What is a Zapier task and how much do they cost in 2022?
Understand what Zapier counts as a task and calculating how many your zaps use in the key to working out what plan you need
One of the trickier things about Zapier can be working out how much you're going to need to spend to make your zaps work. Zapier has a variety of pricing plans each with a variety of limits. The two important ones are the number of zaps you can have and the number of task you can use per month.
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How much does Zapier cost?
Zapier has a Free plan, a Starter plan, a Professional plan, a Team plan and a Company plan. Each plan has a starting price and then tiered pricing based on how many tasks you need.
Here is a pricing table that's up to date as of June 2020:
These prices are per month, billed annually. Paying yearly for Zapier costs less than paying monthly.
What counts as a task in Zapier?
Keeping it simple, each zap in your account that is switched on counts against your zap quota. If you leave a zap switched off, it doesn't count. This means you don't have to worry about things while you're still building and experimenting.
As for tasks, it's a little more complex. When a zap runs live, each successfully completed step counts as 1 task. The exceptions here is the trigger step which does not count towards you task quota. Nor does a filter step if it does not pass.
Let's look at an example to illustrate.
You have a zap that triggers on a new Shopify order, a filter step to check if the order total is above a certain amount and then an action step that writes the order details to a new row on a Google Sheet. That zap has two steps, excluding the trigger.
If the zap runs, the order total is above the set amount and the details are written to a Google Sheet - then you'll have used two tasks.
If the zap runs but the order total is below the set amount, then the filter will stop the zap. In this case, the zap will not have used any tasks.
With that in mind you can easily calculate how many tasks you might need per month. Say you'll get roughly 50 orders per month above the set total. That works out to 50 * 2 task. You'll be using about 100 tasks per month - so the Starter plan will be more than enough for you.
What is an example of a Zapier task?
Here are some examples of tasks in Zapier:
- When you get a new Mailchimp subscriber, you want to trigger a zap that sends them an SMS. This would use 1 task from your Zapier quota.
- You receive an email in Gmail, and if it's from a specific domain, you want send an alert in Slack. This will use 2 tasks, one for the filter step after the trigger and another to send the message in Slack. However, if the filter does not pass, then 0 tasks will be used.
- Someone purchases a ticket to your event on Eventbrite. You trigger a zap and you use Zapier Paths to send them a customised email depending on which tier of ticket they bought. This would use 2 tasks. One to clear the path and another to send the email.
Is Zapier more expensive than Integromat?
Broadly speaking, Integromat is cheaper on a per task basis. However there are thing to consider - like the fact that they charge for the trigger step in a workflow. They also have plan restrictions based on data transfer that Zapier doesn't have.
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