Make.com pricing explained: what it really costs in 2026

Make is an automation tool: it moves work between your business apps on its own, like pushing every new lead into your customer list and firing off the follow-up text. At $9 a month it can replace hours of copy-paste work, but its billing has a trap that catches most new users and can burn a month's budget in one run. This review explains the pricing in plain words, when Make beats Zapier on cost, and who should skip it. Budget 30 minutes to understand credits before picking a plan.

How we checked

All plan facts below come from the official Make pricing page at make.com/en/pricing, pulled July 10, 2026. Make prints a dollar figure only at the entry stop of its credit slider, so this review quotes the $9 entry price exactly and names the higher slider stops without inventing prices for them. Credit-consumption mechanics (iterators, code steps, AI modules) reflect Make's own documentation as previously verified on a paid account; nothing is estimated from third-party reviews. Where the vendor's page is silent, this sheet says so.

Plan tiers

Make rebuilt its public pricing in 2026. The old lineup (Core, Pro, Teams) is gone from the table. What you can buy now:

Plan	Price	Credits/month	Active scenarios
Free	$0	1,000	2
Make Plan	from $9/mo	5,000 at the entry stop	Unlimited
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Unlimited

A scenario is Make's word for one automated routine. The Make Plan scales through a credit slider: 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 40,000, 80,000, and on past 8 million credits a month. The page shows a price once you drag the slider to your volume; only the $9 entry figure is printed up front. Annual billing saves 15% or more against monthly. Extra credits come in bundles of 1,000 or 10,000 at a fixed rate set by your subscription, for the months you overshoot.

This is the reverse of Make's old model, where three tiers all carried the same credit allowance and the price bought features. Now there is one feature set and the price buys volume. For a buyer, that is easier to reason about: your only real decision is how many credits you need.

Two Free-plan limits matter more than the credit count. Free scenarios poll every 15 minutes at fastest, meaning a new lead can sit for a quarter of an hour before the automation notices it. And 2 active scenarios is a hard ceiling. The paid plan drops polling to 1 minute and removes the scenario cap.

Reading the slider like a rate card

Make prints one number, $9, and quotes the rest in-page as you drag. That design favors the seller: most buyers anchor on the entry price and never write down what their real stop costs. Do the comparison the boring way. Drag the slider to the stop your estimate lands on and note the monthly price. Do the same one stop up. Divide each price by its credits to get a per-1,000-credit rate, and keep that number next to Zapier's per-task math for the same workflow. Two minutes of napkin arithmetic turns "starts at $9" into an actual rate card you can hold against the other meters.

While you are on the page, note the price of a credit bundle at your stop. That number decides whether an occasional overshoot month should buy bundles or whether the overshoot is structural and the answer is the next stop up.

What the free plan is actually for

The Free plan's 1,000 credits sound like a real allowance, and for learning the canvas they are. As a production line they are not, and the credit count is not the reason. The two limits that bite are the 15-minute polling floor and the 2-scenario cap. A lead-capture flow that waits up to a quarter of an hour before noticing a new lead is a follow-up problem dressed as a savings win, and the second scenario slot fills in the first week.

Use Free the way a workshop uses a bench: build the scenario, run it on test data, read the credits each run consumed in the scenario history, and only then move it to a paid stop with a number you trust. The moment a scenario answers real customers, it belongs on the paid plan's 1-minute scheduling. And remember the hard stop: when free credits run out, every scenario halts until next month, silently.

How credits actually work

A credit is Make's billing unit: one credit for each small action the automation performs. A three-step routine that runs once uses three credits. Simple.

The number that catches people off guard: iterators. An iterator is a loop, a step that repeats an action for every row in a list. A loop that processes 500 rows consumes 500 credits before any action inside it fires. A routine that pulls 500 contacts, looks up extra details on each, and pushes each to your customer list can burn 1,500 or more credits in a single run.

