— Make.com Core starts at $10.59/mo for 10,000 operations, roughly 3–5× cheaper than Zapier at the same volume. The trap nobody tells you: triggers, filters, and iterators all count as separate operations. A "3-step" workflow on the canvas easily burns 8–15 ops per run, and a 1-minute polling trigger eats ~43,000 ops/month doing nothing. Here's the math you actually need before committing.

I've been migrating clients between Zapier, Make, and n8n for the past year. Make is genuinely the cheapest hosted option for most SMB workloads — but only if you understand how operations are counted. Here's the dev-honest version of what each tier really costs.

What an "operation" actually is

One operation = one module execution.…