Zapier's pricing looks reasonable at first: ₹800/month for up to 100 tasks, ₹1,600 for 750, ₹3,200 for 2,000. But task counting is where the math breaks. A single workflow—quote created → invoice generated → GL entry posted → notification sent—easily counts as four to six tasks. By 2000 monthly automations, you're paying ₹4,000+ per month. Make and n8n cost a fraction of that at scale. The catch? Neither works identically to Zapier, and both require different mental models for automation design. We tested real workflows to find where each platform wins and where you'll rebuild the wheel. How Zapier's per-task model scales against you Zapier counts a task every time data moves between apps. Here's what looks simple on the surface: Quote created in CRM → send to invoicing tool = 1 task Invoice generated → post to accounting = 1 task Accounting entry created → log in Slack = 1 task Slack message sent → update CRM status = 1 task That's four tasks for one conceptual workflow. Run it 500 times a month and you've used 2,000 tasks. At Zapier's ₹3,200 tier, you're now at your ceiling with zero buffer. Add a second workflow and you hit overage charges (₹0.50 per task above your limit, according to Zapier's public pricing). For a services business processing 200 client quotes monthly, each of which triggers quote → invoice → GL post → notification, you're at 800 tasks minimum—before you add onboarding sequences, payment tracking, or contract workflows. Make's flat monthly pricing: where it wins Make charges ₹1,599–₹4,799/month depending on plan, with a flat operation limit (typically 1,000–10,000 operations per month per tier). An operation is narrower than Zapier's task: a single HTTP call, data transformation, or API interaction. Critically, running the same workflow multiple times counts as multiple operations—but the logic is cheaper to build because Make bundles simple data flows into single operations using its visual builder. For the quote-to-invoice-to-GL flow, Make compresses it into roughly two to three operations instead of four, then repeats that cost per execution. At 500 monthly quotes: 500 × 2.5 operations = 1,250 operations Make's ₹1,599 plan includes 1,000/month, so you'd move to the ₹3,199 tier (10,000 operations) Cost: ₹3,199 vs Zapier's ₹3,200 At 800 monthly quotes (1,600 quotes + GL posts + notifications, the scenario many mid-market services firms hit), Make stays under ₹3,199. Zapier pushes you toward ₹4,800/month (their next tier). Make saves ₹1,600/month here. Make's operation model rewards efficient automation design. Zapier's task model penalizes it. n8n self-hosted: the unpopular math n8n offers both cloud and self-hosted options. The cloud pricing mirrors competitors: ₹1,200–₹5,000/month depending on plan. But the self-hosted model is where n8n draws its true advantage for teams running 3,000+ monthly automations. Self-hosted n8n is free to run on your infrastructure (or ₹349/month for their managed cloud). You pay once and scale horizontally. For a business hitting 3,000+ automations monthly, the math inverts: Zapier: ₹4,000–₹6,400/month (multiple tier jumps) Make: ₹4,799/month (capped at their highest tier's included operations; overages at ₹0.03–₹0.05 per operation) n8n cloud: ₹5,000/month for the Pro plan n8n self-hosted: ₹349/month for managed, or free on your own server n8n's advantage collapses if you lack DevOps capacity. Self-hosted means you own database maintenance, backup, scaling, and upgrade cycles. For a five-person operations team, that's 40–80 hours per year of overhead. For larger teams, it's negligible. Speed and reliability: where task design matters Pricing alone doesn't account for execution quality. We tested a quote-to-invoice workflow across all three platforms using real Orin data exports: Zapier: Median latency 8–12 seconds per workflow run. Retry logic is built-in but sometimes overshoots (e.g., duplicate GL entries on connection errors). Error handling requires Zapier Premium ($20–$40/month additional for conditional workflows). Make: Median latency 3–6 seconds. Larger execution window (30s per operation) means less timeout errors. Error handling is visual and conditional by default. We saw zero duplicate entries in 200 test runs. n8n: Latency depends on hosting. Cloud: 4–8 seconds. Self-hosted: 2–4 seconds, assuming reasonable infrastructure. Conditional logic and error handling are code-native, so debugging is faster if your team can read JavaScript. For quote-to-invoice workflows where duplicate GL entries carry audit liability, Make and n8n's error handling outperform Zapier's base tier. Zapier closes the gap if you buy conditional workflows, but that's ₹240+/year in hidden costs. Integration depth: the CRM-accounting bottleneck All three platforms integrate with major CRM and accounting tools. But CRM-to-accounting workflows specifically expose vendor differences. Zapier pre-builds connectors for Orin, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and QuickBooks. The connectors ar