Most companies don't notice Zapier's pricing cliff until month six. You start with 50 tasks at ₹300/month, feel efficient, add another 200 tasks, then hit 1,000. Suddenly you're paying ₹2,400 per month for the same automations that cost ₹500 on Make or n8n. That's not an anomaly—it's the SaaS pricing math that catches every scaling team. The real question isn't whether Make or n8n are cheaper. It's whether the price difference justifies the operational overhead: where your developer hours go, what integration debt you accumulate, and when—or if—self-hosting makes economic sense. Zapier's pricing cliff: how 1,000 tasks cost ₹2,400/month Zapier charges per task execution, and the unit cost climbs with volume: Tier 1 (0–100 tasks/month): ₹300/month (included) Tier 2 (101–1,000 tasks/month): ₹900/month base + overage Tier 3 (1,001–5,000 tasks/month): ₹2,400/month base + overage Tier 4 (5,001–10,000 tasks/month): ₹6,000/month base + overage At exactly 1,000 tasks, you cross into the ₹2,400 tier. A team running 50 Zaps at 20 executions each per month hits 1,000 tasks almost silently—especially if those Zaps include loops, multi-step filters, or polling triggers that Zapier counts as separate task executions. The trap: each small automation feels cheap in isolation. One Zap that syncs new Stripe charges to your CRM costs nothing. Five Zaps run the same way. But by Zap fifteen, you're paying ₹2,400 base just to turn them on. Make's and n8n's flat-rate advantage Make (formerly Integromat): ₹500–₹2,000/month unlimited operations within the tier. A 'scenario' (Make's term for a workflow) runs as many times as you build it, and each run can perform dozens of operations. Make charges for runs and complexity, but at a fixed cost per tier—not per execution. n8n: Self-hosted free with your infrastructure cost; cloud plans start at ₹250/month for execution-based pricing, but the scaling curve is gentler. At 1,000 monthly task equivalents, you're still under ₹1,000/month. n8n also prices by 'executions' but bundles more work per execution than Zapier does. The practical difference: Make and n8n don't penalize you for adding more automations once you hit their tier threshold. You hit the ceiling and stay there. Zapier keeps climbing. Developer time and integration debt: the hidden cost Switching from Zapier costs nothing in license fees. It costs time. Every automation you've built in Zapier lives in Zapier's UI. Moving to Make or n8n means: Workflow audit and mapping: 2–4 hours. Document which Zaps do what, identify dependencies, spot which ones have built-in logic (formatting, conditional branching) that needs rebuilding. API endpoint recreation: 4–8 hours. Make and n8n expose raw API calls more directly than Zapier. You'll likely rebuild 30–40% of your Zaps from scratch to gain efficiency and avoid Zapier's overhead layers. Testing and failover: 2–3 hours. Spot which automations have been running invisibly broken for months. (They all have.) Monitoring setup: 2–4 hours. Make and n8n require more hands-on observability than Zapier's passive reporting. Total migration cost: 10–20 developer hours at your blended rate. At ₹1,500/hour (mid-market), that's ₹15K–₹30K in time. But the math inverts fast: ₹2,400/month Zapier cost minus ₹500/month Make cost = ₹1,900/month savings. That developer time pays back in 8–16 weeks. API integration costs across platforms The three platforms don't charge for APIs, but they differ in how efficiently they consume API quotas from your connected tools. Zapier: Creates one API call per 'action' step. A five-step Zap that reads a Stripe invoice, enriches it with HubSpot contact data, writes to a Google Sheet, posts to Slack, and updates your internal database = 5 API calls per execution. At 100 executions/month = 500 calls. Most SaaS APIs include 1,000–10,000 calls/month free, so you rarely hit overage. But Zapier's inefficiency means you'll hit overages on APIs with tighter limits (e.g., some accounting platforms, older ERPs). Make: Bundles operations more aggressively. The same five-step workflow might consume 3–4 API calls because Make's HTTP modules and data transformers don't count as separate API calls to external systems. Over 100 monthly executions, you're at 300–400 calls—17% more efficient. n8n: Same efficiency as Make for most workflows, but self-hosted deployments let you cache API responses and batch requests in ways SaaS platforms cannot. At 5,000+ monthly executions, self-hosted n8n can cut API costs by 30–50% through batching alone. In dollar terms: if an API charges ₹0.01 per call over quota, Zapier costs you an extra ₹100–₹500/month on overage. Make saves ₹17–₹85/month. n8n self-hosted saves ₹150–₹250/month at high volume. Not earth-shattering, but real. The break-even model: when to self-host n8n Self-hosting n8n means running it on your own infrastructure (AWS, DigitalOcean, a Kubernetes cluster). It costs nothing in software fees but demands operational overhead. Infrastructure