When bot traffic from Lanzhou spiked to 40GB of database downloads in days, the developer behind n8nworkflows.world faced a choice: fight an expensive war against rotating proxy IPs, or surrender the data entirely.
He chose surrender. The entire dataset of 8,414 n8n workflows is now on GitHub, free and open.
What Happened
The site indexed verified n8n workflows by role and integration pairs (think "Notion to Slack" or "Stripe webhook to email"). Traffic looked normal until systematic scraping hit the "Copy JSON" endpoint. The culprit: coordinated requests from Lanzhou, a known data center and proxy hub.
Supabase's free tier couldn't handle it. The developer was facing account suspension and potential upgrade costs just to serve bots.
Why This Matters
n8n competes with Zapier and Make.com in the workflow automation space, but with a self-hosted, open-source angle that appeals to enterprises wanting data ownership. The platform supports 350-500+ app integrations and scales to 220 workflow executions per second on a single instance.
The official n8n template library lists roughly 1,700 workflows. This GitHub dump contains 8,400+, pulled from community sources and verified implementations. For DevOps teams evaluating n8n for lead generation, CRM sync, or payment webhook handling, it's a shortcut past vendor marketing.
The Trade-Off
Open-sourcing the data solves the bandwidth problem but kills the business model. The developer is pivoting to mobile apps (family safety tracking and hidden camera detection), abandoning the n8n project as a going concern.
For APAC enterprises testing n8n for AI agent orchestration or ITOps automation, the dataset offers real-world patterns: error handling for Stripe webhooks, Notion-to-Slack workflows, lead scoring templates. The code is Next.js. The data is JSON. No sign-ups, no limits.
History suggests scrapers don't stop when you ask nicely. Sometimes the smartest move is to make the fight pointless.