Zapier vs Make: $19.99 and $9 do not buy the same unit

What the record says

The first thing to say about these two prices is that they cannot be subtracted from one another. Zapier bills tasks: one task is one action it performs. Make bills credits, and a single scenario run can consume several depending on how many steps it contains. So $9 against $19.99 is not a 55% saving; it is two numbers denominated in different things. Any comparison that puts them side by side without saying so is selling you an answer it has not worked out.

What is comparable is how each page is built, and here Make is the more legible of the two. Its three paid tiers — Core $9, Pro $16, Teams $29 — all carry the same label underneath: 'Price for 10k credits/mo'. That means the ladder is not selling you more volume as you climb; it is selling you features at a fixed volume. Core buys unlimited active scenarios, minute-level scheduling and API access. Pro adds priority execution, custom variables and full-text log search. Teams adds roles and shared templates. You can see exactly what each $7 step buys.

Zapier's ladder works the other way round and is harder to price in advance. A slider above the plans asks how many tasks you need, and every paid figure is published as 'Starting from' — $19.99 for Professional, $69 for Team. The card does not say what volume those floors correspond to. So Zapier's page tells you the shape of the discount precisely and the shape of the bill vaguely, which is the opposite of Make.

On the annual discount Zapier is both deeper and more exact. Its switch says 'Save 33%' and delivers 33.3% on both priced tiers: $239.88 a year against $359.88 on Professional, and $828 against $1,242 on Team. That is one of the larger annual discounts we have recorded and its label survives checking. On Make's page we found no billing-period toggle at all in our read — which is not the same as saying none exists, only that we did not reach one, and so no annual Make figure appears above.

The free tiers are where the practical difference lives, and the constraint that matters is not the one you would expect. Make's free plan carries 1,000 credits a month, which sounds tight but is workable for light use. The binding limit is the other line on the card: a 15-minute minimum interval between runs. That rules out anything that needs to respond promptly — a form submission, a new order, an alert — regardless of how many credits you have left. Zapier's free tier is described simply as 'Free forever' with no interval restriction stated on the page.

That single line reframes the entry comparison. If you want free automation that reacts within seconds, Make's free plan cannot do it and Zapier's is the only option on the table. If you want cheap paid automation and can define your volume, Make's $9 with minute-level scheduling is well below Zapier's $19.99 floor. The decision is made at the free/paid boundary rather than by comparing two headline numbers.

Both keep their top tier unpriced, which by now will surprise nobody. Zapier's Enterprise and Make's Enterprise are both 'contact sales' — Make's carries custom functions support and enterprise app integrations, Zapier's carries no published detail we could read. Neither figure is estimated here.

A last note on why we tracked both today. Neither Zapier nor Make was in our daily price record before this article; both are now, along with n8n and Pabbly, so the figures above become the first dated point in a series rather than a one-off reading. If either changes its unit economics — and in a category priced by consumption, that is the change that matters most — the record will show it.