Skip to content
Free AI audit
Self-hosting guide

How to Self-Host Flowise for Free

Last reviewed

Flowise lets you build RAG chatbots and AI agents on a visual canvas — and self-hosting it is free. This guide shows the fastest way to get a private Flowise instance running.

Why self-host Flowise

Self-hosted Flowise is free and unlimited. Your documents, vector stores, and API keys stay on your own infrastructure — important for RAG over private knowledge bases.

You can expose finished flows as an API or an embeddable chat widget, so the same instance powers both internal tools and customer-facing bots.

Quick start with npx

  1. 1 Make sure Node.js 18+ is installed.
  2. 2 Run: npx flowise start
  3. 3 Open http://localhost:3000.
  4. 4 Create an account and you're in the builder.

Production deploy with Docker

  1. 1 Clone the Flowise repo and copy the example env file.
  2. 2 Set a username and password in the environment variables.
  3. 3 Run docker compose up -d.
  4. 4 Put it behind a reverse proxy for HTTPS and restrict access.

Build your first agent

  1. 1 Start from an 'Agent' or 'Conversational Retrieval' template.
  2. 2 Add a chat model and (for RAG) a document loader plus a vector store.
  3. 3 Test in the chat panel.
  4. 4 Deploy as an API or copy the embed snippet for your site.

Frequently asked questions

Is Flowise free to self-host?

Yes. Flowise is open-source and free to run on your own machine or server. You pay only for model API usage and any optional managed hosting.