Review
We built 23 automations across a small business stack. Zapier connected everything in an afternoon and then charged us for every task it ran.
Nothing connects more apps with less effort. The task-based pricing means high-volume automations get expensive quickly, and that is precisely when you should look at Make or a small script instead.
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Every small business ends up with the same problem: eight tools that do not talk to each other and a person copying data between them. Zapier's promise is to be that person. We built 23 automations across a real stack — store, accounting, CRM, email, spreadsheets, Slack — and ran them for two months.
Pick a trigger, pick an action, map the fields. The first zap took four minutes; the tenth took two. Nobody involved needed technical training, and the interface explains itself well enough that our operations lead built eleven of them alone.
Filters and paths cover most real logic — only send to the CRM if the order is over a threshold, route enquiries by topic, format dates properly on the way through.
The wins were mundane and valuable.
Tasks are counted per action, not per zap. A three-step automation triggered by every website enquiry used tasks four times faster than we predicted. Two of our 23 zaps accounted for over 60% of the monthly usage, and moving just those to Make cut costs substantially with no functional loss.
When something fails, the run history tells you where, but tracing data through a long multi-path zap is tedious. Anything with more than about six steps starts to feel like programming without a debugger — a sign the workflow belongs somewhere else.
Use Zapier for breadth and speed: the long tail of little automations that each save someone ten minutes a week. Audit the two or three highest-volume zaps every quarter and move them to Make or a script before they quietly become your biggest software cost.
| Free plan | 100 tasks/mo, two-step zaps only |
|---|---|
| Professional | From $19.99/mo, multi-step, paths, webhooks |
| Team | From $69/mo with shared workspaces |
| Apps | 7,000+ integrations |
| Update time | Polling from 15 minutes down to 1 minute by plan |
| Free trial | 14 days of premium features |
Scores from our own testing. Prices are launch RRP in USD.
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