Every week we talk to a business owner who built something clever in Zapier, watched it become essential — and then watched the bill grow faster than the business. This piece is the comparison we wish they’d read first.
The pricing trap nobody mentions
Zapier and Make both charge per task or operation. That sounds fair until you realise what it means: the more successful your automation, the more you pay. A workflow that processes 200 orders a month costs little. The same workflow at 20,000 orders can cost more than the software it replaced.
n8n flips this. Self-hosted, you pay for the server, not the task. Run one workflow or one thousand — the infrastructure cost barely moves.
“Per-task pricing punishes success. Fixed-cost automation rewards it.”
Where Zapier still wins
Honesty time: if you need a two-step zap between two mainstream apps and you’ll never touch it again, Zapier is genuinely easier. Its app directory is bigger, its templates are slicker, and there’s nothing to host.
The trouble starts at step three — branching, error handling, custom logic. That’s where per-task pricing meets per-step complexity, and where most of our customers came from.
The self-hosting catch
n8n’s catch is real: someone has to keep the server updated, monitored and online. That someone is either you at 11pm on a Sunday — or a hosting partner whose whole job is keeping you online. That’s the gap Awesomate fills: managed n8n on Australian infrastructure, with a human team behind it.
The honest verdict
Two-step zaps, no growth plans? Stay on Zapier. Real workflows, growing volume, or anything you’d call “core to the business”? Self-hosted n8n wins on cost, control and capability — as long as the hosting is handled.
