Your ops team shipped 47 Zapier workflows last quarter. Now the bill is ₹12,000/month and climbing. Each new integration someone adds to the dashboard is a small prayer that the task count stays below the next pricing ceiling. You've started asking uncomfortable questions: Is this vendor lock-in? Can we afford to automate one more process? The answer is usually yes—just not with Zapier. The Zapier pricing cliff: where ₹800 becomes ₹2,400 Zapier charges by task count, and the math looks reasonable at first. The ₹800/month plan ($10 USD) includes 750 tasks. But a task isn't one action. A task is a trigger plus one action. A multi-step workflow—send data to CRM, add a tag, create a calendar event—counts as three tasks. Real-world ops use cases blow past that ceiling in 6-8 weeks. A 200-contact monthly onboarding flow that creates a Slack notification, adds to your CRM, sends an SMS, and logs to accounting? That's 4 tasks per contact = 800 tasks/month from one workflow. Add lead routing (2 tasks × 150 leads), invoice notifications (2 tasks × 100 invoices), and user signup syncing (3 tasks × 50 new users), and you're already at 2,250 tasks/month. You've jumped to the ₹2,400 tier without moving the needle on your actual operations. The hidden tax: each workflow addition costs more in task budget than in engineering time. Make's flat-rate simplicity: ₹1,400 for unlimited tasks (sort of) Make (formerly Integromat) charges per execution, but the pricing tier you want is the ₹1,400/month plan: 10,000 operations/month. An operation is roughly equivalent to a Zapier task—trigger plus action—so the math is simpler. What makes Make competitive: Scenario builder is more visual. Multi-step workflows are easier to debug because you can see the whole flow at once, not nesting rules in layers of if-then trees. Operations budgets reset monthly. You can run 10,000 operations in the first week if you want. Zapier doesn't penalize month-end rushes the same way. Template library is deeper. Pre-built scenarios for Shopify, HubSpot, Slack, and 200+ others mean you're copying a working flow, not building from scratch. Data transformers are built in. Text parsing, date conversion, JSON mapping—these are free functions inside Make. Zapier charges per Formatter step. The real-world cost for that onboarding + routing + invoice + signup scenario? ₹1,400/month covers it, with 6,000 operations still unused. Zapier would cost ₹2,400. Make's weakness: their free tier is genuinely limited (100 operations/month). If you're testing a workflow before committing to a paid plan, you'll hit the ceiling fast. n8n's self-hosted escape hatch: ₹0 to ₹6,000, depending on your risk tolerance n8n inverts the equation. Cloud hosting is metered (₹500–₹1,400/month for 200K–1M executions), but the open-source version is free. You pay for hosting, not the platform. This matters for ops teams that already manage infrastructure: Self-host on AWS EC2 (₹1,500–₹2,500/month). A small instance runs 50,000+ workflows/month without sweating. Your ops team owns the infrastructure, not n8n. Docker deployment to your existing Kubernetes cluster. If you're already running containers, n8n becomes a microservice with near-zero marginal cost. No seat limits. Five team members building and debugging workflows cost the same as one. This is the inverse of Zapier's mindset. The catch: someone on your team needs to handle updates, security patches, and backups. If you're running n8n on a $5/month DigitalOcean droplet and that droplet gets compromised, your entire automation backbone is exposed. Most teams underestimate this operational debt. For a comparison of how these fit into larger platform ecosystems, see how native CRM automation can eliminate the Zapier dependency altogether. Feature parity test: the workflows that actually matter We tested a single complex workflow across all three platforms: incoming lead → CRM create/update → Slack notification → SMS confirmation → tag assignment based on lead source → HubSpot contact sync. Zapier: 6 steps, 6 tasks, ₹2,400/month plan needed (1,500 tasks included). 47% of budget wasted on headroom. Make: 6 steps, 6 operations, ₹1,400/month plan. All three platforms handle it identically. Error handling is slightly easier in Make because the UI shows the full scenario upfront. n8n (cloud): 6 steps, 6 executions, ₹500/month plan. Execution logs are better; you get deeper JSON visibility than Make or Zapier. n8n (self-hosted): Same 6 steps, but no per-execution cost. Operational overhead ~2 hours/month for maintenance. None of the three platforms failed the workflow. The difference is in what you're paying for headroom you won't use. When bundled CRM automation beats all three If the workflows you're building are entirely within your CRM ecosystem—lead scoring, contact tagging, task creation, document generation, invoice syncing—a native CRM with built-in automation deletes this problem. Example: You're using a CRM that includes native no-co