n8n Workflow Development
Self-hosted n8n workflows that connect your tools, run AI agents and process work on your own infrastructure — no per-task pricing.
n8n is the automation platform we reach for most, for three specific reasons: it self-hosts, so your business logic and your data stay on infrastructure you control; it is priced by workflow execution rather than per task, so cost does not punish success; and it has native AI agent, vector store and memory nodes, so an automation can include genuine reasoning rather than only if/then branching.
Who this is for
Teams who have outgrown Zapier — either its pricing or its logic ceiling. Companies with data residency or compliance requirements that rule out a hosted automation vendor. Operations teams who want to adjust workflows themselves without filing an engineering ticket for every change.
Problems we solve
- Per-task pricing. Bills that scale linearly with volume, so the automation gets expensive exactly as it proves its value.
- Logic you cannot express. Branching, loops, code steps and error handling beyond what simple tools allow.
- Data leaving your network. Customer records passing through a third-party automation vendor.
- Undebuggable runs. A failure with no execution history to inspect or replay.
- Workflows nobody can maintain. Two hundred unnamed nodes assembled by someone who has left.
What we build
- CRM automation — records created, updated and synced across systems without manual entry
- Lead qualification — inbound enquiries enriched, scored, routed and assigned
- Customer support automation — tickets triaged, answered from documentation, escalated when needed
- WhatsApp automation — two-way conversations through WhatsApp Business Cloud
- Email automation — parsing, classification, drafting and sequenced follow-up
- AI agent workflows — reasoning steps with tool access embedded directly in the workflow
- Data synchronisation — two-way syncs between systems with no native integration
- Google Workspace automation — Sheets, Docs, Drive, Gmail and Calendar as workflow steps
- Slack automation — alerts, approvals and internal bots
- Marketing automation — campaign triggers, list hygiene and attribution reporting
- Invoice and document processing — PDFs read, validated and posted to finance systems
- API integrations — REST and GraphQL calls with authentication, pagination and retries
- Scheduled business processes — nightly reconciliations, reports and housekeeping
- Webhooks and event-driven flows — real-time reactions to events in other systems
- AI + RAG + n8n workflows — retrieval over your documents inside the automation itself
A reference build
Our self-hosted AI customer support workflow is a working example of the full pattern. It accepts messages from both WhatsApp Business Cloud and web chat, normalises them into one format, and uses Redis to deduplicate retried webhooks and hold conversation memory. Non-greeting messages route to an AI agent running Ollama locally, which retrieves grounding context from a Qdrant vector collection and consults Google Sheets for product and property lookups. New leads and support tickets are appended back to Sheets, and the reply returns on whichever channel the customer used. No message content leaves the host infrastructure.
How we work
We map the process before automating it — automating a broken process only produces failures faster. Workflows get named nodes, documented assumptions, retry with backoff, idempotency keys on anything that sends or charges, and an error path that notifies a channel your team reads. We hand over with a walkthrough, because a workflow only you can maintain is a liability we have handed you.
Technologies we use
n8n self-hosted with Docker, Redis for queues, deduplication and memory, PostgreSQL or MySQL for state, Qdrant or pgvector for retrieval, and OpenAI, Claude, Gemini or Ollama for reasoning steps. Connectors for WhatsApp Business Cloud, Slack, Gmail, Google Workspace, HubSpot, Stripe and several hundred others.
Business benefits
- Execution-based pricing rather than per-task billing
- Data and logic stay on infrastructure you own
- Operations staff can adjust routing and copy in a visual editor
- Full execution history for debugging, replay and audit
- Workflows exportable as JSON and version-controlled like code
Common questions
Should we self-host or use n8n Cloud?
Self-host when data residency matters, volume is high, or you want full control. n8n Cloud is a reasonable starting point for lower volumes without an ops function. We deploy either and will recommend based on your constraints, not our preference.
Can we edit the workflows ourselves?
Yes — that is much of the point. We build them to be legible, name every node, and walk your team through them at handover.
What if n8n cannot connect to one of our systems?
Anything with an HTTP API can be reached with the generic request node, and we write custom nodes where a system deserves a proper integration.
How do we know a workflow is still running?
Error handling with alerting to Slack or email, plus health-check workflows that confirm the critical paths are alive rather than assuming silence means success.
Paying per task for automations you cannot fully control? We will scope a self-hosted replacement.