Zapier vs. Make vs. Power Automate vs. a Custom Script: An Honest Cost Comparison

Four tools, one honest question

Some version of this email lands in my inbox every week: “We tried Zapier and it worked great for a while. Are we doing something wrong, or do we need something else?”

Usually they’re not doing anything wrong. They’ve just outgrown the tool, and nobody told them where the edges are, because the edges aren’t on the pricing page. So here’s the comparison I walk people through, written down. I build custom business automation for a living, which means I’m the guy these tools lose to, and also the guy who tells you to stay on them when that’s the honest answer. Both happen.

Who each tool is actually for

Zapier is for the owner who wants it working this afternoon. The biggest catalog of app connectors in the business, a gentle learning curve, a free tier to start on. The bill is per task, forever.

Make is for the person who outgrew Zapier’s pricing or wants the whole flow visible on one canvas. Cheaper per run (it bills in credits now, a unit renamed from “operations” in August 2026), more visual complexity, a steeper first week. It rewards tinkering and punishes casual setup.

Power Automate is for the company already living in Microsoft 365. A seeded version rides along with most business plans (standard connectors only, which matters more than it sounds), and if your data lives in SharePoint, Excel, Dynamics, or Outlook, some of the plumbing is already paid for. The trade: Microsoft-grade licensing logic, and premium-connector paywalls that appear exactly when things get interesting.

A custom script (what I build) is for the process that’s load-bearing. Invoicing. Payroll inputs. The report the whole company runs on. Written for your two systems specifically, error-handled, logged, and boring forever after.

The pricing math at three volumes

First, the units, because that’s the actual gotcha

A Zapier “task,” a Make “credit,” and a Power Automate “license” are three different coins, and comparing headline quotas side by side is how people decide Make is a fraction of the cost, or a multiple of it, before the first invoice runs.

• Zapier bills per task: one task per successful action step, triggers free. A two-step Zap (trigger plus one action) burns one task per run. A five-step Zap burns four.
• Make bills per credit (the unit renamed from “operations” in August 2026): one credit per module run for non-AI scenarios. A three-module scenario processing one invoice burns three credits.
• Power Automate bills per license: $15/user/month for Premium, billed yearly, with no per-run meter under the subscription. The ceiling that replaces the meter is throttling: 40,000 platform requests per user per day.

The corrected table

Assumptions, so the math is checkable: one workflow, the classic trades flow (a new invoice in the field system creating the accounting entry, one run per invoice), built as a two-step Zap on Zapier (1 task/run), a ~3-module scenario on Make (~3 credits/run), and one licensed Power Automate user. Zapier figures are annual billing; it’s ~33% off monthly and how most people pay once the bill stings.

Runs/mo	Zapier	Make	Power Automate	Custom script
100	$0. Free covers 100 tasks/mo, two-step Zaps only; $19.99/mo+ the moment you need multi-step	$0. Free covers 1,000 credits (≈330 runs); $9 Core only if you need 1-minute scheduling	$15/mo flat, or $0 extra if seeded M365 rights plus standard connectors reach both systems	Overkill. Genuinely.
1,000	$39/mo. Pro, 1,500 tasks, annual billing	$9/mo. Core: 10,000 credits ≈ 3,300 runs	$15/mo flat	The breakeven conversation starts
10,000	$129/mo. Pro 10K annual; $169 for Team if you need its 1-minute polling	10k runs ≈ 20–30k credits, the 20K/40K tiers; prices not verifiable, check before you buy	$15/mo flat. Fits the 40k requests/day cap; pay-as-you-go would run ~$6,000/mo, so don’t	Marginal cost per invoice: pennies

Read the middle row twice. That’s the row where the subscription still looks manageable and the failure modes are already moving in. By the bottom row, Zapier alone is $1,548 a year — about a fifth of the $7,000 entry price of a dedicated build (published openly), paid every year, forever, with none of the error handling.

The per-platform fine print

Zapier. Professional starts at $19.99/mo annual ($29.99 monthly) for 750 tasks and scales by quota, not usage: $39 at 1,500 tasks, $49 at 2,000, $129 at 10,000. Polling gets faster as you pay: every 15 minutes on Free, 2 on Professional, 1 on Team. The overage mechanic matters more than the sticker: an optional pay-per-task toggle charges 2.5× the base per-task rate on monthly billing (1.25× on annual) and hard-stops at 3× your plan volume. Blowing through a small plan gets expensive; blowing through a big one is impossible, because the flows just stop at 3×.

