Your automation bill crosses over around 50,000 tasks a month.
Below that, Zapier's convenience usually wins. Above it, per-task billing starts to dominate and self-hosting pulls far ahead. Here are the real monthly costs for n8n, Make, Zapier and n8n Cloud, with the assumptions shown.
Zapier vs Make vs n8n vs n8n Cloud, monthly cost by task volume
| Tool | Billing | 5k tasks | 50k tasks | 500k tasks | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| n8n (self-host)VPS + unmetered runs | server cost | ~$5 | ~$5 | ~$9-18 | Review → |
| Makeflat per-operation | per operation | $9 | ~$44 | ~$338 | Review → |
| n8n Cloudmanaged, no VPS | per execution | ~$54 | ~$720 | custom | Review → |
| Zapierper-task, the meter | per task | ~$74-139 | hundreds | custom | Alternatives → |
Assumptions: Zapier Professional, Make Core, n8n Cloud Business; self-hosted n8n on a Hetzner CX22 VPS (2 vCPU, 4 GB), no paid licence, excludes your setup and ~1-3 maintenance hours a month. Zapier and n8n Cloud are slider-priced by volume (50k Zapier runs into the hundreds; n8n Cloud Business ~€667). List pricing checked May 2026, EUR converted to USD. Full math on the cost-at-scale page.
jump by volumecalculator5k50k500kOSS
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