Automation Free Tiers Compared, September 2026
Free tiers on the major automation platforms are sized for one or two low-frequency workflows, and the wall is usually structural rather than volumetric. Zapier caps free Zaps at two steps, Make's free 1,000 credits vanish in ten days of 15-minute polling, and n8n has no free cloud plan at all.
You can run a real automation for $0, but not many, and not often. As of September 2026 the honest summary is this: free tiers on the major platforms are sized for one or two low-frequency workflows, and the wall you hit is usually structural — a cap on how many workflows can be active, or how many steps each can have — rather than a volume cap you can grow into.
Every figure below was checked against the vendor's own pricing or documentation page in September 2026. Where a vendor no longer publishes a hard number, we say so instead of guessing.
The free tiers, side by side
| Platform | Free allowance | Structural limit | What stops you first |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zapier | 100 tasks/month | Two-step Zaps only; 15-minute polling; no premium apps | The two-step cap, usually before the 100 tasks |
| Make | 1,000 credits/month | 2 active scenarios; 15-minute minimum interval; 5-minute max execution; 512MB transfer | Trigger checks eating credits |
| IFTTT | Unlimited Applet runs | 2 Applets | The third Applet |
| Activepieces | 100 credits/day | 1 user; unlimited flows | The daily reset, not a monthly cap |
| Airtable | Not published per plan (see below) | 1,000 records per base; 5 editor/creator seats | The 1,000-record base limit |
| n8n | No free cloud tier | Self-hosted Community edition is free | Needing cloud hosting |
| Power Automate | 30-day free trial | Trial, not a perpetual free plan | Day 31 |
| Pipedream | Daily credit figure not published | "Limited number of active workflows" | Unclear from the docs |
Zapier: the step limit bites before the task limit
Zapier's Free plan includes "100 tasks /mo", "unlimited Zap workflows, Tables, and Forms", "two-step Zap workflows", and a 15-minute update time. Premium apps are not included. Tables are capped at 2,500 records per account and Forms at 10 pages per account (Zapier pricing, verified September 2026).
Two steps means a trigger and one action. That is enough for "new form response, add a row" and almost nothing else. You cannot add a filter to cut noise, you cannot format a field, you cannot branch. The 100 tasks are generous relative to that constraint — since Zapier only bills successful actions and triggers are free, 100 tasks buys 100 completed one-action runs a month.
When you exhaust them, Zapier's documentation says plans without pay-per-task billing have runs held "until your billing cycle resets" or you upgrade (Zapier, How is task usage measured, accessed September 2026). Nothing is billed silently.
Make: 1,000 credits sounds like a lot until you count polls
Make's Free plan gives "1,000 credits/month", a maximum of 2 active scenarios, a 15-minute minimum scheduling interval, a 5-minute maximum execution time and 512MB of data transfer (Make pricing, verified September 2026).
Here is the arithmetic that catches people. Make's documentation counts trigger modules as consuming one operation per check — "one per check" is the wording, and it applies whether or not new data is found (Make, Operations, accessed September 2026). A scenario polling every 15 minutes checks 96 times a day, or roughly 2,880 times a month.
One scheduled scenario polling at the 15-minute free-plan minimum consumes about 2,880 credits a month doing nothing at all. The free allowance is 1,000. You run out in roughly ten and a half days before a single downstream action fires.
This is not a gotcha so much as a design instruction: on Make's free tier, use instant webhook triggers, or set a scenario to run a few times a day rather than every 15 minutes. A scenario polling four times a day uses about 120 credits a month and leaves 880 for actual work.
IFTTT: the simplest free tier, and the smallest
IFTTT's Free plan is "$0.00 / forever" with "2 Applets" and "Unlimited Applet runs" (IFTTT plans, verified September 2026). There is no run meter to manage at all. If your entire need is two simple one-trigger-one-action connections that fire constantly, this is the only free tier on the list where volume is genuinely not a concern. Pro is $2.99/month ($35.88 billed annually) for 20 Applets; Pro+ is $8.99/month ($107.88 billed annually) for unlimited Applets.
Activepieces: a daily meter, and a free self-hosted path
Activepieces gives "100 credits a day", "1 user included" and "unlimited flows" on Free, with runs exceeding the daily allowance waiting for the next day. Paid Plus is $16/month billed yearly for 10,000 credits a month and up to 5 users, with overage at "$0.007 per extra credit" (Activepieces pricing, verified September 2026).
A daily meter behaves differently from a monthly one. It rewards steady work and punishes bursts: 100 credits a day is roughly 3,000 a month if spread evenly, but a Monday morning batch of 400 runs simply stalls until Tuesday. The company also publishes an open-source Community Edition described as free forever with no constraints on runs, users or flows, excluding Agents, Chat, Projects, API access and enterprise features like SSO and audit logs.
n8n and Power Automate: no perpetual free cloud tier
n8n's cloud pricing starts at Starter, €20/month billed annually for 2,500 workflow executions. There is no free cloud plan listed. What is free is self-hosting: "a standard, self-hosted version of n8n is available on GitHub" at no cost (n8n pricing, verified September 2026). That trades a subscription for a server and your own time.
Microsoft's Power Automate pricing page lists a "Power Automate Free Trial" as a 30-day trial rather than a perpetual free plan, with paid tiers starting at Power Automate Premium, $15.00 per user per month paid yearly (Power Automate pricing, verified September 2026). Separately, Microsoft's admin documentation still lists a "Power Automate Free" license in its request-limits table at 6,000 requests per user per 24 hours, so limited free capability exists inside Microsoft 365 — but it is not sold or described as a free tier on the pricing page.
Where vendors have stopped publishing hard numbers
Two cases are worth naming plainly, because the absence is itself the finding.
Airtable. The pricing page states Team at $20 per user per month and Business at $45 per user per month, both billed annually, but does not state per-plan monthly automation run limits. Airtable's own plans documentation gives record caps clearly — "1000 records per base" on Free, "50000 records per base" on Team, "125000 records per base" on Business — and caps Free at 5 collaborators with Editor or Creator permissions. It does not state a monthly automation run figure for production plans; the only run number we could find was a 25,000-per-month figure attached to a Team trial (Airtable plans documentation, accessed September 2026). If automation volume matters to you, ask before you commit.
Pipedream. The documentation defines a credit as "one credit per 30 seconds of compute time at 256MB megabytes of memory" and says free workspaces have a daily credit limit, a "limited number of active workflows" and a "limited number of connected accounts" — without stating any of those numbers. The one hard figure in the limits documentation is a test-runtime cap of 750 per day on Free (Pipedream limits documentation, accessed September 2026). We could not verify the free daily credit allowance from a published page.
What you can genuinely run for $0
- Two constantly-firing one-step connections: IFTTT Free, comfortably.
- A handful of daily or hourly jobs with real logic: Activepieces Free, within 100 credits a day.
- One webhook-triggered multi-step scenario at low volume: Make Free, if you avoid scheduled polling.
- About 100 simple two-step runs a month: Zapier Free.
- Anything at real volume: self-hosted n8n or Activepieces Community Edition, paying in server costs and your own maintenance time instead.
Bottom line
Free tiers in 2026 are evaluation tools and hobby tools. They are sized so that the first genuinely useful workflow — one with a filter, a lookup and two destinations, running on a schedule — pushes you onto a paid plan. That is a defensible product decision, not a trick, but it should shape how you test. Build your real workflow on the free tier, watch which limit you hit first, and let that tell you which meter you should be shopping on.