A team of four engineers spent three months building a customer onboarding flow on Zapier. They had 9,000 integrations to choose from, a clean dashboard, and a $19.99/month plan that looked harmless. Twelve months later they were rebuilding the same logic on a different platform because a 50-step workflow had become unmanageable and the task count was eating their budget.
I hear some version of this story at least twice a year. The common thread is not a bad tool — it is a mismatch between the tool's natural ceiling and the team's actual complexity. The industry keeps treating Zapier, Make, and n8n as three interchangeable budget alternatives for workflow automation. They are not. Each platform caps at a fundamentally different level of workflow orchestration. The cost of guessing wrong is a forced re-platforming that most small teams do not budget for. I would bet that team started with the $19.99 plan because it looked harmless. That plan is harmless until your workflow needs 50 steps and runs daily. Then the credits multiply. Then you notice that a multi-branch scenario burns through Make's credit pack twice as fast as the starter page suggests. Then you start searching for something that does not count each branch as a separate run. That is not a bad tool — it is picking a ceiling you will hit within a year.
