One task, three bills
Take a typical online-shop workflow. A new order arrives, the system creates a CRM card, sends the manager a Telegram message and adds a row to the accounting sheet. Four steps: a trigger and three actions.
The three most common automation services count this workflow very differently:
- Zapier bills tasks — every successful action. The trigger is not a task. One run of the workflow is three tasks.
- Make bills credits — every module run, trigger included. One run is four credits.
- n8n bills executions — a whole workflow run, however many steps it has. One run is one execution.
- 1New order (trigger)
- 2CRM card
- 3Telegram message
- 4Sheet row
Per Zapier Help ("trigger steps do not count as tasks"), Make Help ("each module run is an operation; 1 operation = 1 credit") and n8n's pricing page ("pay for full executions, not for each step").
The more steps a workflow has, the further the bills diverge. A ten-step workflow is still one execution in n8n, and ten credits in Make.
What it costs per month
We priced the same four-step workflow at two volumes: 1,000 orders a month (a small shop) and 10,000 (a mid-sized one), taking the cheapest plan whose limit fits the volume, billed monthly.
| 1,000 runs | 10,000 runs | |
|---|---|---|
| Zapier, Professional | 3,000 tasks → 5,000-task plan — $133.50 | 30,000 tasks → 50,000-task plan — $433.50 |
| Make, Core | 4,000 credits → 10,000-credit plan — $10.59 | 40,000 credits → 40,000-credit plan — $34.12 |
| n8n, cloud | 1,000 executions → Starter (2,500) — €24 | 10,000 executions → Pro (10,000) — €60 |
Bar length is nominal. Euros are not converted to dollars; the exchange rate does not change the conclusion. Annual billing is cheaper: Zapier by a third, n8n by 17%, Make by at least 15% (as stated on their pricing pages).
At 1,000 runs Zapier costs about 12.6 times as much as Make; at 10,000, 12.7 times. Between Zapier and n8n the gap is 5–7 times, depending on the euro rate.
That does not mean Zapier always loses. Its advantage is the free trigger, so for a one-action workflow the bills even out. And at 10,000 runs n8n is already at the ceiling of its Pro plan: the next month of growth requires Business, at €800 a month.
The hidden cost: trigger checks
This is where Make budgets most often go wrong.
Many triggers work by polling: every few minutes the service checks whether new sheet rows or new emails have appeared. In Make, each such check is a module run, which is a credit — even when there is no new data. Make's own help gives the example: a module watching for new rows in a Google Sheet uses one operation per check.
Take one workflow in which nothing at all happens during the month:
- checking every 15 minutes: 4 × 24 × 30 = 2,880 credits a month;
- checking every minute: 60 × 24 × 30 = 43,200 credits — more than the whole 40,000-credit plan.
The way out is instant triggers (webhooks): the source service sends the event when it happens, so there are no empty checks. If your CRM or shop can send webhooks, use them. If not, set the longest interval the task allows.
Your own server: when n8n is free
n8n has a Community Edition you can install on your own server with no charge per execution. For a business running thousands of workflows a month this is the cheapest option: you pay only for the server, and the simplest cloud servers cost a few euros a month.
But it is free only in licence terms. Updates, backups, access security and recovery after a failure are your job. If nobody in the company understands what a server is and how to update it, the cloud plan costs less than the first outage nobody can fix.
How to choose
- Write your workflow out step by step and count how many units it uses in each service. Five minutes of work, and it is what sets the price.
- Estimate the volume — how many times a month the workflow will run. Use real numbers: last month's orders, enquiries, emails.
- Check the integrations. All three connect to popular CRMs, spreadsheets and messengers, but a niche Ukrainian service may exist in only one of them. If the integration you need is missing, price does not matter.
- Start on the free plan. Zapier gives 100 tasks and two-step workflows only; Make gives 1,000 credits, two active scenarios and checks no more often than every 15 minutes. n8n cloud has a trial.
Our position
For a small business launching its first workflows without a technical person, Make is the cheapest start: on a typical workflow it costs 12 times less than Zapier — provided the triggers are instant rather than polling. Once workflows multiply and grow longer, moving to n8n pays off.
The position does not hold if the integration you need exists only in Zapier, or if your workflow is a single action running a few hundred times a month. Then the price gap is a few dollars, and the time spent learning an unfamiliar service costs more.
Prices checked on 6 October 2026 on the pricing pages of zapier.com, make.com and n8n.io; counting rules from Zapier and Make Help. Prices are shown as the services present them; taxes may apply.