Is Zapier free? What it actually costs in 2026
Zapier's Free plan runs 100 tasks a month with two-step Zaps checked every 15 minutes. Professional starts at $19.99 a month for 750 tasks.
Free gives unlimited Zaps but only two steps each — one trigger, one action — 100 task runs a month, and a 15-minute polling interval.
What the free tier actually includes
- 100 tasks a month
- Two-step Zaps only (one trigger + one action)
- 15-minute update time
Where the wall is
The third step. Any workflow with a filter, a formatter or a second action is multi-step, and multi-step is paid. 100 tasks a month is also about three runs a day.
After that: Professional $19.99 a month billed annually ($29.99 monthly) for 750 tasks; Team $69 a month annually ($103.50 monthly) for 2,000 tasks; Enterprise custom.
Can you self-host Zapier? No — cloud only
Zapier is hosted only. n8n, Node-RED and Activepieces are the self-hosted automation tools compared here; n8n's self-hosted edition has no task cap.
What it actually takes to run one yourself
Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.
Self-hosting n8n
Self-hosting Node-RED
Self-hosting Activepieces
Self-hosting Huginn
When paying is still the right call
Zapier's real product is the integration catalogue — around 8,000 apps, and the long tail of them is where the value sits. If your workflow touches a niche CRM, a regional payment processor or an internal tool that only Zapier supports, no open alternative will connect to it and building that connector yourself costs far more than the subscription. Stay too if nobody on the team wants to run a server: n8n self-hosted is free in licence and not free in maintenance, and a broken automation nobody is on call for is worse than a bill. And stay if your volume is genuinely low — the free tier's 100 tasks a month covers a surprising number of real setups, and task-based pricing only becomes painful once you are running multi-step Zaps at scale.
What you are locked into
Workflows (Zaps), connected-app credentials, and stored data live inside Zapier's cloud with no self-hosted deployment. There is no standard export/import format to move a library of Zaps to another platform, so migration means rebuilding automations by hand. You depend on Zapier's uptime, pricing, and continued support for each integration.
If you would rather not pay: Node-RED
Node-RED
Fully open-source, flow-based programming that runs on hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi.
Free / self-host
See all 5 Zapier alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Read from Zapier, Inc.'s own pricing and documentation on 2026-09-23 — 7 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.