Zapier starts free but scales brutally. At 50,000 tasks/month you're paying $299. At 100,000 you're at $599. We've moved every agency client off Zapier — here's the honest breakdown of why.
Zapier's free tier gives you 100 tasks/month. Sounds fine — until you realise that every action in a Zap counts as a separate task. A 5-step Zap triggered 200 times a month uses 1,000 tasks. Add three more Zaps and you're paying before you've automated anything meaningful.
The real pain kicks in at agency scale. A client with a busy CRM, active Shopify store, and a few reporting Zaps can easily burn through 50,000–100,000 tasks/month. That's $299–$599/month — every single month.
| Platform | Tasks/month | Monthly | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zapier Professional | 100,000 | $599 | $7,188 |
| n8n Cloud (Starter) | Unlimited | $20 | $240 |
| n8n Self-hosted (VPS) | Unlimited | ~$12 | ~$144 |
| Make (Integromat) | 100,000 ops | $99 | $1,188 |
To be fair: Zapier is genuinely polished. 7,000+ app integrations, human-readable error messages, and non-technical users can maintain Zaps without help. If your team has non-developers building their own automations, Zapier is still defensible under $100/month.
Our rule of thumb: spending more than $100/month on Zapier? Migration pays for itself in under 3 months.
If you're ready to make the switch, we migrate clients off Zapier regularly and can have your stack running on n8n within a week.