Every week we get the same conversation. A business owner in Newcastle, Sunderland, Durham — wherever — has heard that automation could save their team a couple of days a week. They've watched a Zapier ad on YouTube, they've maybe even built one or two zaps. Then they get the renewal email and the colour drains out of their face.
"Why is this so expensive?"
It's a fair question. So let's actually do the maths.
The Honest Comparison
Make.com and Zapier do roughly the same job: they connect the tools your business already uses (your CRM, your email platform, your booking system, your payments, your spreadsheets) and run workflows between them — without you copying and pasting between tabs all day.
Where they differ is what they charge for, and how that scales as your business grows.
Zapier's Pricing Model (2026)
Zapier counts tasks. Every time a step in a workflow runs, that's one task. New lead in your CRM → email sent → Slack notification → row added to a spreadsheet = four tasks. Multiply that across every interaction your business handles in a month and the numbers balloon fast.
- Free: 100 tasks/month — fine for a hobby project, useless for a business
- Starter: £24.50/mo for 750 tasks — you'll burn through this in a week
- Professional: £58.10/mo for 2,000 tasks — minimum viable for an SME
- Team: £83.50/mo for 50,000 tasks — where most growing businesses end up
- Company: £555/mo for 100,000+ tasks — enterprise tier
- Free: 1,000 operations/month — usable for testing
- Core: £8.18/mo for 10,000 ops — covers most early-stage businesses
- Pro: £14.46/mo for 10,000 ops with full features
- Teams: £24.40/mo for 10,000 ops with shared workspaces
- 50,000 ops/mo equivalent: roughly £89/mo on the standard scaling tier
- Zapier: £6,670+ a year (Team tier with realistic scaling)
- Make.com: £1,070 a year
- Saving: over £5,500 a year for the average growing SME
- App library. Zapier connects to roughly 7,000 apps. Make sits at around 1,800. If you're using something niche — a regional accounting tool, a specific salon booking platform, an obscure project management app — Zapier is more likely to have it natively.
- Speed of getting started. Zapier's editor is more linear, more guided, more "next, next, finish." If you've never built a workflow in your life, you'll get to a working zap faster.
- Documentation and community. More users = more Stack Overflow answers, more YouTube tutorials, more agency support.
- Cost at scale. Already covered.
- Visual workflow design. Make's canvas lets you see complex multi-branch logic at a glance. Once you're past simple A→B zaps, this matters a lot.
- More operations per "step." Make often uses fewer ops than Zapier uses tasks for the same outcome. The like-for-like cost difference is usually understated.
- Built-in tools. Iterators, aggregators, routers, error handlers — the stuff Zapier locks behind premium tiers — come standard.
For a typical North East SME doing around 50,000 ops a month — say a small estate agency, a multi-location restaurant, or a B2B services firm with steady lead flow — that's £1,002 a year minimum. And that's before you add multi-step zaps, premium app connections, or any of the features Zapier puts behind paywalls.
Make.com's Pricing Model (2026)
Make.com counts operations — the same idea as tasks, but priced very differently:
That same SME running 50,000 operations a month? About £1,070 a year, all-in.
The Difference at a Glance
Same volume, same job:
That's not a small difference. That's the cost of a part-time employee.
So Zapier Is Just Worse?
No. And anyone telling you that is selling you something.
Zapier wins on three things:
Make wins on:
So Which Should You Use?
If you're a one-person business running a handful of simple workflows, and your time is more valuable than a few hundred quid a year: start with Zapier. It's faster to learn.
If you're running a growing SME with 5+ tools, multiple staff, and you can already see your workflow complexity climbing: start with Make.com. The learning curve is steeper but the savings compound month after month, and the visual canvas makes complex automations actually maintainable.
If you're not sure: get someone to do an audit first. The wrong platform choice is the most expensive mistake we see businesses make. Switching later means rebuilding every workflow from scratch.
The Northern Take
We’re tool-agnostic. Across our client base we run Make.com, Zapier, n8n, GoHighLevel’s native workflows, OpenClaw, and a few custom builds — whichever one actually fits the job. The only tool we won’t sell you is the one you don’t need.
That said, for most growing North East SMEs the maths does point toward Make. Over the last year we’ve migrated three clients off Zapier and onto other platforms and the average annual tooling saving has been around £4,800 — even after our rebuild fees. The pricing gap is real and it’s getting bigger as Zapier keeps tightening its task limits.
None of this is to say Zapier is a bad product. It isn’t. It’s a great product. It’s just an expensive one for the kind of operation volume most North East SMEs actually run. Same story with GoHighLevel for service businesses, n8n for self-hosted setups, Make for complex branching logic, Zapier for obscure app integrations. Different jobs, different tools.
If you’d like us to look at what your current automation setup is costing you and where you could save, our free Automation Audit takes about 20 minutes. We’ll send back the three highest-impact workflows you should be running and tell you what each one is worth, in pounds, per week. No sales pitch, no tool bias, no hype.
