TL;DR: Make charges per module execution, not per workflow run. A scenario with 10 modules running 500 times costs roughly 5,000 credits, not 500. Free $0 for 1,000 credits, Core $9, Pro $16, Teams $29, each for 10,000 credits a month. Most small businesses land at $9-16. If you are over 150,000 credits a month, look at n8n.
One terminology note before anything else, because it will confuse you against older guides: Make used to call these operations and now calls them credits. Same unit, new word. Every tutorial written before 2026 says operations and still applies.
What counts as a credit
Every time a module inside a scenario executes, that is one credit. This is the single fact that determines your bill, and it is the one most people get wrong on their first estimate.
Counts:
Every action module: create a row, send an email, call an API
Routers, each path that actually runs
Filters that evaluate and pass
Aggregators and iterators, per item processed
Error handler modules when they fire
Does not count:
The trigger, the first module that starts the scenario
Paths that a filter blocks before any module runs
A scenario that errors before any module executes
The iterator line is the one that bites. A scenario that fetches an order and then loops over its line items does not cost one credit per order. It costs roughly one per line item, per module inside the loop. A store averaging six items an order can be six times more expensive than the first estimate suggested. Check every loop in your design before you trust a number.
The plans, verified September 2026
Taken from make.com/pricing directly. All the paid tiers quote the same 10,000 credit bucket, and the price rises along a slider as you need more, up past 8 million a month.
Free: $0, 1,000 credits/month, limited active scenarios, 15-minute minimum interval between runs
Core: $9/month for 10,000 credits, unlimited active scenarios, scheduling down to the minute, Make API access
Pro: $16/month for 10,000 credits, priority execution, custom variables, full-text execution log search
Teams: $29/month for 10,000 credits, team roles, shared scenario templates
Enterprise: custom pricing, overage protection, advanced security
The Free plan's fifteen-minute minimum interval matters more than the credit limit for most people. If you need something to happen when an order arrives rather than within a quarter of an hour, Free is not a trial of your use case, and the $9 tier is the real entry point.
Worth knowing what the $7 step from Core to Pro actually buys: full-text search across execution logs. That sounds minor until the first time something goes wrong in a scenario that has run four thousand times and you need to find the one run that failed. We put clients on Pro for that reason alone.
Typical usage, by how much you automate
Rough bands from what we see in small businesses. Use them as a sanity check on your own estimate, not as a substitute for making one.
Light: three to five simple scenarios, low volume, 2,000-5,000 credits/month. Free or Core.
Moderate: around ten scenarios on daily triggers, 15,000-40,000 credits/month. Core or Pro plus a larger bucket.
Heavy: twenty or more scenarios on real-time triggers, 100,000+ credits/month. Pro or Teams at a high slider setting, and worth pricing n8n against it.
Estimating your bill before you build
Five minutes with a pen saves a surprise in month two. The method:
Count the billable modules in the planned scenario, excluding the trigger
Multiply by expected runs per month
For any loop, multiply that section by the average number of items
Add 20% for error routes, retries and the paths you have not thought of
Price that number on the slider, then check it against the volume you expect in a year rather than today
Worked example: an eight-module email automation with no loops, running 1,000 times a month. That is 8,000 credits, plus 20% is 9,600, which fits inside Core at $9/month with a little room. Now the same scenario with a three-item average loop over four of those modules: roughly 4,000 plus 12,000, so 16,000 before buffer. Same scenario, double the bucket. That is the difference the loop makes.
Where it gets expensive, and what to do about it
Make becomes cost-inefficient on high-volume real-time events: every order, every form submission, every inbound email. A store doing 500 orders a day through a twelve-module scenario is around 6,000 credits a day, 180,000 a month. At that point you are well up the slider and it is worth comparing against a self-hosted n8n instance, where the cost is server hosting in the tens of dollars rather than a usage bill.
The honest counterweight: self-hosting means you now own uptime, updates and backups. If nobody on your team wants that job, the usage bill is buying you something real. The switch makes sense when the saving is large enough to pay for the attention it costs, which in practice is somewhere north of $100-150/month in Make spend.
Cutting credits without changing what the system does
Before you migrate, most scenarios have easy waste in them. These are the four we find most often.
Filter early. A filter that blocks a path before the modules run costs nothing; the same filter at the end has already paid for everything upstream.
Stop polling. A scenario checking for new rows every minute burns credits all day finding nothing. Use a webhook where the source supports one.
Batch instead of looping. Many APIs accept multiple records in one call, turning fifty module executions into one.
Delete the dead ones. Every account we audit has scenarios still running for a process that ended last year.
Against Zapier, on cost
The wider head-to-head, including where each one wins, is in our three-way comparison. Zapier charges per task, meaning per action step that runs, and starts at Free with 100 tasks, then Professional from $19.99/month. Make starts at $9 for 10,000 credits. The units are not equivalent, so normalise before you conclude anything: count billable steps, multiply by runs, price both sliders. Even after normalising, Make comes out materially cheaper for equivalent volume in every workload we have measured, which is why businesses that outgrow Zapier generally move rather than climb its tiers.
Want your credit usage estimated before you build anything? That is a ten-minute job and we will do it. Start with the audit at 2pizza.team/audit, no call required.
Originally published at 2pizza.team. We build AI and automation systems for small teams - fixed price, two to six weeks. See the work.
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