How to Handle Data Privacy When Offering n8n Automation as a Service?

Hey everyone,

We’re building an AI automation agency and are exploring how to integrate n8n for clients without running into data privacy issues.

The main challenge: Clients need to connect their integrations (e.g., Google Sheets, CRM, Slack, etc.), but we don’t want to handle their credentials directly.

We’ve considered a few options:

Self-hosted n8n on our infrastructure: Clients would connect their APIs via OAuth or API keys, but would they trust us with their keys?
Deploying n8n on the client’s infrastructure: This solves privacy concerns but makes it harder to charge a recurring fee.
Selling pre-built n8n templates: The problem here is that once they buy a template, they can keep using it forever, making a subscription model difficult.
Hybrid model: We host n8n but require clients to provide API credentials themselves. This balances privacy and usability but still has trust issues.

Questions:

What’s the best way to handle authentication without compromising privacy?
Have any of you implemented a similar solution? How did you manage API access securely?
How do you ensure clients remain subscribed if selling templates?

Any insights would be really helpful! Thanks in advance.

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