Two other places credits move faster than expected:

• Make Code (custom code steps): charges 2 credits per second of running time, not per run
• Native AI modules (built-in AI steps): billed by the amount of text the AI processes, so longer responses cost more and the total is hard to predict; Make's own pricing page notes that AI-powered features can consume more credits than standard actions

Error handlers and the Router step (which splits one flow into branches) are free.

Real bill math

A typical small marketing team running four routines:

Scenario	Modules	Frequency	Monthly credits
Form → CRM push	3	50×/day	4,500
Weekly analytics pull	6	4×/month	24
Contact enrichment loop	3 per row, 400 rows	1×/month	1,200
SMS follow-up trigger	2	40×/day	2,400
Total			~8,124

That total clears the entry stop's 5,000 credits, so this team sizes the slider at 10,000. The lesson is not the exact dollar figure; it is that one mid-sized team with four modest routines already needs the second stop. Estimate first, then drag the slider once, rather than buying the $9 entry and hitting the ceiling in week three.

Three scenarios, priced

Scenario 1: a 3-step lead-capture flow at 22 leads a day. Form in, CRM record created, notification out: 3 × 22 × 30, about 2,000 credits a month. That fits the $9 entry stop with more than half the allowance spare. The same workflow needs the whole entry allowance of Zapier's $69 Team plan, which is the cleanest illustration of why volume workflows get priced in Make first. The full head-to-head is in Make vs Zapier for marketing automation.

Scenario 2: the four-routine team above, ~8,100 credits. Sits in the 10,000-credit slider stop. Before committing, check the two biggest line items for waste: a 50-a-day form push is fine, but if that analytics pull ever moves from weekly to daily, it jumps from 24 to 180 credits, and a second enrichment list doubles the loop cost. Size the tier to the roadmap, not just to today.

Scenario 3: a monthly 2,000-row list clean with 2 actions per row. The iterator walks 2,000 rows (2,000 credits) and fires two actions on each (4,000 more): at least 6,000 credits in one run. On the entry stop this single job blows the month's 5,000-credit budget on its own; it needs the 10,000 stop or a credit bundle. This is the shape that generates most Make bill-shock stories, and it is entirely predictable with the formula below.

The credit audit, step by step

When the monthly total surprises you, the meter is readable. Every scenario keeps a run history, and each run shows the operations it consumed. The audit takes fifteen minutes:

1. List your active scenarios and what each one is for, one line each.
2. Open each scenario's history and read the credits consumed by the last few runs.
3. Multiply per-run consumption by monthly runs. That is the scenario's real monthly cost.
4. Rank scenarios by monthly credits. The top one or two almost always carry more than half the bill.
5. Inspect the top consumer for three kinds of waste: iterators walking longer lists than the job needs, polling triggers that could be webhooks, and retries burning credits on a step that fails often.
6. Rerun the estimate formula with the corrected numbers before touching the slider.

The usual finding is not "Make is expensive." It is one scenario doing quiet, expensive work nobody remembers building.

If you bought Core, Pro, or Teams

The old three-tier lineup no longer appears on the public pricing table, but the names still show up in Make's own pricing FAQ, which is the tell that existing subscriptions did not all vanish overnight. If you are on one of the old tiers, do not assume the $9 headline applies to you or that your renewal terms match the new table. Open your organization's billing screen and read three things: what your plan is called today, when it renews, and what your current credit volume costs on the new Make Plan slider. Then decide with numbers, not with the headline. The comparison often favors switching, because the new structure sells volume on one feature set, and gates you once paid a tier for, like unlimited active scenarios and 1-minute scheduling, now ship at every stop.

Who should skip Make

Skip Make if you have fewer than five things to automate or want teammates building automations with zero training; Zapier is simpler and its library is three times wider. Skip it too if your workflows are dominated by one big monthly list-processing job and nothing else: at that shape an execution-billed tool like n8n charges you one execution where Make meters every row. The field-wide comparison, including n8n and the flat-fee CRM route, is in the Zapier alternatives sheet.

Pick Make when the work is steady, multi-step, and worth a few hours of learning curve: that profile gets the most automation per dollar of any managed option here.

