Chutes just announced something that could change how people build AI automations. They’ve released official nodes for n8n, a popular automation platform, and they’re claiming you can cut costs by 90% compared to traditional AI automation tools.

On January 7, 2026, Chutes posted a thread calling it “The Automation Reality Check.” Their argument is simple: most AI automation platforms force you to choose between expensive-and-easy or cheap-and-complicated. Their new n8n integration promises to give you both easy-to-use and dirt-cheap.

The Problem They’re Solving

If you’ve ever tried to build AI automations, you know the frustration. Premium platforms, like some popular AI automation services, make it easy to drag and drop workflows together. But they charge a lot per task, limit which AI models you can use, and get expensive fast when you scale up.

The alternative is building everything yourself. You get full control and lower costs, but now you need to manage servers, handle scaling, write code, and basically become a DevOps expert. For most people, that’s not realistic.

Chutes claims their n8n integration eliminates this trade-off. You get the easy visual workflow builder from n8n, plus the cheap, powerful AI compute from Chutes. No servers to manage, no infrastructure headaches, and costs that are a fraction of what you’d pay elsewhere.

The Cost Difference Is Huge

Chutes shared a real-world example in their thread. Imagine you’re processing 100 documents per day, extracting data from them, summarizing the content, and categorizing everything. A typical automation workflow for this task.

On traditional AI automation platforms, this costs $200 to $400 per month. Using Chutes with n8n, the same workflow costs $15 to $30 per month. That’s genuinely 90% cheaper, and you can use different AI models for each step of the process instead of being locked into one provider’s options.

How It Actually Works

n8n is an open-source automation tool that lets you build workflows visually by connecting different services together. You drag boxes onto a canvas, connect them, and build complex automations without writing much code.

Chutes is a decentralized AI compute platform. Instead of one company with massive servers, thousands of independent nodes provide computing power. You can use over 60 different AI models for text, images, speech, and more, all through a simple API. Prices range from $0.05 to $1.75 per million tokens, way cheaper than major providers.

Now with the new integration, you can add Chutes directly into n8n workflows. Install the package with npm install n8n-nodes-chutes, add your Chutes API key from chutes.ai/auth, and start building.

Inside n8n, you drop Chutes nodes into your workflow wherever you need AI processing. Maybe you want to summarize emails, extract data from documents, generate responses, or analyze sentiment. Each node can use a different AI model from Chutes’ 60+ options, and you only pay for what you use.

The magic is combining n8n’s 400+ integrations with Chutes’ cheap AI. You can connect to Google Sheets, databases, Slack, email, webhooks—basically anything—and add AI processing powered by Chutes at each step. All visual, all no-code or low-code, and all affordable.

Why This Matters

AI automation is powerful but expensive. Companies are spending hundreds or thousands per month on automation platforms when the actual AI compute should cost a tiny fraction of that. The difference is mostly markup from platforms handling the infrastructure.

Chutes uses decentralized computing to cut that markup out. The nodes contributing compute power earn rewards directly. There’s no massive company in the middle charging huge premiums. That’s how they can offer the same AI capabilities for 90% less.

For developers and businesses, this means you can build sophisticated AI workflows without worrying about costs spiraling out of control. Want to process every customer email with AI? Want to automatically summarize all your meeting recordings? Want to extract data from thousands of documents? These things were expensive before. Now they’re accessible.

The n8n integration specifically matters because n8n is designed for exactly this use case. It’s built for people who want automation power without learning to code everything from scratch. By bringing Chutes’ cheap AI into n8n’s visual builder, they’ve made powerful AI automations accessible to way more people.

Getting Started

If you want to try this, the setup is straightforward. You need n8n running (you can self-host it or use n8n Cloud), then install the Chutes package. The GitHub repository at github.com/chutesai/n8n-nodes-chutes has documentation.

Get an API key from Chutes by signing up at chutes.ai/auth. Then, in n8n, add Chutes nodes to your workflows and configure them with your key. From there, it’s just building workflows visually—connect services, add AI processing with Chutes, and set up logic and conditions.The real test will be whether it actually delivers on the cost savings and model flexibility in practice. But if Chutes’ numbers are accurate—and there’s no reason to think they aren’t, given how decentralized compute works—this could make AI automation dramatically more accessible.