Your Zapier bill started at ₹800. By month three you added integrations. By month six, you hit the ceiling: ₹2,400 for 5,000 monthly tasks—and the growth curve is still climbing. At that point, you're not looking at Zapier anymore. You're looking at n8n (self-hosted at ₹0, or managed at ₹480/month), Make (which charges per operation, not per task), or whether your CRM has native automation you never turned on. The math isn't hidden. It's just invisible until you need it. Let me show you when the flip happens, and how to count the tasks you're actually running. Zapier's pricing edge expires at 500 tasks/month Zapier's free tier: 100 tasks/month. Pro plan at ₹800: 750 tasks/month. Team plan at ₹1,600: 2,000 tasks/month. Most small teams land in that ₹800 slot because it feels permanent. It isn't. A single integration—CRM to invoice tool, booking calendar to client email, form submission to spreadsheet—can burn 100–200 tasks/month without you noticing. Add three integrations. You're at 600–800 tasks by month two. By month four, you've hit 1,500 and you're paying ₹1,600 for the next tier. Here's where most teams stop counting: each Zapier task is one execution of one trigger and one action. A "new Calendly booking → send SMS reminder" counts as one task. But if your booking triggers an email, and a Slack notification, and a spreadsheet row, those are three tasks. If your form submission syncs to your CRM contact record, your pipeline, and fires off a welcome email, that's four tasks—and only 25% of the actual work is the CRM sync. At 500+ monthly tasks, Zapier costs ₹800. Make costs ₹0 (first 1,000 operations free) to ₹250 for 10,000 operations. n8n self-hosted costs ₹0 after setup. The TCO axis flips hard. Map your actual task load by use case Before you migrate, count the real number. Not the integrations. The tasks. CRM-to-invoice sync (a common workflow) Trigger: New deal closed in your CRM (1 task). Action 1: Create invoice in billing tool (1 task). Action 2: Send invoice to client via email (1 task). Action 3: Log the invoice ID back to the CRM contact record (1 task). Total per deal: 4 tasks. Volume: 50 deals/month = 200 tasks/month for one workflow. Booking calendar to client communication Trigger: New Calendly booking (1 task). Action 1: Send booking confirmation SMS (1 task). Action 2: Add booking to spreadsheet for tracking (1 task). Action 3: Add contact to CRM (1 task). Action 4: Send 24-hour reminder SMS (1 task—a separate Zapier schedule). Total per booking: 5 tasks. Volume: 40 bookings/month = 200 tasks/month . Form submission to multi-tool sync Trigger: Form submitted (Typeform, Gravity Forms, etc., 1 task). Action 1: Create CRM contact (1 task). Action 2: Add contact to email list (1 task). Action 3: Create task in project tool (1 task). Action 4: Send webhook to internal Slack (1 task). Total per form submission: 5 tasks. Volume: 60 submissions/month = 300 tasks/month . Three workflows. That's 700 tasks/month . You've already moved past Zapier's ₹800 tier. When Make beats Zapier on price Make (formerly Integromat) doesn't charge per task. It charges per operation , and the definition is narrower. One trigger + one action = one operation. But it also offers a free tier: 1,000 operations/month at ₹0. At 700 operations/month, you pay ₹0 on Make. You pay ₹800 on Zapier. Make's paid tier starts at ₹50/month for 10,000 operations. At 5,000 operations (roughly Zapier's Team plan threshold), you pay ₹50 on Make, ₹1,600 on Zapier. Make also doesn't rate-limit based on plan. You can run complex multi-step workflows on the free tier; Zapier locks deep integrations behind higher pricing. That matters if you're building custom business logic rather than simple point-to-point syncs. The catch: Make's free tier expires after 40 scenarios (workflow templates). Zapier's doesn't. If you have 20+ active automations, you'll hit Make's 40-scenario limit and need to consolidate. Still cheaper than Zapier at scale, but you need to architect workflows tighter. n8n self-hosted: zero per-task cost, but engineer cost n8n is open-source. Deploy it yourself on AWS, DigitalOcean, or your own server, and your per-task cost is ₹0. Truly zero. You pay for hosting: roughly ₹300–₹500/month for a small instance. The trade-off is upfront setup and ongoing maintenance. You need someone who can: Deploy the application (30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on your infrastructure). Manage OAuth credentials and API keys (1–2 hours per new integration). Handle version upgrades and security patches (2–4 hours per quarter). Debug failures (varies; automation failures are usually app-side, not n8n-side, but you're responsible for investigating). If that person is a technical co-founder or your engineering team, the cost is labor you're already paying. If you need to hire a contractor, budget ₹2,000–₹5,000 upfront and ₹500–₹1,000/month for maintenance. n8n Managed Cloud (their hosted version) costs ₹480/month for up to 10 million executions.