Process automation on your infrastructure – with n8n and custom ETL pipelines

With us: process check €1,500–3,000, pilot workflow including n8n set up on your infrastructure €3,500–8,000 (both typical ranges from our projects), larger projects with ERP/CRM integration from €8,000, ongoing operations from €1,500/month. Add your own server costs of €20–50/month on EU infrastructure – there are no license costs for n8n. For perspective: manually handling a single incoming invoice costs €15–40 according to the Billentis study – at a few hundred documents a month, a pilot workflow often pays for itself within the first quarter.

For small volumes, Zapier and Make are legitimate tools – connecting two SaaS tools, a few hundred runs a month, no sensitive data: go ahead, you don't need an agency for that. The math tips at two points. First, volume: Zapier and Make charge per task or operation (as of 18 August 2026), so your costs grow linearly with every run – n8n on your own servers costs the same €20–50 a month in server costs whether you have 500 runs or 50,000. Second, data: with SaaS iPaaS, your order, customer and pricing data runs through someone else's cloud infrastructure; with n8n on your servers, it stays in-house.

No – deliberately. The n8n Sustainable Use License prohibits hosting n8n and charging for access to it. What it explicitly allows is consulting: building workflows, developing integrations, supporting operations. That is exactly our model as an n8n agency: n8n runs on your infrastructure (e.g. a Hetzner server on your own contract), set up, connected and maintained by us. A pleasant side effect for you: you are not dependent on us – if you cancel, your automation keeps running.

The ones with high repetition rates, clear rules and measurable cost of errors: capturing incoming invoices and routing them for approval, transferring orders from your shop into the ERP, syncing master data between systems, compiling recurring reports. What you should not automate first are processes that are broken in themselves – unclear responsibilities, constant exceptions. We clean those up in the process check first; otherwise you just automate the chaos faster. And workflows without repetition don't belong on the list at all.

AI steps pay off where rules are not enough: classifying unstructured input (what kind of document is this? who needs to handle this email?), extracting data from PDFs and free text, drafting text for reports. That can be built into an n8n workflow as a single step and becomes economical quickly. Be skeptical when someone promises you autonomous AI agents that run entire business processes without oversight – our guide to agentic AI (/en/blog/what-is-agentic-ai-a-guide-for-decision-makers) separates what works from the marketing.

That is the core of our operating model: n8n and the ETL pipelines run on your EU infrastructure (Hetzner, with data centers in Germany and Finland), not in a US cloud. Your process data does not leave your servers, and a data-processing agreement exists only with us as a German provider. For AI steps, we choose models and deployment options that match your data – from EU-hosted endpoints to local models for sensitive material.

From our projects: two to four weeks from kickoff to a production pilot workflow – including n8n set up on your infrastructure, integration of the systems involved, error handling and monitoring. The timeline depends less on the workflow logic than on the interfaces: an ERP with a documented API connects in days; a legacy application without one needs an ETL route and correspondingly more time. That is exactly why the interface review comes first in the process check.

Yes, if your business is based in Germany: several German regional funding programs at the state level subsidize digitalization and AI projects, and automation projects including consulting and implementation typically fall within their scope. We help prepare the technical project description for the application; filing the application itself is up to you or your funding consultant.

Marketing automation is its own field with its own tools: lead funnels, newsletter logic, campaign workflows and CRM upkeep. This page is about business processes – order processing, approvals, data flows between ERP and CRM, reporting. In practice the two worlds touch (say, when order data triggers customer communication), and then we build the bridge; the channels and rules of marketing belong on the marketing side.

That is why error handling is part of every workflow from day one: failed runs are detected, logged and – depending on the case – retried automatically or escalated to a human, by email or into your team channel. Under ongoing support, we additionally monitor executions and the server infrastructure; you learn about a problem before a customer notices it. Without a support contract, we hand the same monitoring over to you, set up and ready to use – it belongs to the setup, not to a subscription.