Zapier's headline price of ₹2,400/month looks reasonable until you actually run automation at scale. Three thousand tasks per month—a realistic volume for a 5–10 person team running daily reminders, lead syncs, invoice routing, and customer updates—costs ₹24,000 on Zapier. Make and n8n cost ₹600–₹1,200 for the same workload. But those cheaper platforms don't fail the same way. Make has integration depth issues; n8n needs hosting skills. This is not a straightforward three-way price win. It's a map of where each platform stops being useful. Zapier's task meter becomes your budget wall at 2,500+ monthly runs Zapier prices on task consumption. One task = one action (send an email, update a row, create a contact). A single workflow can burn through tasks quickly. A real example: You have a 5-person sales team. Every lead that enters your CRM needs to trigger: A Slack notification (1 task) A calendar invite to your booking system (2 tasks: fetch availability, create event) An email to the lead (1 task) A webhook to your custom data warehouse (1 task) That's 5 tasks per lead. If your team gets 500 leads per month, you're at 2,500 tasks. Add daily sync workflows, invoice reminders, support ticket routing, and you easily hit 3,000–4,000 tasks. Zapier's pricing tiers: Free: 100 tasks/month Starter: ₹2,400/month (7,500 tasks) Professional: ₹7,200/month (25,000 tasks) Advanced: ₹24,000/month (100,000 tasks) At 3,000 tasks/month, you cannot fit into Starter. You must jump to Professional. One workflow expansion—adding a second notification channel or splitting logic—pushes you to 4,000+ tasks. You overflow the plan. Upgrading happens suddenly, not gradually. Zapier's pricing model penalizes growth. A 20% volume increase often forces a tier jump that doubles your monthly bill. Make: Half the price, but integrations have depth limits Make (formerly Integromat) charges by monthly operations, not per task. An operation is roughly equivalent to a Zapier task, but the pricing is dramatically lower. Make's pricing: Free: 1,000 operations/month Basic: ₹600/month (10,000 ops) Standard: ₹1,200/month (50,000 ops) Professional: ₹2,400/month (200,000 ops) At 3,000 operations/month, you're comfortably in the Basic tier at ₹600. You'd need to scale to 30,000+ operations to hit the Standard plan. That's a 10× growth buffer compared to Zapier's fragile tier boundaries. But Make has real constraints. Its integration catalogue is smaller, and some integrations lack the depth of Zapier's. For example: HubSpot integration in Make doesn't support all custom field types. You often need a second workflow to fetch data Make's native connector misses. Salesforce integration lacks native support for certain object types (e.g., quote line items). You route through REST API calls, adding complexity and debugging friction. Freshdesk integration doesn't track webhook delivery natively. Failed webhook retries require manual workflow logic. The result: You save money on licensing but spend more time building workarounds. A Zapier workflow might be 3 steps; the Make equivalent is 5–6 steps with conditional logic and error handling you write yourself. n8n: Open-source pricing, but you're buying infrastructure n8n is open-source and self-hosted. You pay no per-operation fee. Instead, you pay for the server running it. Pricing models: Self-hosted (DIY): Free software + ₹0–₹2,000/month server cost (AWS t2.small or equivalent) n8n Cloud (managed): ₹1,200/month base + optional pro plans At 3,000 operations/month on a t2.small instance, you're paying roughly ₹800–₹1,200 total, assuming moderate CPU and memory. That's 50–75% cheaper than Zapier and 25–50% cheaper than Make. The catch: n8n requires someone to manage it. You need: Basic DevOps knowledge to deploy and maintain the instance Troubleshooting when workflows fail (no native support from n8n unless you pay for professional support, another ₹1,200–₹2,400/month) Security patching and backup responsibility Integration library maintenance. n8n's native integrations are solid, but custom node development or API calls are common. If you have a technical co-founder or an engineer who can own the infrastructure, n8n is cheap. If you don't, the hidden cost of troubleshooting and maintenance often exceeds the savings. Real workflow cost: Where each platform breaks Let's price a specific workflow across all three platforms: a lead management system that: Syncs 500 leads/month from a web form to your CRM Sends each lead a welcome email Creates a calendar event for sales outreach Logs the action in a data warehouse Posts a Slack notification Runs once per day at 8am (daily reconciliation to catch missed leads) Zapier cost: Lead sync workflow: 500 leads × 5 tasks = 2,500 tasks Daily reconciliation workflow: 30 × 10 tasks = 300 tasks Total: 2,800 tasks/month Plan: Professional at ₹7,200/month Make cost: Same workflows, same operation count: 2,800 operations Plan: Basic at ₹600/month But: The Salesforce/custom field i