Independent review · Pricing checked 21 August 2026
Make: the automation layer, and how its credit billing actually works
Make pays us a commission if you sign up through our link — your price is unchanged. Among the automation tools we cover, Make and Pabbly Connect pay us; n8n pays us nothing and Zapier structurally never can. How this works
Make (formerly Integromat) is a visual automation builder. You draw a scenario on a canvas — a trigger, then a chain of actions across your other tools — and it runs without you. New form submission creates a CRM record, tags the contact, adds a row to a sheet, pings you in Slack.
The thing to understand up front: Make doesn't replace any tool you're paying for. It connects them. If your problem is “I need a funnel builder”, this isn't the answer. If your problem is “my funnel tool and my email tool don't talk to each other”, it is.
The short version: good value if your automations are triggered by events and act every time they run. Expensive, and unpredictably so, if they poll on a schedule and act rarely. That single distinction decides more Make bills than the plan you pick.
- Best for
- Connecting an existing stack of tools
- Free plan
- 1,000 credits/month, 2 active scenarios
- From
- USD $12/month (Core, annual billing)
- Credits
- 10,000/month on every paid tier
- Watch for
- Every module run costs a credit
Plans
| Plan | Annual (USD) | Monthly | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 1,000 credits/month, 2 active scenarios, and scheduled scenarios can run no more often than every 15 minutes |
| Core | $12/mo | $16/mo | 10,000 credits, unlimited scenarios, scheduled runs down to every minute, Make API access |
| Pro | $21/mo | $28/mo | Everything in Core, plus priority execution, custom variables and full-text execution log search |
| Teams | $38/mo | $51/mo | Everything in Pro, plus team roles and shared scenario templates |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom credit allocation, SSO, SLA, dedicated support |
US dollars, at the base 10,000-credit tier — each plan sells larger credit packs at higher prices. Make raised these rates during August 2026, so any guide quoting Core at $9 is now out of date, and a fair number still do. Checked against make.com on 21 August 2026. Annual billing is locked for the full year with no prorated refunds.
The paid tiers all include the same 10,000 credits. You're paying for features, not capacity — Pro buys you execution visibility, Teams buys you collaboration. If you're solo and your scenarios work, Core is usually where you stay. Extra credits are sold as add-ons at roughly a 25% premium over your base plan rate.
How credits work, and why people get it wrong
Make renamed its billing unit from “operations” to “credits” in August 2025, so older guides use different language for the same thing. The mechanic is unchanged: every module execution costs one credit, not every scenario run.
A four-step scenario processing 100 records a month burns 400 credits, not 100. That alone catches people out. But the bigger trap is triggers.
A trigger spends a credit on every check, even when there's nothing new. Polling every minute costs around 43,200 credits a month before a single item arrives — more than four times what Core allows. Design your triggers around events rather than frequent polling, and use “watch new rows” style triggers rather than rescanning whole datasets.
Iterators and routers multiply usage too, since each loop iteration and each active branch executes its own modules. AI-powered modules consume credits at a higher and less predictable rate than standard ones.
Worth saying plainly, since this is the section that costs Make sales: every word of it is what it was before Make paid us a commission, and the August price rise made it worse rather than better. If a future version of this page softens the polling warning, that will be the commission talking.
Size it before you build
This is the arithmetic most people skip and then regret. Take your scenario, count the modules, multiply by how often it runs, and add the trigger checks separately. Some common shapes, against Core's 10,000 credits:
| Scenario shape | Credits/month | Where that lands |
|---|---|---|
| 3 modules, webhook trigger, 100 runs | ~300 | Comfortable on the free plan |
| 4 modules, webhook trigger, 500 runs | ~2,000 | Twice the free allowance; fine on Core |
| Scheduled every 15 min, acts 50 times | ~3,000 | Nearly all of it is checks finding nothing |
| Scheduled every 5 min, acts 50 times | ~8,800 | Almost all of Core, for one automation |
| 4 modules, 100 runs a day | ~12,000 | Over Core before you build anything else |
| Scheduled every minute | ~43,200 | Not viable on any base tier |
Two things fall out of that table. The trigger type matters more than the scenario length — a long webhook-triggered scenario is cheaper than a short scheduled one. And your first scenario is rarely the expensive one; the bill arrives when the fourth and fifth are running alongside it. Leave real headroom on whatever you calculate, to cover retries, test runs and the branch you forgot.
The full version of this arithmetic, with the polling cost at every interval, is in Part 2 of our Make Starter Kit.
Who it suits
- Anyone running three or more tools that need to share data
- People who think visually — scenarios are drawn on a canvas, so every branch and filter is visible at once rather than as a list of steps
- Workflows triggered by events rather than by a schedule, where the billing model works in your favour
- Small teams wanting Zapier-style automation at a lower cost per action
- Anyone who wants to test automation properly before paying, thanks to a real free tier
Affiliate link — we may earn a commission if you sign up. Your price is unchanged, and the free plan is genuinely free. The rest of this page is the case against, and it's worth reading first.
