Zapier, n8n or a custom build: which should you use?

All three can move data between your apps when something happens. The differences show up later: who can fix it when it breaks, what it costs at ten times the volume, and whether anyone can tell what happened last Tuesday.

If the automation is small and not central to the business, learn it yourself. Zapier takes an afternoon, and you'll understand your own process better for having wired it up.

Hire when a failure costs real money, when the flow touches customer or financial data, or when it spans several systems that each change on their own schedule. Also hire when the honest answer to "who fixes this when it breaks?" is nobody.

The monthly bill grows faster than the business. Flows fail silently and someone notices a week later. Nobody remembers why step seven exists. You're building workarounds for features the tool doesn't have. A customer's security questionnaire asks where their data goes, and the honest answer is "through about six services".

One of these is normal. Three or four means the workflow has quietly become infrastructure, and it deserves to be treated that way.

You rarely need to rip everything out. Keep the simple zaps that work. Move the one or two workflows that matter most into a small custom service with tests, logs and an alert when something fails. That's usually where we start too, and it costs far less than rebuilding everything.