Annual or monthly

Make prices the annual commitment at 15% or more below monthly. The discount is real money at higher slider stops, but commit only when the volume estimate is stable, because an annual plan sized to a guess locks the guess in. The pattern that works: run the first month or two on monthly billing while the credit audit above settles the real number, then move to annual at the stop the audit proves. Buying the discount before knowing the volume saves 15% on a number that might be 40% wrong in either direction.

The part that breaks

Loop miscounting burns most new Make users. People count one run as "one execution" and forget the multiplier. A routine that walks through a 2,000-row spreadsheet and fires two actions per row uses at least 6,000 credits in a single run.

The free tier stops all automations the moment credits run out, with no warning. A lead follow-up or daily report simply halts mid-month until the next billing cycle.

And because the slider prices are quoted in-page rather than printed, teams sometimes commit at the entry stop without ever checking what their real volume tier costs. Drag the slider to your estimated number and read the quote before you enter a card.

There is a quieter version of the same mistake: treating credit bundles as the plan. Bundles exist for the occasional overshoot month. A team that buys a bundle every month is paying the top-up rate for volume the slider would sell cheaper, twelve times a year. Two bundle months in a row is the signal to re-run the estimate and move the slider, not to buy a third. The billing screen lists bundle purchases next to the plan line, so the pattern takes one glance to catch during the audit.

Copy this

Estimate monthly credits before building anything:

monthly credits =
  (modules × runs per day × 30)
  + (iterator rows × actions inside loop × loop runs per month)
  + (Make Code runs × avg execution seconds × 2)
  + AI module overhead (estimate high; token costs vary)

example:
  4-module workflow, 20 runs/day = 2,400 base credits
  + 300-row iterator, 2 actions each, 5 runs/month = 3,000
  = 5,400 credits/month → the 10,000-credit slider stop

Run this before you build. If the total lands within 20% of a slider stop, size up one stop: retries and growth eat the margin faster than you expect.

Upgrade path

Once the first build is stable, three savings worth knowing:

• Route AI work through your own account: an HTTP step (a plain web request) calling an AI service with your own access key costs one flat credit, versus the unpredictable built-in AI billing.
• Webhooks instead of polling: a routine that checks for new data every five minutes fires 8,640 times a month even when nothing happened. A webhook (a web address that gets notified the instant data arrives) fires only when there is real work.
• Prune the iterators: many loops exist only to reformat data. If a built-in aggregator or a filter can collapse the list before the loop, you delete hundreds of credits a month without changing what the automation does.

See how Zapier's task billing compares or jump straight into the lead-to-CRM build to put Make credits to work. More automation builds at /topics/automation.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Make.com cost per month in 2026?+

The Free plan is $0 for 1,000 credits and 2 active scenarios. The paid Make Plan starts at $9 per month for 5,000 credits with unlimited scenarios, and a slider scales the same plan to 10,000, 20,000 and far beyond. Enterprise is custom. Pricing checked July 2026 from the official Make pricing page.

What is a Make credit and how many does a typical automation use?+

One credit equals one module action, like adding a spreadsheet row or fetching a record. A three-step scenario that runs once uses 3 credits. An iterator that loops through 500 rows uses 500 credits for the loop alone, plus one credit per action inside each iteration.

When does Make.com get expensive?+

The bill climbs fast with iterator modules (each row counts as one credit), native AI modules (billed by token, not by run), and error retries, which also consume credits. Teams that estimate by workflow count rather than execution volume routinely overshoot their tier.

Is Make cheaper than Zapier at volume?+

Usually yes for multi-step or high-volume workflows. A five-step scenario running 1,000 times per month consumes 5,000 Make credits and 5,000 Zapier tasks, and Make's cost per unit is lower at comparable volumes. For simple one- or two-step automations at low frequency, both cost roughly the same.

What happened to Make's Core, Pro and Teams plans?+

In 2026 Make's public pricing table stopped selling them. It now lists Free, a single Make Plan with a credit slider, and Enterprise. The old tier names still appear in Make's pricing FAQ, but new buyers pick a credit volume on one plan instead of choosing between feature tiers.