Make. Core is $9/mo annual for 10,000 credits (roughly 3,300 runs at ~3 credits a run), with Pro at $16 and Teams at $29 on the same 10k tier, and 20k/40k+ tiers above it (whose prices I couldn’t verify, so check current). Free is capped at 2 active scenarios and 15-minute scheduling; 1-minute scheduling starts at Core. There is no overage meter: scenarios stop dead at credit exhaustion and inbound webhooks queue until you top up, in bundles of 1k/10k credits at in-app prices, with auto top-up available on Core and up. Paid plans also cap a single execution at 40 minutes and 5 GB of data transfer per 10k credits.

Power Automate. Premium is $15.00/user/month billed yearly: unlimited flows, 40k platform requests/day per user, premium connectors and attended RPA included. The seeded Microsoft 365 rights are standard-connectors-only and throttled harder, which is exactly why “free with M365” and “actually useful” diverge the moment a premium connector shows up. Unattended or shared flows move to the Process plan: $150/bot/month (successor to the retired per-flow plan), with 250k actions/day shareable across 25 flows. There’s pay-as-you-go at $0.60/run ($3.00 unattended, capped at 1k billable runs/day/flow) for spiky workloads. Minimum recurrence is 60 seconds on every plan.

What the table doesn’t show

The table prices the happy path: every trigger fires, every field matches, nobody renames anything mid-quarter. It doesn’t price fragility, silent drops, or what each vendor does when you hit a ceiling, which is the next section, and the part that actually decides the bill.

Prices verified August 2026 against each vendor’s official pricing page; Make’s via an August 8, 2026 capture (they block bots); check current before you buy.

The failure modes the docs don’t mention

Rate limits. Every SaaS API caps how hard you can hit it. Your field system, the accounting system, and the middleware each have their own ceiling, and on a busy Monday they meet in the middle. The connector retries — sometimes. Or throttles. Or drops the run and moves on.

The silent drop. A customer name doesn’t match, a required field arrives empty, a duplicate record appears, and the flow skips that row and tells no one. You find out at reconciliation, weeks later, mid-statement, when the books look thin.

The limit cliff, three ways. Each tool handles “you ran out” differently, and none of them error loudly. Zapier’s optional pay-per-task overage runs at a multiplied rate (2.5× the base per-task cost on monthly billing, 1.25× on annual), then hard-stops at 3× your plan volume. Make has no overage at all: scenarios halt at credit exhaustion and queued webhooks pile up until someone buys a top-up bundle. Power Automate doesn’t stop, it throttles: requests slow to a crawl when you blow the daily platform-request cap, which is gentler and much harder to notice. Everything after the cliff queues up where nobody’s watching until the meter resets.

The fragile zap at 2 AM. I’ve inherited this one more than once, and the shape is always the same: a 30-truck shop, invoicing through middleware that worked great for six months. Then a field gets renamed on one side, or the API times out mid-batch, and the sync breaks, quietly, weekly. Nobody notices until receivables and cash flow stop agreeing. The fix, each time, was an hour. Noticing took three weeks. That asymmetry is the whole argument for the next section.

When a custom script wins

• Volume. Nothing meters it. Ten thousand invoices cost functionally the same to move as one hundred.
• Real error handling. When a record won’t match, it doesn’t skip silently; it holds the record, flags it, and tells a human the same day.
• Bi-directional sync. Payments and credits flowing back the other way, without chaining three tools together and inheriting every tool’s weaknesses.
• Secrets and audit. Credentials in a vault, not pasted into a web form. Every run logged, every change auditable: the version of events your accountant prefers.

When it doesn’t

Candor, because this article is worthless without it: if the flow is low-volume, one-directional, and nobody’s week depends on it (the website contact form feeding the CRM), middleware is the right answer, and I say so on the phone weekly. A dedicated build for a 200-task-a-month convenience flow is a solution in a tuxedo at a cookout. The pricing page is honest about what builds like mine cost; be honest about whether you need one.

The decision table

Your situation	The honest answer
Under ~500 runs/mo, one-way, low stakes	Zapier, Make, or seeded Power Automate; pick by connector quality, not price
Already on Microsoft 365, data in SharePoint or Dynamics	Power Automate first; the plumbing’s partly paid for
Volume in the thousands, or the per-task bill climbing every quarter	Make, or price a custom build before the next renewal
Bi-directional, error-handled, auditable	Custom script
Money, payroll, or compliance rides on the flow	Custom script — not because I sell it, but because “it broke and nobody noticed” is not a sentence you want to say to your accountant

If you’re mid-decision, tell me the flow — what triggers it, what systems it touches, what happens when it fails. I’ll tell you which row you’re honestly in, including the rows that don’t make me money. This piece is one spoke of the field-service automation guide; the hub has the whole map, and what a build costs is published too.