Quick post about a change I made that's worked out well.

I was using OpenAI API for automations in n8n — email summaries, content drafts, that kind of thing. Was spending ~$40/month.

Switched everything to Ollama running locally. The migration was pretty straightforward since n8n just hits an HTTP endpoint. Changed the URL from api.openai.com to localhost:11434 and updated the request format.

For most tasks (summarization, classification, drafting) the local models are good enough. Complex reasoning is worse but I don't need that for automation workflows.

Hardware: i7 with 16GB RAM, running Llama 3 8B. Plenty fast for async tasks.