40 Automations, One Weekend, Zero Regrets? My Zapier-to-Make Migration Diary

Why I Even Bothered

Let's start with the confession: my automation bill had crept north of $180 a month on Zapier. Not because I was doing anything exotic — a CRM sync here, an email sequence there, a Slack ping when someone filled out a Typeform. But task-based pricing is a slow leak. Every new client, every new workflow, every slightly chatty integration added another few dollars.

Make (formerly Integris, formerly Integromat — yes, the rebrand history alone deserves its own article) promised the same functionality for roughly half the cost on its equivalent tier. Skeptical but annoyed enough to try, I blocked off a Saturday and Sunday and moved everything. Here's how it went.

Friday Night: The Inventory

Before touching a single workflow, I exported a full list of my Zaps and sorted them into three buckets:

1. Trivial — simple two-step automations I could rebuild in 15 minutes
2. Annoying — multi-step flows with filters, formatters, and paths
3. Scary — anything touching billing, client data, or webhook receivers I'd forgotten the purpose of

That third bucket taught me something immediately: I had automations I didn't remember building. If you've been stacking tools for years, you probably do too. Migration weekend doubles as an audit, and honestly, that alone was worth the price of admission.

Saturday: The Rebuild Grind

Make doesn't import Zaps. Full stop. Every workflow gets rebuilt by hand, which is the single biggest hidden cost of switching.

The trivial bucket went fast — about four hours for 19 automations, mostly while listening to a Braves game in the background. The interface takes a few hours to click with. Where Zapier thinks in linear steps, Make thinks in a visual canvas of modules, which is more powerful but requires a mental gear shift.

The annoying bucket ate the rest of Saturday. Filters and formatters don't translate one-to-one; I had to re-derive logic I'd set up once and forgotten. Two automations relied on a Zapier-specific feature (their native table storage) that has no Make equivalent, so I had to spin up a free Airtable base as a stopgap.

Sunday: The Breakage Report

Here's what actually broke, in order of how much it hurt:

• Webhook URLs changed. Every external service pointing at my old Zapier webhook went silent until I updated the endpoints. If you have third-party apps posting into your automations, budget an hour for this alone.
• Date formatting is different. My Monday-morning digest arrived with timestamps that looked like a European train schedule. Small fix, but I caught it only because a client texted me.
• One Zap just didn't survive translation. A conditional flow with nested paths was easier to keep on Zapier than rebuild. Which brings me to...

I Kept a Hybrid — And You Might Too

I didn't fully migrate. Two complex workflows stayed on Zapier's free-ish footprint, costing me about $22 a month. The other 38 live on Make's $16 tier. Total monthly spend dropped from roughly $180 to $38.

That's the part nobody puts in the comparison blog posts: you don't have to pick a winner. The all-or-nothing framing around tool swaps is mostly tribal. Run both platforms in parallel for a month if your budget allows; kill the loser later.

The Decision Framework: Switch or Stay?

After living through it, here's the checklist I'd hand a friend:

Switch if:

• Your bill is growing faster than your business (mine was)
• You have more than a handful of automations but fewer than ~100 — enough to matter, few enough to rebuild
• Your workflows are mostly standard app-to-app connections
• You have a slow weekend and a tolerance for tedium

Stay put if:

• You rely on platform-specific features (Zapier Tables, Make's visual scenarios — the lock-in runs both directions)
• External systems post into your webhooks and you can't easily repoint them
• Your time is worth more than the savings. Rebuilding 40 automations took about 14 hours. If that time is better spent selling or shipping, the math changes fast.

The Verdict

Would I do it again? Yes — but only because my savings were large and my stack was mostly simple. If your bill is $40 a month and your automations are held together with nested logic and prayers, stay put and go outside instead.

The real lesson of migration weekend wasn't about Zapier or Make at all. It's that most of us don't actually know what's running under our own businesses until we're forced to touch every wire. Whatever platform you're on, do the inventory. The savings are nice; the clarity is better.