Can you resell n8n to clients? What the licence actually says

This is the question that stops agencies cold once they get past client three, and the answer is genuinely confusing because n8n is described everywhere as 'open source' — a phrase most people read as 'I can do what I like with it'.

n8n is not distributed under a standard open-source licence. It uses the Sustainable Use Licence (SUL), a 'fair-code' licence. The distinction matters commercially, and it is the single most expensive thing to discover late.

What the licence permits

The SUL allows you to use n8n for internal business purposes. If you run automations that serve your own company — your lead routing, your reporting, your internal ops — you are squarely inside the licence, and you can self-host it for free.

Where agencies run into the wall

The restriction bites when the software itself becomes part of what you sell. Hosting n8n instances on behalf of clients, white-labelling the interface as your own product, or otherwise providing n8n as a service to third parties falls outside internal business use. n8n sells commercial and embed licences precisely for those cases.

The practical consequence: the community that generated the demand for client automation work is the community least able to resell the tool that does it. That gap is not an accident of pricing — it is the licence working as intended.

The options actually open to you

• Client-owned instances. The client holds the n8n account and pays for it; you build and maintain inside their instance. Clean on licensing, but you inherit access sprawl — a separate login, and a separate place credentials live, for every client.
• A commercial or embed licence from n8n. Correct and supported. Budget accordingly; embed-tier pricing for white-label platforms generally starts in the high hundreds per month.
• A platform built for reselling. Tools licensed for multi-client hosting from the start avoid the question entirely.
• A different engine. Some agencies move automation work to tools whose licences permit client hosting outright.

How to decide

Ask one question: is the software part of what the client is buying, or is it just how you happen to do the work? If a client is paying for an outcome and you would deliver it the same way with any tool, client-owned instances are usually the simplest honest answer. If you are packaging a dashboard and calling it your product, you need a licence that says you can.

Read the terms yourself rather than trusting a forum summary — including this one. The licence text ships in the repository as LICENSE.md and the docs site carries a plain-language explanation. It takes ten minutes and it is your commercial exposure, not ours.

Disclosure: we are building Tenvik, a platform for running client automations, so we are not a neutral party. We think the licence question is worth understanding on its own terms whichever way you resolve it.