Where it's weaker
- Credit consumption is hard to predict until you've run a scenario for a month, and the meter runs whether or not the automation does anything useful
- On the free plan, scheduled scenarios can run no more often than every quarter hour, so anything polling-based is quarter-hourly at best — webhook triggers still fire instantly — and the two active scenarios usually bite before the credit cap does
- More people building scenarios doesn't come with more credits, so a bigger team burns the same allocation faster
- It adds a subscription without removing one — the saving is time, not software cost
- Prices rose across every paid tier in August 2026, which matters on a twelve-month annual commitment with no prorated refunds
- Make connects apps but can't build a database, a customer-facing interface or a mobile app — if that's what you need, this is the wrong category of tool
The other thing that decides it
Cost is only half the question. The other half is whether Make connects the specific apps in your stack — and that is worth checking on Make's own directory before you commit to anything, including the free plan.
We don't publish an app count for Make, deliberately: its own pricing page advertises two different figures, one in the feature table and a much smaller one in the FAQ below it. We're not going to pick whichever suits the argument. What we can tell you is that Zapier connects around 9,000 applications and comfortably more than Make on either figure, so if a niche tool is the deciding factor, check there too — Zapier can never pay us a commission and we'd still tell you to buy it.
Probably not for you if
- You're at step one of building a business — automation between tools solves a problem you don't have yet
- You use an all-in-one platform where the pieces already share a database
- You want one tool that does the job rather than a layer that wires other tools together
- Your scenarios poll constantly and act rarely — Pabbly counts only action steps, and n8n charges per whole workflow, so both are cheaper for that shape
Questions
Is the free plan usable, or just a demo?
Usable for testing and light automation, not for production. 1,000 credits sounds generous until you remember every step counts — a four-step scenario handles roughly 250 runs a month. Good enough to learn the tool and prove the concept, and the two-scenario cap usually bites before the credits do. Webhook-triggered scenarios do run instantly on free; it's scheduled ones that are held to a quarter-hour minimum.
Which paid plan do I actually need?
Core, most likely. All three paid tiers include the same 10,000 credits — Pro adds execution logging and priority runs, Teams adds collaboration. If you're solo and your scenarios are working, you're paying for features you won't open. Buy Pro when you need to see why something failed, not before.
How does it compare to Zapier on price?
Cheaper per action for equivalent work — Core at $12 annual includes 10,000 credits, against Zapier's entry plan at around $19.99 for far fewer tasks. But the counting differs: Make charges for triggers and filters where Zapier doesn't, so the real gap is narrower than a straight per-unit comparison suggests. Treat credits and tasks as different units rather than dividing one by the other.
Did the price just change?
Yes. Make raised its paid tiers during August 2026 — Core moved from $9 to $12 a month on annual billing, with Pro and Teams rising in step. The plans themselves didn't change, only the prices. A lot of guides still quote the old figures, so check make.com before you commit rather than trusting any review, including this one.
What happens if I run out of credits?
Scenarios stop running until the next cycle, or until you buy add-on credits at around a 25% premium. Worth knowing before you route anything business-critical through it — size your plan with headroom rather than to your exact expected usage, and treat a scenario that has quietly stopped as a real operational risk rather than a billing inconvenience.
You earn from Make. Why trust this review?
Check it rather than trust it, and know that our incentives here are mixed: Make and Pabbly Connect both pay us, while n8n and Zapier pay us nothing. The credit-burn arithmetic above is the least flattering thing on this page, and it's the part we lead on. We also report a price rise on the tool we're paid for rather than quietly leaving the cheaper old number up, and we decline to publish an app count that would flatter it. And our n8n review argues that per-execution billing beats Make's credit model outright for long workflows — we earn nothing when you act on that.
Do I need this at all?
Only if you have tools that need to share data and currently don't. If you're on one platform that handles funnels, email and contacts together, you've already avoided the problem Make exists to solve.
If it fits, here's the first week
Before you build anything, write down your most important workflow, count the modules, and run it through the table above. If the number is uncomfortable, redesign the trigger rather than buying a bigger plan — that is almost always where the cost is.
Then build one scenario on the free plan and let it run for a week or two. Use a webhook trigger if the app offers one — it fires instantly, and it doesn't spend a credit sitting there waiting.
Then compare the credits it actually consumed against your estimate. That single number tells you which plan you need, whether your design is efficient, and whether the automation is worth a subscription at all. It is also the only way to find out how wrong your estimate was while it's still cheap to be wrong.
- The credit arithmetic to do before you build — including why one always-on scheduled scenario costs about 2,880 credits a month on the free plan's 1,000
- Five starter scenarios with module counts, so you can price them
- The seven mistakes that burn credits, and the trigger change that fixes most of them
- A six-question planning sheet, and an honest section on when Make is the wrong tool
Affiliate link — we may earn a commission if you sign up. Your price is unchanged, and the free plan is genuinely free.
Read next: Pabbly Connect vs Make — a lifetime licence against a credit meter. Both of those tools pay us, and that page says so at the top. Or n8n vs Make, if your workflows are long enough that per-step billing hurts — n8n pays us nothing.