Make.com Pricing Breakdown: What You'll Actually Pay

Make.com (formerly Integromat) has become the automation platform of choice for businesses that need more power and flexibility than basic tools offer. But its pricing model, based on operations rather than simple task counts, confuses many buyers. The plan you need depends not just on how many automations you run, but on how complex they are.

This guide breaks down exactly how Make.com pricing works, what real businesses actually pay, and how to estimate your costs before you commit. As a Make.com automation partner, we have built hundreds of scenarios and can tell you precisely where the pricing model rewards efficiency and where it punishes poor design.

How Make.com Pricing Works

Make.com charges based on three primary factors: the number of operations consumed, the data transfer volume, and the plan features you need. Understanding operations is the key to predicting your costs.

What counts as an operation? Every module (action) that executes in your scenario counts as one operation. A simple scenario that watches for a new order, creates a customer in QuickBooks, and creates an invoice uses 3 operations per execution. A complex scenario that processes order line items individually might use 15 to 30 operations per order.

This is fundamentally different from Zapier, which counts each multi-step workflow execution as one task regardless of steps. On Make.com, a 10-module scenario uses 10 operations per run. This means your operation consumption depends heavily on scenario design.

The Plan Tiers Explained

Make.com offers four main tiers. Here are the current plans and what they include:

• Free Plan: 1,000 operations per month, 2 active scenarios, 100 MB data transfer. Good for testing only.
• Core Plan ($9/month): 10,000 operations per month, unlimited active scenarios, 1 GB data transfer. Suitable for very small businesses with light automation needs.
• Pro Plan ($16/month): 10,000 operations per month, plus priority execution, full-text log search, and custom variables. Essential for business-critical automations.
• Teams Plan ($29/month): 10,000 operations per month, team collaboration features, roles and permissions. Required for organizations with multiple automation builders.

The critical nuance is that the base prices above include only 10,000 operations. Most businesses need significantly more. Additional operations are purchased in packs, and this is where the real cost lives.

Figure 1: Monthly Make.com costs vary dramatically based on scenario design efficiency

Real-World Cost Scenarios

Scenario 1: Small e-commerce business (50 orders per day). A typical order processing workflow uses 8 to 12 operations per order. At 50 orders per day, that is 12,000 to 18,000 operations per month. With a well-optimized setup, you would need the Core plan with one additional operation pack, putting your monthly cost around $16 to $29. With a poorly designed scenario using 20+ operations per order, you could easily hit $49 to $79 per month.

Scenario 2: Mid-size distributor (200 orders per day). With order processing, inventory sync, and invoice creation, a mid-size operation typically needs 40,000 to 80,000 operations per month. Monthly costs range from $49 to $159 depending on design efficiency. At this volume, the difference between efficient and inefficient scenario design is $50 to $100 per month.

Scenario 3: High-volume operation (500+ orders per day). At this scale, you are looking at 150,000 to 400,000+ operations monthly. Costs range from $99 to $399 per month. Expert optimization becomes critical here because an extra operation per order across 15,000 monthly orders adds 15,000 operations, which translates to real dollars.

The Data Transfer Factor

Every plan includes a data transfer allowance. If your automations handle large files like PDF invoices, product images, or CSV exports, you can burn through this allocation quickly. Exceeding your data transfer limit means purchasing upgrades or accepting throttled execution speeds.

Most order processing workflows use minimal data transfer. But if you are processing PDF purchase orders, syncing product catalogs with images, or generating reports, budget an extra $5 to $20 per month for data transfer overages.

How to Minimize Your Make.com Costs

The single biggest factor in your Make.com bill is scenario design. Here are the strategies that experienced builders use to minimize operations:

• Use aggregators and iterators wisely. Processing order line items individually can multiply your operations by the number of line items. Aggregating data before sending it to the destination reduces operations dramatically.
• Filter early. Place filters at the beginning of scenarios to prevent unnecessary operations on orders that do not need processing.
• Batch operations. Instead of creating one API call per record, use bulk endpoints where available. This can reduce operations by 80% or more for high-volume data syncs.
• Avoid unnecessary lookups. Cache reference data in Make.com's data store rather than looking it up with an API call for every execution.
• Use webhooks instead of polling. Webhook triggers use 0 operations when idle. Polling triggers consume operations every time they check for new data, even when nothing is found.

Make.com vs the Alternatives

Compared to Zapier, Make.com is typically 60% to 80% cheaper for equivalent automation volume. This is because Make.com's operation-based pricing, while more complex, is more granular and rewards efficient design. Zapier's per-task pricing is simpler but significantly more expensive at scale.

Compared to custom development, Make.com is dramatically cheaper for most use cases. A custom integration that would cost $15,000 to $30,000 to build can often be replicated on Make.com for $2,000 to $5,000 in professional setup costs plus $30 to $100 per month in platform fees.

The platform cost is rarely the expensive part. The expensive part is paying for operations you do not need because your scenarios were not designed efficiently.

Before committing to a plan, map out your automation needs, estimate your operation consumption, and consider whether investing in expert scenario design could pay for itself through lower monthly costs. In most cases, the answer is a definitive yes.