Zapier pricing: why a step and a task aren't the same thing
By Anwar Benhamada · August 22, 2026
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Zapier’s pricing page opens with a line that sounds reassuring: pick a task tier, pay for that many tasks. Clean, right up until you notice the page never says a task is worth one unit of work. It’s worth one, three, or five, depending on what that step actually does — and the page that explains the multiplier lives on a different URL than the one that sells you the plan.
The tiers
Per month, US pricing in USD, billed annually unless noted. Checked on zapier.com/pricing, 22 August 2026, with the task-tier selector set explicitly at each row below.
| Plan | Tasks/mo | Annual | Monthly (no discount) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 100 | $0 | $0 |
| Professional | 750 | $19.99 | $29.99 |
| Professional | 2,000 | $49 | $73.50 |
| Professional | 10,000 | $129 | $193.50 |
| Professional | 50,000 | $289 | $433.50 |
| Team | 2,000 (floor) | $69 | $103.50 |
| Team | 10,000 | $169 | $253.50 |
| Team | 50,000 | $399 | $598.50 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Contact sales | — |
The annual discount holds at a flat 33% no matter which tier you’re on — I ran the numbers on all seven paid rows above and every single one comes out to the same percentage. That’s tidier than most of this category. It also means the sticker price you see by default (Zapier shows the annual number first) is a third cheaper than what you’d actually pay month to month, and the page doesn’t flag that unless you go looking for the toggle.
Team costs roughly 35-40% more than Professional at the same task count — $20 more at 2,000 tasks, $40 more at 10,000, $110 more at 50,000. That premium buys 25 seats, shared workspaces, SAML SSO, and priority support, not more tasks. If you’re a solo builder or a two-person team, Team is very likely the wrong plan regardless of how many tasks you burn through.
The part that isn’t in the pricing table
Here’s the actual teardown. Zapier counts “tasks” the same way n8n counts executions, except the exchange rate between “one step ran” and “one task spent” isn’t fixed:
| Step type | Task cost |
|---|---|
| Standard trigger/action step | 1 task |
| Built-in tools (Formatter, Paths, Filters, Delay, Looping, Tables, Forms) | 0 tasks |
| Lead Router step | 5 tasks |
| Code by Zapier step | 1 task |
| Extended code runtime | +1 task per 30 seconds past your plan’s allowance |
| Zapier MCP tool call | 2 tasks |
| AI step, standard model | 1 task |
| AI step, advanced model | 3 tasks |
| AI step, premium model | 5 tasks |
| AI tool call, advanced/premium model | 3 or 5 tasks per call |
This is on a separate page (zapier.com/pricing/rates), not the pricing page itself, and it’s the single most useful number for estimating your real monthly cost. A workflow built entirely from standard steps at 2,000 tasks a month fits comfortably on Professional’s $49 tier. Swap in a Lead Router step and a premium-model AI step partway through that same workflow, and each run of that branch now burns 5 to 10 tasks instead of 1 or 2 — you can hit your limit at a fifth of the run volume you budgeted for.
If your workflow does anything with AI beyond a cheap classification call, model the task cost of the specific step type before you pick a tier, not just the number of Zaps you think you’ll run.
Free plan: fewer tasks is the smaller problem
100 tasks a month is the obvious limit on Free, but it’s not the one that actually blocks people. Two others matter more:
Free is capped at single-step Zaps and 15-minute polling. Professional unlocks multi-step workflows and 2-minute polling; Team gets 1-minute. If your automation needs to fire more than one action, or fire close to real time, Free can’t do it regardless of task volume.
Free also can’t touch Zapier’s “Premium” app tier — the badge covering Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira Software Cloud, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, among others. Build your stack around any of those and the free plan isn’t a smaller version of the product, it’s a different, more limited one.
What happens when you hit the limit
Zapier gives you a choice, and it’s worth setting deliberately rather than leaving on the default. With pay-per-task billing turned on, once you cross your plan’s task limit you get moved to pay-per-task billing at a higher per-task rate than your subscription tasks — Zapier doesn’t publish that rate on the pricing page, so check it in your account before you assume a number. Turn pay-per-task off, and your Zaps just pause at the limit until your next billing cycle starts. Neither option is wrong, but “which one am I on” is worth confirming before a busy month turns into a surprise invoice or a workflow that silently stopped running.
What it actually costs you
Count tasks by step type, not by Zap count. A ten-step workflow built from standard actions and free built-in tools might cost less than a three-step workflow that routes through a Lead Router and calls a premium AI model twice. The task tiers scale reasonably well as you grow — cost per task on Professional drops from about $0.027 at 750 tasks to about $0.006 at 50,000 — so the pricing itself isn’t the trap here. The trap is assuming a task equals a Zap step when the rate card says otherwise.
Figures from zapier.com/pricing and zapier.com/pricing/rates, checked 22 August 2026, US pricing in USD. Task rates are the kind of thing platforms adjust as they add capabilities — recheck the rates page before locking in a plan around a specific workflow.