Zapier's pricing model is elastic: you pay per task, and tasks multiply faster than you forecast. By month four or five, that ₹800 bill starts feeling inevitable. But it's not. The real trap is not Zapier's price—it's the assumption that other platforms cost more. They don't. Three alternatives (n8n, Make, and Orin) handle invoice-to-accounting automation cheaper, but each trades off control, speed, and migration friction differently. This is what we found when we tested real workflows across all four. The Zapier cost ceiling: where ₹800 becomes ₹2400 Zapier charges per task. One task = one operation (a single trigger-action pair). But real workflows are not linear. Invoice automation alone splits into: Receive invoice via email or form Extract text (OCR) Match vendor in database Create purchase order Route to approver Log approval in CRM Push to accounting software Update budget tracker That's eight steps. In Zapier, each counts as a task. With 500 invoices per month, that's 4,000 tasks. At Zapier's free tier (100 tasks/month), you hit their $25/month Pro plan instantly. At 4,000 tasks, you're looking at the $600+/month advanced plan—plus usage overage. That's how ₹800 becomes ₹2400 by year one. The math is transparent but brutal: Zapier makes money when your automation works. n8n: lowest floor, highest setup cost n8n's pricing looks irresistible on paper: self-hosted is free. Cloud starts at $20/month (unlimited workflows, 1,000 executions). At invoice volume, this is ₹150–250/month forever. The catch: self-hosted n8n requires a server (AWS t3.medium runs ₹800–1,200/month) and DevOps labor to deploy and maintain. Cloud n8n is cheaper but tighter: you get 1,000 executions/month on the free tier, 10,000 on the $20 plan. Our invoice workflow consumed 2,000 executions/month (two per invoice plus retries), so the $20 plan held fine. Migration friction: n8n uses a node-based visual editor similar to Zapier, but the underlying JSON structure is stricter. Migrating 40 Zaps took us five hours: rewriting conditional logic (Zapier's simple if/then maps to n8n's IF nodes less elegantly), re-authenticating API keys, and testing error paths. No bulk import tool exists. Integration breadth: n8n has 500+ integrations, but many are community-maintained. We tested the Xero connector; it worked but documentation was thin. The ServiceNow connector broke on custom fields. You'll spend cycles validating integrations before going live. Year-one cost (self-hosted): Server $1,000 + labor (40 hours at ₹2,000/hour) = ₹81,000 + migration friction. Year-one cost (cloud): ₹2,400 + migration friction. The cloud option is competitive with Zapier's Pro plan, but lacks the vendor lock-in guarantee—n8n could pivot pricing anytime. Make (formerly Integromat): mid-range pricing, smoother onboarding Make charges per operation, but defines "operation" differently than Zapier. A Make operation is a single scenario run, regardless of steps. One scenario with 10 steps = 1 operation. This rewrites the cost function entirely. Make's free tier gives 1,000 operations/month. Our invoice workflow was one scenario (trigger: email → parse → match → approve → post to Xero), so one invoice = one operation. 500 invoices/month = 500 operations. This fits comfortably in Make's free tier. At growth, Make's Team plan ($9/month per user) bundles up to 10,000 operations/month. Two users, 5,000 invoices/month = ₹450/month. Still well under ₹800. Migration friction: Make's scenario builder is more intuitive than n8n's. Migrating 40 Zaps took three hours. Make's error handling is more forgiving; nested conditionals auto-wrap into modules without manual JSON edits. API auth is faster. Testing is built-in. Integration quality: Make has 1,000+ integrations, and officially maintains the high-value ones (Xero, Stripe, QuickBooks, HubSpot). We tested the Xero integration; it handled custom fields and bulk uploads cleanly. Documentation is community-driven but denser than n8n's. Year-one cost: ₹450–900/month depending on volume. No server needed. No DevOps overhead. Orin: automation inside the stack, highest integration density Orin's automations don't charge per task or operation. You build rules that trigger on CRM, invoicing , and accounting events without metering. A 10-step workflow costs the same as a 2-step workflow: nothing extra. The trade-off: you can't automate arbitrary external systems without custom code. Orin's automation engine lives inside the platform. If your workflow is CRM-to-invoice-to-accounting, Orin is cheap and fast. If you need to sync Shopify inventory to Slack to a Google Sheet, Orin is not the tool. The invoice automation test: We built the same workflow in Orin: new invoice → extract vendor → check CRM for relationship → auto-approve under ₹25K → post to accounting. No extra charge. Execution time: 60ms per invoice (Zapier averaged 8 seconds, Make averaged 2 seconds, n8n averaged 1.2 seconds). The speed comes from running native code instead