What Workflow Automation Costs in 2026

For a five-person company running three modest automations, the software costs roughly $47 to $110 a month as of September 2026. The person who maintains it costs more than that — about $186 a month at four hours of upkeep, using the federal average for employer compensation costs. The software line is the part everyone budgets for and the smaller of the two.

Below is the full arithmetic, with every price checked against the vendor's own page this month.

The number that decides your bill is not the price

Three major platforms bill for three different things, and the difference is larger than the difference in sticker price.

• Zapier bills per task. Its help documentation defines a task as "any successful action that runs in Zapier," and notes that "Zap triggers never use tasks" and that filters and paths do not count either (Zapier help, checked September 2026).
• Make bills per operation. Make defines an operation as "a single module run to process data or check for new data," and notes that a module's operation count depends on how many bundles it processes — "each module runs one or more times, resulting in 1 or more operations" (Make Help Center, checked September 2026).
• n8n bills per execution. n8n defines an execution as "a single run of an entire workflow" and states plainly that "it does not matter how many nodes or steps the workflow has" (n8n, checked September 2026).

A workflow with six steps that runs 400 times a month consumes roughly 2,000 tasks on Zapier, roughly 2,400 operations on Make, and 400 executions on n8n. Same work. A sixfold difference in billable units.

A realistic workload for five people

Take three automations that a small ops team plausibly runs.

1. Lead intake. Web form fires, record created in the CRM, Slack notification, confirmation email, row appended to a tracking sheet. Four actions after the trigger. 400 runs a month.
2. Overdue invoice nudge. Runs every business day, pulls about 30 overdue invoices, and for each one sends an email and logs it. 22 runs a month, 30 records per run, 2 actions per record.
3. Weekly report. Pulls data, computes, formats, emails. About six steps. 4 runs a month.

The Make column includes the trigger module, which Make counts as an operation; Zapier's column does not, because Zapier documents triggers as free. The n8n column is just the number of runs.

List prices, verified September 2026

Sources, all checked September 2026: Zapier pricing, Make pricing, n8n pricing, Power Automate pricing, and Microsoft 365 Business plans.

Three monthly budgets, with the arithmetic

Assume the workload above and five people who need mailboxes.

Annualized, that is $564 for Option A and $1,320 for Option C. The spread between the cheapest and the most expensive software option is about $756 a year — real money, but less than two days of a person's time.

The line item nobody budgets

Automations need maintenance: an API changes, a column gets renamed, a credential expires, someone asks for a new field. Budget four hours a month for a five-person company running three workflows. That is one hour a week, and it is the low end.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that total employer compensation costs averaged $37.36 per hour worked in March 2026 at private establishments with 1 to 49 workers — the band a five-person company sits in (BLS, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, Table 6). The all-private-industry average is higher, $46.60, but it is dominated by large employers and is the wrong number for a small business.

Four hours × $37.36 = $149.44 a month, or $1,793.28 a year. That is more than three times the Option A software bill. Use your own loaded rate if you have one — the point is the ratio, not the average.

Full picture, Option A: $47.00 software + $149.44 labor = $196.44 a month, or $2,357.28 a year.

Where budgets actually blow up

Four failure patterns, in rough order of how often they surprise people.

Per-record loops. Look again at the invoice workflow. It runs 22 times a month and consumes over 1,300 billable units on the per-action platforms, because it touches 30 records each time. Any workflow that loops over rows is where per-task pricing gets expensive, and it is the workflow people forget to count.

Retries and reruns. A failing step that retries consumes units. On per-task pricing, a workflow that errors halfway through has already spent the tasks for the steps that succeeded — Zapier's definition counts successful actions, and the ones before the failure were successful.

Seat creep. Zapier's Team plan includes 25 users at its stated entry price, and Make and n8n advertise unlimited users on paid plans. Power Automate Premium is priced per user, so it scales linearly with headcount: five people is $75 a month, twelve is $180.

Premium connectors. Some integrations sit behind higher tiers on every platform. Check that your specific apps are available on the plan you priced before you commit to an annual term.

How to price your own build

1. Write out each workflow as a numbered list of steps.
2. Estimate runs per month, honestly, including the ones that fire at 2 a.m.
3. Multiply by the vendor's unit: actions for Zapier, module runs per bundle for Make, whole runs for n8n.
4. Add 30% for retries, test runs and the workflows you have not thought of yet.
5. Look up the plan that covers that volume, and note the price of the tier above it — that is the one you will be on within a year.
6. Add four hours a month of maintenance at your loaded rate.

Do that and the decision usually becomes obvious. If your workflows are step-heavy and loop over records, per-execution pricing wins on arithmetic alone. If you run a handful of simple two-step automations, the per-task platforms are cheaper and easier to staff. Either way, the software is the small number.