SelfHostFlow Cost breakdown

Cost calculator

What will your automation actually cost per month?

Zapier bills per task, Make per operation, n8n per execution. The same workload lands at wildly different prices depending on how many steps each workflow has. Drag both and watch where the cliff is.

by Ivar Berg. Vendor list pricing verified 2026-05-30, EUR converted to USD. Higher tiers are slider-priced estimates, see method. How we test

Your workload

One run = one trigger firing (one execution on n8n).
Each action = 1 Zapier task and 1 Make operation. n8n charges the same no matter how many.
Zapier tasks/mo: 8,000
Make operations/mo: 8,000
n8n executions/mo: 2,000

Estimated monthly cost

 

Make and n8n Cloud links are affiliate links: we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you, and it never changes the math. Zapier is covered editorially with no affiliate relationship. Full disclosure.

How these numbers are calculated

The point of the calculator is the billing-unit contrast, not a precise quote. Drag "actions per workflow" up and Zapier and Make climb while n8n stays flat, because n8n charges one execution per run regardless of step count.

  • Make (per operation): Core plan is $9 for 10,000 operations, then roughly $0.00075 per operation above that (fitted to Make's published $9-at-10K anchor and the directional ~$40 at 50K / ~$338 at 500K figures). Verify your exact tier on the Make pricing slider.
  • n8n Cloud (per execution): Pro is EUR 50 (~$54) for 10,000 executions; Business is EUR 667 (~$720) for 40,000. Above 40,000 it is custom Enterprise, so the calculator shows "custom" and points you at self-host (n8n.io/pricing).
  • n8n self-hosted (server only): Community Edition is free software with unmetered executions. You pay for the VPS: ~$5/mo up to 50K, ~$15/mo to 200K, ~$17/mo above (Hetzner CX22-CX41 list prices). Excludes your setup time and ~1-3 maintenance hours a month; above ~200K you also run Postgres + Redis in queue mode.
  • Zapier (per task): Zapier does not flat-publish per-tier prices, they only appear on its slider, and overage bills at 1.25x base. The shown range is an estimate of roughly $0.015-0.028 per task derived from its base-plan-plus-overage logic. Treat it as order-of-magnitude and check the Zapier slider for your tier.

Full sourced breakdown with the operator quotes is on the cost-at-scale page. All figures are vendor list pricing as of 2026-05-30; we do not run a load test, the VPS sizing comes from n8n's queue-mode docs.

Once you know the number

n8n vs Make vs Zapier: the full cost-at-scale math
The flagship breakdown at 5K, 50K and 500K, including the self-host VPS spreadsheet and operator quotes.
Cheapest way to replace 50,000 Zapier tasks/month
Real numbers: VPS cost, execution math, and the hours you actually spend.
7 open-source Zapier alternatives, honestly compared
Self-host difficulty, integration count and maintenance hours, not vendor spin.

SelfHostFlow is an independent comparison site. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Zapier, Make, n8n, ActivePieces, Automatisch, Kestra, Windmill, or any tool mentioned. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners, used for descriptive comparison (nominative fair use). We earn commissions on some outbound links, see our full disclosure.