Zapier's pricing page shows four plans, and the number that decides your bill is on none of them. You are billed by task, and the tier you choose sets the features while your volume sets the price. This guide explains what you will actually pay, using figures verified on 2026-09-09.
What a task is
A task is one action Zapier completes for you. The trigger that starts a Zap is free; every step after it that does something — creating a row, sending an email, updating a record — is a task, every single time the Zap runs.
So a Zap that catches a form submission, adds the person to a CRM, sends a welcome email and posts to Slack spends three tasks per submission, not one. Two hundred submissions a month is 600 tasks, which is most of the entry Professional allowance from one workflow.
The estimate to make before you commit: count the action steps, multiply by how often the Zap will fire in a month. Nothing else predicts the invoice.
The free plan is a demo, and not because of the 100 tasks
100 tasks a month sounds thin but survivable. The real limit is that free Zaps are two-step only: one trigger, one action.
Almost every automation worth building has at least two actions. "Add the lead to the CRM and email me" is a three-step Zap, and it is not available at $0 at any volume. That makes the free plan a place to confirm Zapier connects to your apps, not a place to run anything. The first genuinely useful automation you build is the upgrade.
Compare that with Make, whose free plan allows unlimited steps inside two scenarios and gives 1,000 credits a month. On free tiers the two products are not close.
Why the same tier costs $30 or $5,099
Professional starts at $29.99 a month ($19.99 on annual) and includes 750 tasks. It is the tier that unlocks multi-step Zaps, unlimited premium apps, webhooks and AI fields.
That $29.99 is a starting point on a sliding scale. The same Professional plan runs up to $5,099 a month at 2,000,000 tasks. You are not buying a plan, you are buying a volume band, and the plan name only tells you which features come with it.
Team is $103.50 a month ($69 annual) at 2,000 tasks, and adds 25 users, shared Zaps, shared folders and connections, and SAML SSO. Notice what you are buying: shared ownership. If one person builds and maintains every Zap, Team is an expensive way to get more tasks — bump the volume on Professional instead and compare the two numbers directly.
Enterprise is custom, with unlimited users, SCIM, advanced admin controls and custom data retention.
The trap in the middle
A Zap that misfires still spends tasks. A loop that runs on every record update rather than on a status change can burn a month's allowance in a day, and Zapier will keep running it. Two defences worth the ten minutes: put a filter step as early in the Zap as possible so runs stop before they spend actions, and check the task usage in your dashboard in the first week of any new workflow rather than at the end of the month.
When Make wins, and when it does not
Make is dramatically cheaper for the same work: $12 a month for 10,000 credits against $29.99 for 750 tasks, and a free tier ten times more generous. On price alone this is not a contest, and the full comparison prices both at real volumes.
Zapier still wins in two cases, and they are real ones.
The app you need is obscure. Zapier's connector library is bigger. In Make, a long-tail app means the HTTP module and reading someone's API documentation.
Nobody on the team is technical. Zapier's linear builder is learnable in an afternoon. Make's canvas and data-mapping model is the price you pay for the cheaper bill, and if the person maintaining it will be a non-technical owner, that price can exceed the savings.
When you need neither
The cheapest automation is the one already inside software you pay for. If the job is "tag the buyer and stop sending them the promotion", Systeme.io does it natively on a plan you may already have, with no task meter running. Reach for a connector only when the two systems are genuinely separate.
The short version
Budget by action steps, not by automations. The free plan is two-step only, so it cannot run a real workflow at any volume. $29.99 is an entry price on a sliding scale, not a price. Put filters early so misfires do not spend your allowance. And unless you need an obscure connector or a non-technical builder, price the same workflow in Make before you commit — the gap is usually a factor of ten.
For where Zapier's free tier sits against every other one we have checked, see the Free Plan Index. For which automations are worth building first, automate lead follow-up starts with the messages that earn their cost.