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How to know how many actions or operations is enough from Make or Zapier

  • May 9, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 71 views
Michael-Zimmer
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We are getting close to determining of going with Zapier or Make. I know very well the feedback about Make vs Zapier. However, the decision is more than just me. Either way, our team has a question on how to best judge how many actions or operations is enough?

At minimum we’re quoted around 300k-500k runs. I can understand there is a number of variables at play.

Some considerations:

  • From an Airtable perspective on an Enterprise account with over 20 apps used across the organization for about 150 editors
  • Considerations to connect Airtable with ServiceNow, MS products, and other financial tools
  • Starting out with about 5 developers using the API solution
  • Definitely be capitalizing on the AI offerings either has

If anyone has insights on how to determine what is needed love to hear about it.

Best answer by ScottWorld

I wouldn’t be able to give you an exact number that you would need for your scenarios, but I usually take a “watchful waiting” approach to this.

If you feel like you’re going to need between 300,000 and 500,000 runs, I would start with Make’s monthly Pro plan, which will give you the ability to choose either 300,000 or 500,000 operations per month. If you choose 500,000 operations, that will currently cost you about $480 per month (current pricing as of today).

Then, if you end up using 80% of your operations in a particular month, Make will automatically email you to let you know that you only have 20% of your operations left for that month.

At that point, you will have 2 choices:
1. Turn on auto-purchase, where Make will continually purchase more operations for you (in blocks of 10,000 operations) as soon as you run out. There is a slight premium pricing for this.
or
2. Upgrade to a higher monthly plan (and you will be pro-rated for any unused time on your old plan).

After a few months, you will be able to figure out how many operations you are using in an average month, and you will be able to adjust your plan accordingly. You can even go on a higher plan that gives you even more than 500,000 operations per month.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

3 replies

ScottWorld
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  • ScottWorld
  • Genius
  • 9808 replies
  • Answer
  • May 9, 2025

I wouldn’t be able to give you an exact number that you would need for your scenarios, but I usually take a “watchful waiting” approach to this.

If you feel like you’re going to need between 300,000 and 500,000 runs, I would start with Make’s monthly Pro plan, which will give you the ability to choose either 300,000 or 500,000 operations per month. If you choose 500,000 operations, that will currently cost you about $480 per month (current pricing as of today).

Then, if you end up using 80% of your operations in a particular month, Make will automatically email you to let you know that you only have 20% of your operations left for that month.

At that point, you will have 2 choices:
1. Turn on auto-purchase, where Make will continually purchase more operations for you (in blocks of 10,000 operations) as soon as you run out. There is a slight premium pricing for this.
or
2. Upgrade to a higher monthly plan (and you will be pro-rated for any unused time on your old plan).

After a few months, you will be able to figure out how many operations you are using in an average month, and you will be able to adjust your plan accordingly. You can even go on a higher plan that gives you even more than 500,000 operations per month.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

TheTimeSavingCo
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Hmm, what sort of actions / complexity do you expect for each Run?  I’ve got runs with like 3 tasks and runs with 50 tasks, so the calculations would differ wildly.  I think I’d try to get a rough breakdown of the sort of things I’d be doing and estimate how many runs there’d be, then estimate complexity for each, then just slam them all together for a back of the envelope calculation

 

Task/Ops wise, there’s not much of a difference in the way that’d be calculated between Make and Zapier, with the main caveat being polling: Make bills for that but Zapier doesn’t.  If you’re trying to keep something updated hourly, that’s 720 ops a month.  If you want to keep stuff updated in a 5 minute window, that’s like 8.6k ops

 

 

An example of this would be creating an automation that triggers whenever a record gets updated in Airtable, kept on a 15 minute update window, with a follow up action to email you the update.  Assuming you make 10 updates in a month, this is the cost breakdown:

  1. Zapier: 10 tasks (10 actions)
  2. Make: 2890 tasks (2880 triggers + 10 actions)

 

If whatever stuff you’re working with can be set up to trigger and do API calls this is negated though.  With Airtable, you can set up an automation / button that’ll do a call to a Make webhook, so there’s no polling and you end up with 20 tasks again, with an external cost of using up an Airtable automation slot, set up of that automation, etc

Adam, Airtable Consultant - thetimesaving.company
ScottWorld
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  • ScottWorld
  • Genius
  • 9808 replies
  • May 12, 2025

You don’t need to rely on polling to trigger a Make automation whenever a record updates in Airtable.

You can instantly trigger a Make automation via an Airtable automation using my instructions in this thread.

You can also manually trigger a Make automation by manually clicking a link or button in Airtable.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 


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