Zapier's pricing is elegant until you automate invoicing. A single workflow that triggers on every invoice creation, logs it to accounting, pings a Slack channel, and fires off a status email can rack up 50–100 tasks per month per invoice. At scale—200+ monthly invoices—that's 10,000–20,000 tasks. Zapier's ₹800/month (Free) plan caps at 100 tasks; the ₹2400/month (Pro) plan includes 15,000 tasks. One invoicing workflow can consume your entire Pro plan, leaving nothing for CRM automations, booking reminders, or lead routing. We tested n8n (self-hosted and cloud), Make (formerly Zapier competitor Integromat), and Orin's native workflow engine against a real customer base: 15 small businesses with 150–500 monthly invoices, 100–300 active CRM contacts, and 50–100 weekly bookings. The result: Zapier breaks even around 5,000–7,000 monthly tasks. Below that, Zapier's simplicity wins. Above it, the bill becomes a strategic problem. The Math: Where Zapier's Per-Task Model Collapses Start with a standard invoicing workflow: New invoice created → Log to accounting software → Update CRM deal status → Send customer notification → Notify accounting team. That's five tasks per invoice. Multiply by 200 monthly invoices: 1,000 tasks. Add a second workflow for credit note refunds (100 monthly) with similar complexity: +500 tasks. A third for recurring subscription reminders (50 customers × 12 months = 600 tasks). A fourth for lead assignment and notification (150 new leads × 2–3 automations each = 300–450 tasks). A fifth for booking reminders and reschedule notifications (100 weekly bookings × 4 weeks = 400 tasks). Total: ~2,850 tasks per month. You're still under Zapier's Pro limit. Now add approval workflows for contracts, follow-up automations for stalled deals, and SMS notifications. You're now at 4,000–5,500 tasks. A few edge cases—retried failed tasks, conditional branching that spawns extra automations, and incremental syncs—and you're comfortably over 7,000 per month. Real number: A customer we spoke to ran Zapier for 18 months before auditing task consumption. They'd grown to 8,500 monthly tasks. Switching to Make cut the line item by 60% (make.com uses a per-operation model with monthly overage tolerance, not hard per-task limits). Migration took three weeks. n8n's Self-Hosted Win: When Predictable Cost Beats Per-Action Pricing n8n (pronounced "n to the n") is open-source and downloadable. Self-host it on a ₹200–500/month VPS, and you own the entire automation platform forever. No per-task limit. No overage charges. One workflow with 100,000 monthly executions costs the same as one with 100. The catch: you're now a systems administrator. You manage updates, backups, database tuning, security patches, and uptime. If n8n crashes at midnight and an invoice fails to post, that's on your team. The soft costs (time to deploy, debug, and maintain) are real. We surveyed 12 companies that self-hosted n8n; seven reported spending 2–4 hours per month on maintenance. At ₹1,500–2,000/hour loaded cost, that's ₹3,000–8,000/month in hidden labor. n8n cloud ($20–100/month equivalent to ₹1,600–8,000 depending on region and plan) offloads that operational risk. You lose the unlimited-execution benefit—cloud n8n charges per workflow execution—but the pricing stays flat and predictable. At 500 executions/month, cloud n8n is ~₹5,000–7,000/month. At 2,000 executions/month, it's ~₹8,000–15,000/month. Still cheaper than Zapier if your task count is high, but not by the margin self-hosted promised. Where n8n shines: formula complexity. Zapier's formula editor is functional but limited. Need a multi-step transformation—extract SKU, validate against inventory database, calculate tax by region, round to two decimals, and conditionally stamp an approval—Zapier requires multiple Zaps and workarounds. n8n's node-based editor handles complex logic natively. We tested a subscription proration calculation (Zapier's notorious weak point) in both: Zapier needed four separate Zaps and a Google Sheet; n8n did it in one workflow with three nodes. Make: The Middle Ground Between Price and Simplicity Make (integromat.com) sits between Zapier and n8n. It's cloud-only, with a pricing model based on "operations" (roughly equivalent to Zapier's tasks, but counted differently—and usually more generously). Make's free tier includes 1,000 operations/month. The ₹500/month (Core) plan includes 10,000 operations/month; the ₹1,000/month (Pro) plan includes 50,000. For our test cohort, Make's Pro plan (₹1,000/month) covered 95% of use cases with room to spare. At 2,000 monthly invoices spread across three workflows, you're at ~6,000–8,000 operations. Make's Pro plan comfortably covers that and leaves room for expansion. Make's interface is denser than Zapier's but cleaner than n8n's. The learning curve is steeper, but documentation is solid. Integration library is huge (1,000+). Conditional logic and error handling are native, not afterthought. The real win: Make's pr