Every Tool in Zo.E Was Chosen for One Reason

When I started planning Zo.E, the question I kept coming back to wasn't "what's the best tool?" It was "what's the best tool that'll talk to n8n without a fight?"

That single filter made almost every decision easier. And it ruled out a few options that looked attractive on paper.

Ghost was the original plan for the blog

Before Zo.E was anything more than a whiteboard, I had Ghost CMS earmarked as the publishing layer for nunlimited.com. Clean API, no plugin chaos, publishes a full post in one HTTP request from n8n. It made sense.

Then I looked honestly at where the business was. The website didn't have a blog yet. The audience was being built on LinkedIn and Bluesky, not through search. Publishing to a blog nobody was reading felt like the wrong first move.

So Ghost went on the roadmap for when the site's blog actually launches. It's still the plan. Just not for now.

LinkedIn and Bluesky via Upload Post, not direct API

The temptation with n8n is to build everything yourself. You've got HTTP nodes, OAuth flows are theoretically possible — why pay for a scheduling tool?

LinkedIn's API is the answer to that question. The documentation is awkward, the OAuth setup is brittle, and the permissions model for posting content on behalf of a user has changed enough times that you'll find half the tutorials on the internet no longer work. Bluesky is cleaner, but building two separate direct integrations still means building, testing, and maintaining two separate direct integrations.

Upload Post handles all of it. LinkedIn, Bluesky, and a handful of others — one API call from n8n, one set of credentials to manage. The cost is around $20/month. Given the alternative was several weeks of build time and ongoing maintenance, that's not really a cost. It's a decision.

Self-hosted n8n on PikaPods, not n8n Cloud or Zapier

n8n Cloud works. Zapier works. But both charge per execution, and Zo.E runs a lot of executions — ten workflows, two brands, daily cadence.

PikaPods hosts n8n for a flat fee. Around £5/month. That's it. No per-task billing, no surprises at the end of the month, no reason to think twice about running a workflow on a schedule rather than on demand.

I looked at Zapier seriously for about twenty minutes. The pricing model alone ruled it out. n8n on PikaPods has the same orchestration capability at a fraction of the ongoing cost.

NocoDB over Airtable

Airtable is good. It's also not free once you start doing anything interesting with it, and the API — while decent — costs you more at the tier where you actually need it.

NocoDB is free. The API is clean and well-documented. n8n has a native NocoDB integration. It stores every post, every field, every scheduled date without complaint.

There's no meaningful capability gap for what Zo.E needs. The decision took about ten minutes.

The principle behind all of it

Every tool in this stack was chosen because it plays nicely with n8n via API. That's the whole filter. Not the most features. Not the biggest brand. Not the one with the best-looking dashboard.

If n8n can hit it with an HTTP request and get a reliable response back, it's a candidate. If the API is badly documented, expensive at the tier where you need it, or subject to the kind of OAuth complexity that turns a one-day integration into a three-week project — it's out.

That discipline is why Zo.E costs under £30/month and runs itself.

Ta,

James
Founder | Nunlimited