You're paying ₹2,400 a month for Zapier at 2,000 tasks. Make will handle the same volume for ₹1,200. n8n, self-hosted, costs almost nothing. The math is seductive. But the moment you try to move, you hit walls that pricing doesn't mention: execution limits, error recovery that doesn't scale, and workflows that simply fail when you need them most. This is not a "Zapier is the best choice" article. It's not a "Make is the cheapest" article. It's what actually happens at different volumes, where the platforms crack, and the real cost of being wrong. The published pricing at 500, 1,000, 2,000, and 5,000 tasks per month Task counting is the first trap. Different platforms count differently. Zapier counts each step in a workflow as a task. Make counts each scenario run. n8n counts executions. A single workflow can behave very differently in each platform's arithmetic. Zapier : 500 tasks: ₹450/month (Pro plan, 500 included) 1,000 tasks: ₹900/month (2× Pro, or upgrade to 2,000-task plan at ₹1,200) 2,000 tasks: ₹1,200/month (Team plan, 2,000 included) 5,000 tasks: ₹2,400/month (upgrade to 5,000-task plan or add overages at ₹0.75 per 100 tasks) Make (formerly Integromat) : 500 operations: ₹240/month (Free tier bumps to ₹300, or Core plan at ₹250) 1,000 operations: ₹600/month (Pro plan, 10,000 ops included for ₹600; overages rare) 2,000 operations: ₹600/month (still Pro; you don't upgrade) 5,000 operations: ₹600/month (still Pro; Make doesn't meter closely above the plan limit) n8n (self-hosted) : 500–5,000 executions: ₹0/month (open-source, your server cost only) Typical server: ₹2,000–3,000/month for small VPS with one instance n8n Cloud (managed): ₹600/month at 5,000 executions; ₹1,200 at 50,000 At 2,000 tasks monthly, Zapier costs 2× Make. At 5,000, Zapier is 4× more. But "cheaper" does not mean "works." Where the platforms actually diverge: execution limits and recovery Pricing is the lie pricing tells. The truth lives in what happens when a workflow fails, or when your data isn't ready on time, or when you need to run 10,000 tasks in one day instead of spread across the month. Zapier's per-minute execution limit : Zapier queues tasks and enforces a rate limit. At high volume, this feels invisible—tasks execute in order, delays build, but you don't see them fail. At 2,000 tasks per month (roughly 65 per day), you're fine. At 5,000 per month, you start to feel queuing. If you need to backfill data—run 500 tasks in one hour—Zapier will queue them over several hours. This is not a hard failure; it's a soft slowdown that breaks SLAs. Make's concurrency model : Make allows up to 4 scenarios to run in parallel on the Pro plan (₹600). If your workflow runs 50 times per minute, Make queues internally. The key difference: Make's error handling is per-scenario. If scenario 87 fails, scenario 88 still runs. Zapier stops the entire task sequence on error and requires manual retry. For high-volume operations where some failures are inevitable, Make's model is more resilient. For operations where one failure means the whole workflow is poisoned, this doesn't matter. n8n's execution model : n8n runs on your infrastructure. There is no per-minute limit. There is no concurrency cap. You scale by adding more workers to your cluster. At 2,000 tasks per month on a ₹2,500 VPS, you'll never hit a limit. At 50,000 tasks per month, you might—and you'll see it clearly in server CPU and memory. The cost is transparency and responsibility: you own the infrastructure, and if it breaks, it's on you. Hidden costs that destroy the price advantage Zapier's overages are explicit: ₹0.75 per 100 tasks above your plan. Most people see this and price it. But Zapier also charges for storage (₹300/month for 1 GB), formatter operations that count against your task limit, and API calls within the Zapier interface that get billed as tasks. By the time you add storage and formatter bloat, a ₹1,200 Zapier bill becomes ₹1,600. Make charges for "operations," not tasks. Each step in a workflow is an operation. The same workflow in Make uses 40% fewer operations than in Zapier because Make's structure is more granular. But Make also charges ₹120 extra per month for basic API access that Zapier includes. At high volumes, this is noise. At 1,000 tasks, it matters. n8n's hidden cost is different: support and upgrades. The open-source version is free, but when your workflow breaks at 11 PM, you're debugging it yourself. n8n Cloud includes support at ₹600/month for 5,000 executions, plus ₹120 per additional 10,000. At 10,000 executions monthly, n8n Cloud (₹1,200) is cheaper than Zapier (₹1,200) but more expensive than Make (₹600). Where each platform actually breaks Zapier breaks when you need speed and recovery . A workflow that sends 500 invoices a day will take 4–5 hours to complete on Zapier because of queueing. If 10 fail, you retry manually. If you need invoicing to complete in one hour, Zapier will not do it without upgrading to a higher plan or running para