Zapier vs Make: What Each One Really Costs a UK Business

Every Zapier vs Make comparison I have read settles the question on the entry price. Zapier at $19.99, Make at $9, a paragraph about which is friendlier, done. That number decides almost nothing, because the entry tier is not where either company makes its money from you.

I build automations for UK businesses and I have paid both of these bills. What actually separates them is the meter: what each platform counts as a chargeable unit, and how steeply the price climbs once your workflow runs more than a few hundred times a month. The two vendors count very differently, and both of their comparison pages shade the difference in their own favour.

So here is the version with the arithmetic in it. I read every figure below off the live Zapier and Make pricing pages on 16 September 2026. Prices are published in US dollars by both companies, so what lands on your card is that figure plus your bank’s exchange rate.

Which should you choose, Zapier or Make?

Choose Zapier if you want something working this afternoon and your volume stays low. Choose Make if you run more than about a thousand automated actions a month, or if your workflow needs to branch, loop or reshape data. On price, Make wins almost everywhere, and by a much larger margin than the comparison pages admit.

That is the honest summary. The rest of this is why, because the difference sits in details that neither vendor puts on its own comparison page.

What are you actually being billed for?

Zapier bills you per successful action step. Make bills you per module that executes. Those sound like the same thing. They are not, and the difference is worth roughly one unit per run.

In Zapier, a task is a successful action. Triggers are free. Filter steps and Paths steps are free. Any step that errors or gets skipped is free. So are the built in utilities: Formatter, Delay, Looping, Digest, Storage and Zapier Manager. A Zap with a trigger, a filter and four actions costs you four tasks.

In Make, a credit is one module execution, and the trigger counts. Routers and filters do not consume credits, which is the part Zapier’s own comparison page gets wrong about its rival. Make switched from operations to credits on 27 August 2025 and converted existing balances one for one, so if you read an older guide talking about operations, the maths still holds.

Where Make’s meter does bite is its own AI provider, which bills on tokens rather than a flat credit. If you plug in your own OpenAI or Claude account instead, you are back to one credit per operation.

Zapier changed its AI billing in the other direction. Since 15 June 2026, an AI by Zapier step consumes tasks according to the model tier you pick: standard counts as one task, advanced counts as three, premium counts as five. Tool calls inside the step add more at the same rate. If a single run reaches 75 tasks, Zapier pauses the Zap and asks you to approve it. That last detail tells you how badly this can run away.

What does the same workflow cost on each?

Take a real one. A form submission arrives, you look up whether that company already exists in your CRM, you create or update the contact, you branch on deal size, you write a row to Google Sheets and you post to Slack. That is a trigger, four actions and one branch.

Run it a thousand times a month and Zapier counts about four tasks per run, so 4,000 tasks. Make counts about five credits per run, so 5,000 credits. Now look at what those volumes cost.

The shape of that table is the whole argument. Zapier’s paid plan starts with 750 tasks and climbs a slider: $49 at 2,000, $89 at 5,000, $129 at 10,000, $189 at 20,000. Make’s cheapest paid plan opens at 10,000 credits and stays $9 until you exceed them.

At the volume where most small businesses actually land, somewhere between one and ten thousand runs a month, you are comparing $129 with $9. Several pages ranking for this keyword still tell you Zapier at 10,000 tasks is around $49 to $69. That is the 2,000 task price with the wrong label on it.

Which features are locked behind which plan?

The gating matters more than the sticker price, and it is where Zapier’s free plan quietly stops being useful. Free Zaps are limited to two steps, which rules out the trigger plus filter plus two actions shape that describes most real automations.

Read those two lists side by side and you can see each company’s theory of who you are. Zapier assumes you will start simple and pay to grow. Make assumes you want the whole toolbox on day one and will pay for volume later.

One ceiling worth knowing before you commit: a Zapier Paths step can only be nested three deep, and a Zap tops out at 100 steps.

Which one copes better when a step breaks?

Make, clearly, and this is the gap that costs people money rather than time. Every module in a Make scenario carries its own error handler, and you pick the behaviour: Ignore it, Break and queue it, Resume with a fallback value, or Rollback and undo what the run already did.

