Make.com
A hosted place to build workflows that run on somebody else's servers — triggered by an event, on a schedule, or by a webhook — so the work happens whether or not your laptop is open.
What you'd use it for
Getting a recurring job — an order into a spreadsheet, a chase email after an unpaid invoice, a form entry into the team channel — to keep happening while your laptop is shut.
- Watch a Google Sheet, an inbox or a form and act on every new entry without anyone opening the file
- Give a workflow its own public webhook address so another system can set it running the moment a payment or signup lands
- Join up more than 3,000 apps with the OAuth logins stored and refreshed by Make rather than by you
- Split one trigger down several paths with routers and filters, so a large order and a small one are handled differently
- Open a run-by-run execution log on Monday and see which module failed on Saturday and what data it was holding
The verdict
Make is the shortest route from wanting a job done without you to it actually being done, and the connector library is broad enough that whatever you want joined up is usually already there. What you pay for that is predictability — credits are not operations, so the first real month is a discovery rather than an estimate, and the visual canvas stops helping at roughly the size where a workflow becomes worth having. It suits an owner who will build three or four workflows and then maintain them, not someone hoping to hand the whole business to a diagram.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | Building a first scenario and seeing whether it holds. | Up to 1,000 credits a month. |
| Core | $9/mo (at 10k credits a month) | One business running a handful of real workflows. | Fundamental AI and automation features. Annual billing saves 15% or more. |
| Pro | $16/mo (at 10k credits a month) | Workflows you now depend on and need to run fast. | Advanced features and higher-performance execution. |
| Teams | $29/mo (at 10k credits a month) | More than one person building and maintaining scenarios. | Shared workspaces and team collaboration. |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | Organisations with security and scale requirements. | Scalable, secure deployment. |
Read from Make.com's own pricing page on 15 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
What you need to start
- An email address, or a Google, Apple, GitHub or Facebook login. No card is asked for on the free plan
- An account on every app you want to connect, and the right to authorise access to it — the official first scenario assumes Google and Slack
- A browser, and nothing beyond it. There is no install and no machine of yours left running
- The Core plan once you want a third live scenario, or anything checking more often than every 15 minutes. Free caps both
Under ten minutes to an account and a first scenario that does something real; a week of reading the execution log most days before you would trust one with a customer.
Your first run Make's own first walkthrough builds a new row in a Google Sheet into a Slack message to the sales team — three free accounts, no code, and the thing runs on Make's servers from the moment you switch it on. Most people have it firing inside an hour.
Where it breaks
Credits are not operations in any sense you can estimate in advance, and the first real month is the only way to find out what a workflow costs. The visual canvas becomes unreadable at about forty modules, which is roughly where a genuinely useful workflow arrives. And a scenario that fails quietly is the standard failure mode — build the alert before you build the second workflow.
Entirely browser-based. Nothing installs. The credit slider on the pricing page runs from 10,000 to over 8 million a month, and the headline prices above are the 10,000-credit price of each tier — the number changes as you move the slider, so read your own line, not the first one shown.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
When not to use it
Not for you if someone technical is already nearby and would rather own the hosting — that is the n8n decision, same move, infrastructure in your hands. Not for you either if the whole job is one app nudging another on a fixed shape, a form entry becoming a spreadsheet row, where Zapier gets there with less canvas. And if you need to know the monthly cost before you commit, Make cannot tell you, because credits only resolve into a number once a workflow has run for a month.
This is where work starts happening without you, and Make is the version of it that a non-technical owner can actually get through.
The thing being bought is easy to misread. It is not a drag-and-drop editor. It is a hosted runtime: servers that stay up, connectors that somebody else repairs when Google or Stripe changes an API, OAuth tokens that get refreshed without you, retries when a call fails, and a log you can open on Monday to find out what happened on Saturday.
Why a desktop AI app cannot do this
It is worth being precise, because the question comes up constantly and the answer is not “the AI is not clever enough”.
- The machine has to stay on. A workflow living in a desktop chat app runs only while that app is running on a powered, awake, connected laptop.
- No inbound triggers. Desktop apps cannot expose a public webhook. “When a payment lands” needs a server with a stable address.
- No retries, no queue, no execution history. When a chat session fails, it fails silently and you find out later from a customer.
- Credentials live on one person’s machine. That is a bus factor of one and a security problem besides.
None of this is an argument that AI is overrated. It is an argument about where a workflow lives. AI writes the workflow; the platform runs it.
Make or n8n
Start with Make if you want it to work this week and you would rather not think about hosting. Start with n8n if you expect to self-host, care about running the thing on your own infrastructure, or already have someone technical nearby.
Both are the same decision at the level that matters: you are moving the work off your laptop and onto something that stays awake.
Alternatives
n8n
A workflow automation platform you can either pay n8n to host or run on your own server, priced by how many times your workflows execute rather than by how many people use them.
Zapier
A hosted service that connects thousands of business apps so an event in one triggers work in another, without anyone sitting there to make it happen.
Automation & workflowsAgentsActivepieces
An open-source automation builder you can self-host, connecting apps into flows the same way Zapier does, with MCP support for wiring in AI agents.
Automation & workflowsAgentsMicrosoft Power Automate
Builds automations across Microsoft 365 and over a thousand other apps, including desktop robots that click through old software with no API of its own.
Our writing about it
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