You start with Zapier's free tier. Five zaps hum along quietly. Then you add a booking flow, a contract signature webhook, an invoice sync to your accounting system. By month three, you're at 247 tasks. Month six: 892 tasks. Month nine, you cross 3,000 tasks monthly and the invoice hits: ₹24,000 a year. For a team of six doing real work—customer acquisition, contract lifecycle, payment routing—that's not noise. And it forces a question that Zapier's pricing tier structure wants you not to ask: is there a cheaper way to move data at this volume? The answer is yes. Make and n8n both cost less at 3,000 tasks monthly. But cost is only part of the math. Setup complexity, feature parity, and switching friction matter just as much. This post compares all three on ground truth, not marketing claims. How Zapier's pricing scales to ₹24,000 Zapier charges per task. A task is one successful execution of a zap—a record created, an email sent, a field updated. Here's how it stacks: Free: up to 100 tasks/month. Zero cost. Bottleneck: five zaps maximum, no multi-step workflows, no premium apps. Starter (₹8,800/year): up to 750 tasks/month. Includes 20 zaps, email and basic integrations. Professional (₹18,480/year): up to 7,500 tasks/month. Includes 100 zaps, webhooks, premium app access, basic automation rules. Advanced (₹36,960/year): 100,000+ tasks/month. Includes team features, advanced filtering, custom API calls. At 3,000 tasks monthly (36,000 yearly), you blow past Starter at 750 and need Professional. That's ₹18,480 yearly. But here's the trap: if you grow to 3,500 tasks in a single month, you overage at ₹0.02 per extra task. Overage costs on Professional tier climb fast. Real SMBs with seasonal spikes (end-of-month invoicing, Q4 campaigns, contract bursts) often land between Professional and Advanced, bleeding money on overages. At consistent 3,000 tasks/month, you stay in Professional. Call it ₹18,480 as the true baseline. Make's model: ₹12,000 at the same volume Make (formerly Integromat) charges by operations, not tasks. An operation is a billable event—a trigger, a module execution, or a filter. The model is less granular than Zapier's, which sometimes costs more, sometimes less, depending on your flow complexity. Make's pricing tiers: Free: 1,000 operations/month. Unlimited scenarios (equivalent to zaps). No premium apps, no webhooks. Standard (₹7,800/year): 10,000 operations/month. Includes webhooks, premium apps, 100+ integrations, basic automation. Pro (₹18,600/year): 50,000 operations/month. Includes advanced features, custom modules, higher throughput. Business (₹36,000/year): 200,000+ operations/month. Team features, dedicated support, audit logs. At 3,000 tasks/month with Zapier, your Make equivalent operation count depends on flow structure. A typical Zapier zap (trigger + 2–3 actions) maps to 3–5 operations in Make. Conservative estimate: 9,000 operations. You'd land in Make's Standard tier at ₹7,800 yearly—roughly 42% cheaper than Zapier Professional. The catch: Make's interface is denser. Scenarios (their term for workflows) require more deliberate setup. Free tier operations ceiling is lower (1,000 vs. Zapier's 100, but free tier is rarely the real constraint). Most SMBs moving to Make spend 2–3 weeks rebuilding zaps and learning the UI. n8n: Self-hosted or cloud, but the math is different n8n breaks from the per-task pricing model entirely. You can self-host for free (minus infrastructure costs) or use n8n Cloud on a fixed monthly tier. This changes the math fundamentally for high-volume automation. n8n Cloud pricing: Free: 1 workflow, 100 executions/month, no premium apps. Starter (₹1,200/month or ₹12,000/year): 50 workflows, 50,000 executions/month, 300+ integrations, webhooks. Pro (₹2,400/month or ₹24,000/year): unlimited workflows, 500,000 executions/month, all integrations, advanced features. Business (₹6,000/month): SLA, dedicated support, SSO, audit logs. At 3,000 tasks/month, n8n Cloud Starter at ₹12,000/year is the answer. Single lowest tier covers you comfortably (50,000 executions allocated). That's 35% cheaper than Zapier Professional and 54% cheaper than Make Pro—if you map tasks and executions 1:1, which most workflows do. But self-hosting n8n on your own server flips the economics again. Self-hosted n8n is free (Apache 2.0 license). You pay only infrastructure—a ₹5,000–₹12,000/month cloud instance running Node.js, PostgreSQL, and n8n itself. For teams already running Kubernetes or Docker, n8n self-hosted is the cheapest path. For teams without DevOps bandwidth, self-hosting becomes a ₹60K–₹144K annual sink in infrastructure, deployment, and security patches. Then it's not cheaper than Make or Zapier anymore. Feature gaps and setup tax Cost per task masks the real switching cost. All three platforms support webhooks, conditional logic, and multi-step flows. But gaps matter: Zapier advantages Largest app library (6,000+ integrations). You'll find niche connectors (Indian invoicing pla