Why it matters for your business
Self-hosting can lower costs at high volume, keep sensitive data inside your environment, and avoid per-execution or per-seat pricing. It also moves responsibility to you: security patches, backups, uptime, scaling and upgrades. Self-hosting open-weight language models requires GPU capacity, and the leading hosted models may outperform what you can run yourself. Weigh data requirements and expected volume against the staff time to operate the system. Many businesses self-host the automation layer while still calling hosted AI APIs under suitable data agreements.
Example
A healthcare billing company self-hosts n8n in its own cloud account so workflows that touch patient data run inside its existing security controls and audit logging. It still calls a hosted language model provider for document extraction, under a BAA. The IT lead schedules monthly n8n updates and nightly database backups as part of the operating plan.