SAP put money into N8n this week at a $5.2 billion valuation, and the number is doing exactly what big numbers do, which is bouncing around HN with a dozen threads on automation stacks and “how I wired my whole life into a workflow graph.” I get the excitement. N8n is genuinely good at what it does. Connect this API to that API, add a transform node in the middle, schedule it, walk away.

But there’s a quiet assumption baked into the whole $5.2B story, and almost nobody says it out loud: every node in an N8n workflow assumes a clean API exists on the other end.

The API is the product, and the product has gaps

N8n connects services through their APIs. That’s the entire model. Webhook in, HTTP node out, OAuth credentials stored somewhere so the cloud runner can authenticate as you. When the API exists and is documented and isn’t rate-limited into uselessness, this is beautiful.

So what happens when there’s no API? Or the API costs $99/month to unlock the one endpoint you need? Or the vendor sunset their public API in 2024 and now you’re staring at a web dashboard that holds your data hostage behind a “Contact Sales” button?

You build a scraper, badly. Or you give up and do it by hand. N8n at $5.2B is a bet that the world keeps exposing clean APIs forever, and that bet has a hole in it shaped exactly like your browser.

Your tabs are already logged in

Here’s the part that took me a while to actually appreciate. The N8n cloud runner has to authenticate from scratch every single time. It needs a token, a scope, a credential object, a refresh flow. It’s a stranger knocking on the door of every service, holding a permission slip you signed weeks ago and hoping it still works.

Your browser isn’t a stranger. You’re already logged into Gmail, into your CRM, into that internal admin panel that runs on a subdomain nobody outside the company has ever heard of and which will never, ever ship an API. The session cookie is sitting right there. The auth is done. A browser agent like Dassi works inside that already-authenticated tab, so it acts as you, in the session you opened, with zero OAuth wiring on either side.

And this matters more than it sounds, because the apps with no clean API are very often the exact apps where the real work lives, the crusty internal tools and the SaaS dashboards that gate their export buttons behind a higher tier, the stuff that runs the actual day-to-day of a real job instead of the demo.

What a graph can’t reach

Think about the shape of the things you do that no workflow tool will ever touch.

Pulling a report off a vendor portal that has login, a date picker, and a “download CSV” button but no documented API. Cross-referencing three open tabs to fill out a fourth form. Reading a thread in a support tool and drafting a reply that matches the customer’s tone. Clicking through a multi-step web UI that was clearly designed by someone who hates you.

N8n can’t see any of that. It lives in the cloud and it speaks API. The browser agent lives where you live, on the page, looking at the same pixels you are.

BYOK, because the plumbing is yours

There’s a second thing the $5.2B model quietly requires: your data flows through N8n’s runners, and your credentials sit in their credential store. For a lot of workflows that’s fine. For the ones touching your inbox or customer records, it’s a middleman you didn’t strictly need.

A browser agent flips that. The model you bring is the model that runs. Dassi lets you log in with your existing ChatGPT subscription or bring your own key for Claude, Gemini, GPT, DeepSeek, whatever you trust this week, and the page content stays in your browser instead of taking a tour through someone else’s infrastructure. The plumbing is short. You, the tab, your LLM provider. That’s the whole path.

I wrote a while back that browser agents are the new API, and the N8n round honestly made the point sharper than I could. The more the world bets on API-based automation, the more obvious the holes become, because the holes are everywhere the API isn’t.

So is N8n cooked? No.

Not even a little. If you’ve got clean APIs and recurring scheduled jobs, N8n is the right tool and SAP made a smart bet. Use it. But it can’t reach into the messy, logged-in, no-API corner of your actual workday, and that corner is bigger than the $5.2B headline wants you to believe.

That’s the integration N8n can’t build. It’s the one you already have open. If you want to point an agent at it, Dassi runs in the Chrome side panel and it’s free, and it’ll happily click the export button that some vendor decided was worth a hundred bucks a month.