There Is No Box to Patch

Your workflow does not have a version number

Run a workflow here and you operate no server.

There is no instance to upgrade, no editor to harden, no credential store to audit. A run starts when your workflow fires. It stops when the work is done. Nothing stays up between runs, so nothing sits there waiting to be patched.

That is a property of the engine, not a service we perform on your behalf. Automation software is normally built around a computer that stays on: a process that keeps running, a database held open, a disk that remembers. This engine holds none of those between runs. There is no always-on surface to reach, because between your runs there is nothing running.

What an always-on box asks of you

Run the software yourself and the box becomes yours to keep current.

That is a standing job, not a one-time setup. Advisories arrive on a schedule. You read them, you work out which ones touch the version you run, you test the upgrade against your workflows, and you apply it. Then you do it again. The work does not scale with how much you automate. It scales with how long you have been running.

None of that is on your desk here. You keep the part you care about, which is the workflow.

Your keys stay in the vault, never in the workflow

Credentials follow the same idea.

The engine never receives a plaintext credential. Your keys live in the Secure Vault, and the vault injects one at the moment of the outbound call. Your workflow holds a reference and nothing more. There is no decrypted copy sitting in the run for something else to read, because the run never holds one.

The credential does reach the service you are calling, which is the point of a credential. What it never reaches is the engine in between.

What stays yours

The platform is ours to keep safe. The workflow is yours to get right.

We maintain the runtime, the vault and the nodes your workflow calls. You decide what your workflow does, which services it talks to, and whose keys it runs on. A workflow can still send data somewhere you did not intend, because that is logic you wrote, and no runtime can tell the difference between that and the job. Read Own and Trust Your Workflow for how credentials and ownership work once a workflow is deployed.

Why this matters

Self-hosting looks free because the software is free. The recurring cost is not the server. It is the attention.

When a maintenance notice lands in your inbox, it is not your task.

To compare the three ways to run what you built, read indie.money vs n8n Cloud vs self-hosting. For the wider picture, read Why indie.money.