You've heard that Zapier is expensive. But the real pain doesn't show up in the headline price—it hides in the task count. A small automation budget of ₹800 per month looks reasonable until you run 2000 tasks, then 3000, then hit 5000 and realize you're paying ₹8,000+ while competitors flat-rate at ₹1,600. This post maps the exact inflection point where Zapier stops making financial sense, and shows you what Make and n8n actually cost when you normalize for the same work. How Zapier's pricing punishes you past 2000 tasks Zapier's tiered model looks clean on the surface: ₹799/month for the Professional plan includes 500 tasks per month. But most real workflows don't fit neatly into that box. Here's the real scaling curve: Professional (₹799): 500 tasks/month. Per-task cost = ₹1.60. Advanced (₹2,399): 2,000 tasks/month. Per-task cost = ₹1.20. Expert (₹4,799): 5,000 tasks/month. Per-task cost = ₹0.96. The catch: you can't buy a single extra task at ₹0.96. You buy the entire tier. So if you run 2,100 tasks in a month, you've jumped from the ₹799 plan into the ₹2,399 plan. That's a ₹1,600 penalty for 100 extra tasks—a marginal cost of ₹16 per task. This tier-jumping problem is invisible until you audit your actual automation usage. Most teams don't. They assume their 15 Zaps are lightweight. Then they add SMS reminders for abandoned bookings, email follow-ups for failed payments, Slack notifications for new leads, WhatsApp order confirmations, and suddenly they're hitting 1,800 tasks—bumping them over the cliff into the next tier. Make's flat-rate model: you pay once, add infinitely Make (formerly Integromat) works differently. Their Professional plan costs ₹1,399/month and includes 10,000 operations (Make's term for tasks). Operations are cheaper to count—a single Zap might equal two to four operations depending on complexity—but the effective math still favors Make at scale. Real comparison: Make Free: ₹0, 1,000 ops/month. Useful only for testing. Make Professional (₹1,399): 10,000 ops/month. Per-op cost = ₹0.14. Make Team (₹2,799): 50,000 ops/month. Per-op cost = ₹0.06. The cost-per-operation floor is much lower, but the operative advantage is not the rate—it's the ceiling. You get 10,000 operations and you can use all 10,000 without an upgrade. The tier jump happens only when you exceed it. Zapier's tier jumps happen at 500, 2,000, and 5,000. Make's happen at 10,000, 50,000, and 100,000. That's a vastly wider runway. A team running 3,000 Zapier-equivalent tasks pays Zapier ₹2,399 (Expert plan). On Make, they'd pay ₹1,399 (Professional). That's a ₹1,000 monthly saving, or 42% less. n8n: self-hosted or cloud, effectively unlimited at a flat rate n8n pricing splits into two flavors: cloud-hosted and self-hosted. The cloud model mirrors Make's structure; the self-hosted model mirrors nothing else in the market. n8n Cloud: Starter (₹0): 20 workflows, 400 executions/month. Free tier with guardrails. Pro (₹999): unlimited workflows, 20,000 executions/month. Business (₹3,499): 200,000 executions/month, priority support. n8n Self-Hosted (Docker, Kubernetes): ₹0 upfront. You pay only for your cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, etc.). Unlimited workflows, unlimited executions. Scaling cost is infrastructure, not per-execution licensing. For a team running 3,000 monthly tasks, the n8n Pro cloud plan (₹999) is the cheapest option yet—less than half of Zapier's Advanced tier, and 28% cheaper than Make Professional. If that team has engineering capability and wants no per-execution tax at all, self-hosted n8n costs only the underlying server (typically ₹2,000–5,000/month for a small Kubernetes cluster). The inflection point: Zapier's cost advantage evaporates somewhere between 500 and 2,000 tasks per month. Below 500, Zapier's simplicity justifies the premium. Above 2,000, Make or n8n cost 40–60% less. Integration breadth and setup effort: where Zapier still wins Cost alone doesn't tell the full story. Zapier has ~6,000 integrations. Make has ~4,500. n8n has ~500 pre-built connectors but lets you build custom ones (if you can code). This gap matters. If your workflow needs to sync data between Xero, Stripe, your custom order management system, Slack, WhatsApp, and a specific Australian accounting tool your bookkeeper insists on, Zapier will have pre-built connectors for most of them. Make will too, though you might hit gaps. n8n will require custom development for proprietary tools—a skill tax that Zapier and Make don't impose. Setup friction also favors Zapier and Make. Both have drag-and-drop UI builders that non-engineers can operate. n8n's cloud interface is improving, but the self-hosted version requires DevOps familiarity. If your team has no engineers, self-hosted n8n is not an option. The honest ranking: Easiest to set up, most integrations: Zapier. Also the most expensive at scale. Best balance of ease and cost: Make. Slightly smaller integration library, same UI simplicity, flat-rate at much lower cost. Low