A Break parks the failed run in an Incomplete Executions queue, where you set how many times it retries and how long it waits between attempts. You can fix the data and let it continue from where it stopped.

Zapier’s equivalent is Autoreplay, which arrives with Professional. It retries a failed step up to five times on a fixed schedule: five minutes, half an hour, an hour, three hours, six hours. You cannot tune it per Zap, and it is switched on for the whole account or not at all.

For a workflow that just posts to Slack, none of this matters. For one that writes invoices into your accounts software, the difference between a run you can repair and a run that simply vanished into an error email is the entire game.

Where does your data sit, and does UK GDPR care?

Zapier is a US company and moves your data under the Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses. Make is owned by Celonis, which bought Integromat in October 2020 and renamed it, is headquartered in Europe, and runs regional zones including eu1 and eu2 with European customers provisioned into an EU one.

Not one of the pages currently ranking for this comparison mentions any of it, which tells you who they were written for.

Here is the sober version. Neither arrangement is unlawful, and a US processor is a perfectly normal thing for a UK business to use. What changes is your paperwork. If your automation carries client personal data, that platform is a processor you need in your Article 30 record with its transfer basis written down, and an EU hosted option is simply less to explain if a client’s procurement team asks.

Do not take my word for where your data lands. Ask both vendors for the current data processing agreement and the subprocessor list, and check which zone your account was provisioned into. Make’s own support has been cagey about the zone mechanics in public, so get it in writing rather than from a forum thread.

Is Zapier or Make easier to learn?

Zapier, and it is not close for a first build. You pick a trigger, then you fill in a form for each action underneath it. Make hands you a canvas where modules are circles you wire together, and the concepts that make it powerful, routers and iterators among them, are the same ones that make the first evening frustrating.

Weigh that honestly against the pricing. Saving $120 a month is worth a weekend of learning. Saving $10 a month probably is not.

Should you be buying either one?

Sometimes not, and this is the question the comparison pages cannot ask because they are selling you one of the answers. Both platforms charge you per unit of work forever, which is fine while the volume is small and quietly expensive when it is not.

Two alternatives are worth knowing. n8n’s Community Edition is free to self host under its Sustainable Use Licence for internal business use, and its cloud plans bill one execution per whole workflow run no matter how many steps are in it, so a complicated automation costs the same as a trivial one. The price you pay is running the server yourself.

The other one barely gets mentioned in this comparison and deserves to. A good share of what people build in Zapier is not really an integration at all, it is a scheduled script: pull yesterday’s orders and email me what changed. An AI coding tool such as Claude Code, included in a Claude Pro plan at $17 a month billed annually, will write and run that job from a plain English description, with no meter counting your steps. You are not renting a workflow, you own the thing that does the work. If you have never seen what that looks like, my AI Opportunity Scorecard takes two minutes and gives you an estimate of the repetitive hours worth reclaiming first.

The catch, and I would rather say it than sell past it, is that nothing is drawn on a screen and nobody is on a support line. For an owner who wants to see the shape of the workflow and click on it, Make earns its $9.

Where I would actually start

If you are choosing today and you have no strong reason to prefer either, I would start on Make’s free plan, build one scenario you genuinely need, and watch the credit counter for a fortnight. You will learn more about your real volume in those two weeks than any comparison table can tell you, and you will have learned the harder tool first while the stakes were nothing.

I would only reach for Zapier if you hit a missing integration or you need something live today and cannot spare the evening. It is a good product. It is also a product that bills you more than fourteen times as much at ten thousand runs a month, and you should know that before the direct debit rather than after it.

And if the honest answer is that you are not sure which of your jobs deserves automating at all, that is the question worth solving before the tool choice. That is exactly what an AI Opportunity Audit is for. It is a fixed fee 60 minute session where we go through your processes, find the job worth automating first, and build a real version of it live in Claude Code, and you leave with a prioritised roadmap rather than a proposal. You can read more about how I work and why I would rather teach you than retain you.