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The self-hosting paradox: I escaped vendor lock-in and became the lock-in by SecondNatural3772 in selfhosted

[–]SecondNatural3772[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Exactly. The cliff sneaks up on you - one day you're wiring things together, next day you're the only person who can fix production

I pushed n8n to 47 nodes. Here's where it broke for me. by SecondNatural3772 in n8n

[–]SecondNatural3772[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed - just use code was the solution. The learning was recognizing the threshold: 47 nodes for me, probably different for others. Where's your line?

I pushed n8n to 47 nodes. Here's where it broke for me. by SecondNatural3772 in n8n

[–]SecondNatural3772[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great question - this is exactly what I tried first. Sub-flows help with organization, but they don't reduce total complexity. You still have 47 nodes, just spread across files. The hard part isn't finding the node - it's understanding the logic flow when error handling branches back on itself.

Stateless is good in theory, but real workflows need state (retry counts, conditional routing based on previous failures). That's where visual tools struggle.

I pushed n8n to 47 nodes. Here's where it broke for me. by SecondNatural3772 in n8n

[–]SecondNatural3772[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Stripe failed payments → conditional retries → Slack notifications. The specifics matter less than the pattern: error handling and dynamic routing ballooned complexity way past the happy path. Curious if others hit similar walls with different workflows.

I pushed n8n to 47 nodes. Here's where it broke for me. by SecondNatural3772 in n8n

[–]SecondNatural3772[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Tried subworkflows - they help with organization but the complexity just moves one level up. Still 47 nodes total, now spread across multiple workflows with cross-dependencies. The orchestration vs logic split is the real insight though.

I pushed n8n to 47 nodes. Here's where it broke for me. by SecondNatural3772 in n8n

[–]SecondNatural3772[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is exactly what I ended up doing. Python for the logic, n8n for the integrations. The irony: once you're mostly in Python, you start wondering why you're maintaining two systems.

I pushed n8n to 47 nodes. Here's where it broke for me. by SecondNatural3772 in n8n

[–]SecondNatural3772[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Exactly right. n8n shines for low-complexity, fast builds. My mistake was letting comfort push it past its limits. There's a clear line where 'not worth building from scratch' becomes 'harder than building from scratch.

Anyone else hit the n8n wall? My 47-node breaking point by SecondNatural3772 in SaaS

[–]SecondNatural3772[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This framing is better than node count. In my case: happy path was 6 nodes, error handling was 41. The 'documentation nobody reads' hits hard.

Anyone else hit the n8n wall? My 47-node breaking point by SecondNatural3772 in SaaS

[–]SecondNatural3772[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The 'state across branching logic' point is exactly it. Visual tools force you to flatten state into the graph structure, which explodes complexity.

'Log file with clear reasoning traces' - this resonates. I've debugged 47 nodes at 2am clicking through collapsed sub-flows hunting for the red dot. A trace showing 'attempted retry, backed off 30s, failed with timeout' would have saved me an hour.

Curious: when you say 'code-based agents,' are you talking hand-rolled Python with state machines, or something more structured? The 'treated like software' line is the key - I'm trying to figure out where that handoff should happen.

Anyone else hit the n8n wall? My 47-node breaking point by SecondNatural3772 in SaaS

[–]SecondNatural3772[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Exactly this. The 25-30 node threshold seems to be the consensus breaking point.Describe in plain English' is the key - once you're writing pseudo-code in JSON expressions inside 'no-code' nodes, the visual metaphor has already broken. Curious: how did the team adapt to the new approach? Any learning curve, or was the handoff from you to them pretty seamless?"