the workspace archive well before the deadline, because generation can take up to 24 hours and the emailed download link expires after 48; for the human-in-the-loop workflows Relay.app was usually bought for, Zapier and n8n are the only platforms evaluated here where a reviewer can edit an AI draft mid-run without custom development.
How much does Keystroke cost in 2026?
Keystroke offers three tiers as of July 2026: Hobby (free forever, with $1/month of included usage credit), Pro ($20/month, including $20/month of usage credit), and Organization (custom pricing with SSO, RBAC, and audit logs). Usage is metered on every tier: $0.01 per agent or workflow run, $0.005 per empty poll, $0.007 per web search, roughly $0.067 per hour of sandbox compute, and a 1.1x markup on AI model calls unless you bring your own API keys.
What is Keystroke?
Keystroke is a code-first workflow automation and AI agent platform, launched July 13, 2026 by Y Combinator-backed Sprint Labs, that positions itself as an n8n alternative built for AI coding agents. Workflows are written as typed TypeScript in the user's own repository, usually by agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex, and deployed to Keystroke's managed cloud or self-hosted under the source-available Elastic License 2.0.
Is Keystroke worth it in 2026?
Keystroke earns a provisional 6.5/10 in its July 2026 open alpha: the agent-native TypeScript model is genuinely differentiated and the free Hobby tier makes it safe to trial, but the platform is pre-1.0 (npm at v0.1.98, public repository published July 13, 2026), has no third-party production track record, and its Elastic License 2.0 restricts offering it as a hosted service. Worth trialing for teams that build through coding agents; too young for production-critical workflows.