The Kestra Starter Pack — Unmetered Automations, $0: the One-Line Install, Three Ready Workflows, and the n8n Escape Map

The companion to the video. n8n's Starter cloud plan is €20/month for 2,500 executions — a single 5-minute uptime monitor burns ~8,640 runs a month on its own — and n8n's Sustainable Use License restricts self-hosted use to 'your own internal business purposes or non-commercial or personal use' (quoted verbatim from the LICENSE.md in github.com/n8n-io/n8n). Kestra is Apache-2.0: commercial use and client hosting explicitly allowed, no execution caps, and the entire setup is one Docker line. INSIDE: (1) THE ONE-LINE INSTALL — docker run -p 8080:8080 kestra/kestra:latest server local, then open localhost:8080; editor, scheduler, and every flow in this pack run from that single container. (2) WORKFLOW 1, REAL — the AI News Digest flow exactly as it ran on 2026-08-10 (4.54s, SUCCESS): pulls Hacker News every morning at 8:00, keeps the AI stories with real Python (real regex, real urllib — not a sandboxed code node), and ships a digest.md kept on the execution via outputFiles. Copy-paste YAML included verbatim. (3) WORKFLOW 2, TEMPLATE — the Website Uptime Monitor: http.Request against your URL every 5 minutes, an If task on any non-200, and a clearly-marked placeholder alert with the exact Slack/Discord notification plugins to swap in. (4) WORKFLOW 3, TEMPLATE — the Weekly AI Report: Monday 9:00 cron, fetch, format a markdown report in Python, keep it downloadable forever via outputFiles. (5) THE N8N → KESTRA MIGRATION MAP — Schedule Trigger → triggers.Schedule, HTTP Request → core.http.Request, Code node → scripts.python.Script with real packages, Set → outputs, Credentials → KV Store/secrets, Webhook trigger → trigger.Webhook. (6) THE DECISION RULE FROM THE VIDEO — stay on n8n only if all three hold (personal/internal automations + you love the visual editor + the meter never touches you); move to Kestra when any one is true (uncountable runs, need real code, want Git/environments/secrets free, or you build for anyone other than yourself — that's the license line). Independent starter pack from Hyperautomation Labs — not affiliated with Kestra or n8n.

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