One five-step workflow: 187 runs a month on Zapier’s entry plan, 2,000 on Make’s
How Zapier, Make, n8n and Power Automate meter one five-step workflow, and how many runs each entry plan buys, from their pricing pages as of September 2026.
A five-step no-code workflow runs about 187 times a month on Zapier’s cheapest paid plan and 2,000 times on Make’s, at list prices as of September 2026.12 Both tools will save a small business time; that part of the 2023 piece holds. Whether they save money depends on a detail the original never mentioned: what the vendor counts as one unit of use. Get that wrong and a workflow that works becomes the line on the card statement nobody can explain.
01Three tools, three meters
Zapier charges a task for every successful action step; the trigger that starts the workflow is free. Its Professional plan starts at US$19.99 a month for 750 tasks, and past the limit it can switch you to pay-per-task billing at a higher rate.1 Make charges a credit for every module action, and reading data from an app or webhook counts, so the trigger costs a credit too; Core is US$9 a month for 10,000 credits and the free plan carries 1,000.2 n8n charges per execution, a whole workflow run regardless of how many steps it has: Starter is €20 a month billed annually for 2,500 executions, Pro €50 for 10,000, and the self-hosted Community Edition is free.3 Microsoft prices Power Automate Premium per person, US$15 a user a month paid yearly, rather than per run.4
Make’s free plan runs more of this workflow than Zapier’s cheapest paid plan
Runs per month of a five-step workflow covered by each entry plan, list prices as of September 2026
Source: Zapier, Make and n8n pricing pages (Internet Archive copies, 25 to 30 September 2026); TechBag arithmetic · as of 30 September 2026 · Power Automate is priced per user, not per run, so it is not on the chart
02What the meter means for the choice
Zapier’s premium buys breadth and ease: more than 9,000 app connections, by its own count, and the gentlest builder of the three.1 For a handful of low-volume workflows that is worth paying for. The meter starts to matter when a workflow succeeds, because success means volume, and per-step pricing multiplies volume by length. Per-run pricing does not care how long the workflow is; per-user pricing does not care how often it runs.
03If you are buying this in India
All four list prices in dollars or euros, though Zapier’s page includes INR among the currencies it can show.1 A foreign vendor with no Indian entity supplies an OIDAR service: a GST-registered business pays the 18% itself under reverse charge and claims it back.5 Make states its hosting as AWS in the EU or North America;2 self-hosted n8n is the only one of the four you can keep on an Indian server. That matters because an automation tool holds working credentials for every app it touches and copies customer data between them. The DPDP Rules were notified on 13 November 2025, with the security-safeguard and breach-notice duties applying from 13 May 2027,6 and CERT-In’s Directions of 28 April 2022 already require a reportable incident to be reported within six hours.7 Keep a list of which workflow holds which key. TechBag quotes these tools with an Indian GST invoice where the vendor allows resale.
Sources
- Zapier, Plans and pricing, Internet Archive copy — captured 25 September 2026
- Make, Pricing, Internet Archive copy — captured 30 September 2026
- n8n, Plans and pricing, Internet Archive copy — captured 25 September 2026
- Microsoft, Power Automate pricing, Internet Archive copy — captured 29 September 2026
- India Briefing, OIDAR services: GST and reverse charge — 29 September 2023
- Legismith Partners, DPDP Rules 2025 commencement timeline — notified 13 November 2025
- CERT-In, Directions under section 70B(6) of the IT Act (six-hour reporting) — 28 April 2022
Disclosure. TechBag is a software reseller: it earns a margin when a reader buys through it, including from vendors named here. The analysis is TechBag’s own; no vendor paid for or saw this piece before publication. Facts are labelled reported, TechBag count or our view.
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