Zapier. $19.99/mo.

The pitch: automation without code. Zaps connect 9,000+ apps: a trigger in one app fires actions in another, with AI agents, chatbots, tables, and forms now bolted on. The free plan caps you at 100 tasks a month and two-step Zaps. Professional starts at $19.99 a month billed annually for 750 tasks, $29.99 if you pay monthly, and every action a Zap completes uses a task, sometimes more than one. Run past your 750 and pay-per-task billing kicks in at a higher rate than the tasks you already bought.

The reality: most of what a small business actually runs through Zapier is routine, not real time. New leads logged to a spreadsheet, a Monday morning report, form responses summarized, invoices filed, a weekly content digest. Each one of those is a sentence to Claude, not a five-step Zap: connect the same apps, describe the routine in plain English, save it as a scheduled Cowork task, and it runs on its own. No task meter, no per-action billing, no Zap editor to debug when a step breaks. The cost is the $20 a month Claude plan you’re likely already paying for, against the $240 to $360 a year coming out of your pocket, before a single overage.

What Zapier still gives you that the free build doesn’t: always-on triggers that fire within two minutes, around the clock, with nothing open on your machine; connectors for thousands of niche apps that have no MCP server yet; and shared Zaps with approvals if a whole team builds automations together. If your business depends on instant handoffs, a new order hitting fulfillment the same minute it lands, keep it. If your Zaps are really daily and weekly routines, you’re paying $240 to $360 a year to schedule chores Claude already handles inside a plan you pay for anyway.

Replacing Zapier Professional with scheduled Cowork tasks pays for the entire Vault subscription twice over in year one, three times over if you pay month to month.