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Zapier Professional lists from $19.99 a month, Team from $69, Agents Pro at $400 a year. Set against admin time at $25 an hour, the licence is the small number. Your build hours are the real bill.
Loistrofi Editorial — Sep 2, 2026 — 10 min read
Zapier Professional lists from $19.99 a month, which is $239.88 a year. At $25 an hour of admin time, that's ten hours. Save one chase-up hour a month and you're ahead before March. Team lists from $69 a month, $828 a year, about 33 hours. The licence is not what will hurt you — the build time is.
Open last month's aged debtors report and count the invoices that actually got a nudge. Not the ones that went overdue — the ones a human touched. That number, call it your monthly chase volume, is the only input that decides which plan you need. Then write down what a single chase involves end to end: pull the ledger, check the payment hasn't already landed, write or paste the note, send it, log that you sent it, set a reminder to look again in seven days. Six steps is normal for a business chasing under a hundred invoices a month.
Both numbers matter because the two pricing models in front of you charge for different things. One charges for the steps. The other charges for the run.
Zapier's Free tier is described as 100 tasks per month. A task is Zapier's unit, and on the pricing page we read today it is not defined in the visible text — there's a link labelled "About task usage rates" and you should open it before you commit. The working assumption most people make is that each step that does something counts. If that holds, a six-step chase costs six tasks, and 100 free tasks covers about 16 chases a month.
n8n prices differently and says so plainly: "Pricing based on monthly workflow executions, regardless of complexity." One run of a workflow is one execution whether it touches one invoice or four hundred. The page gives you the sizing method too — a daily schedule is 30 or 31 executions a month, a job running every five minutes is about 8,600 to 8,900 a month, and a webhook workflow costs one execution per triggering event.
That difference decides the shape of your build. On an execution-priced tool, you want one scheduled workflow that loops the whole overdue ledger each morning: 30 executions a month, forever, no matter how the debtor list grows. On a task-priced tool, cost scales with invoices times steps, so a busy month is a bigger bill. Neither is wrong. But if you build the per-invoice-trigger version on the task-priced tool and your receivables double, so does your automation line.
| Plan | Price shown | What that number buys | Annualised |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zapier Free | $0/mo | 100 tasks per month; Zaps, Tables, Forms | $0 |
| Zapier Professional | from $19.99/mo | Unlimited access to Zap workflows, Tables, Forms; task quota not shown | $239.88 |
| Zapier Team | from $69/mo | Team building and management; seat count not shown | $828 |
| Zapier Agents (free tier) | Free forever | 400 agent activities per month, live data, web browsing | $0 |
| Zapier Agents Pro | $33.33/mo | 1,500 agent activities per month, billed annually | $400 |
| Zapier Chatbots Pro | $13.33/mo | 5 chatbots, 10 knowledge sources each, billed annually | $160 |
| Zapier Chatbots Advanced | $66.67/mo | Up to 20 chatbots, 20 sources each, logo removed | $800 |
| n8n Starter | Not shown in the page text we read | Monthly workflow executions | — |
| n8n Business | Not shown in the page text we read | 50% off via Start-up Plan if under 20 employees | — |
| n8n Community Edition | Not shown in the page text we read | Named on the page, terms not given | — |
The blanks in the bottom three rows are real. The n8n pricing page we pulled today carried the monthly/annual toggle, the "Save 17%" annual note, the plan names and a long FAQ about sizing executions — but no dollar figures in the text we could read. Treat any n8n number you have in your head as unconfirmed until you load the page yourself.
Professional is described as unlocking "the full power of the Zapier platform with unlimited access to Zap workflows, Tables, and Forms." What the page does not say, anywhere in the text we read, is how many tasks Professional includes. That is the single figure that determines whether a $239.88-a-year plan covers 200 chases a month or 2,000. Get it before you pay. If a six-step chase really costs six tasks, a business sending 80 chases a month is spending 480 tasks — a number you need to check against a quota you can't currently see.
Two more things on that page change the number. There's a monthly/yearly toggle with "Pay yearly (Save 33%)" next to it, and the text as captured doesn't make clear which state produced $19.99 and $69. Toggle it yourself and watch the figures move. And non-profits get 15% off any paid plan, explicitly excluding pay-per-task charges — so the discount lands on the licence, not on the overage, which is exactly the part that grows with your debtor list.
The AI layer is not bundled into the $19.99. Agents run "automated behaviours" and are counted in activities: 400 a month on the free tier, 1,500 a month on Agents Pro at $400 billed annually, which the page presents as $33.33 a month. Chatbots Pro is $160 billed annually ($13.33/month) for 5 chatbots with 10 knowledge sources each; Chatbots Advanced is $800 annually ($66.67/month) for up to 20 chatbots with 20 sources each and no Zapier logo.
For invoice chasing, ask what the agent is for. Sending a templated reminder on day 7, day 21 and day 35 is deterministic work — a plain workflow does it and an agent adds nothing but cost. Where an agent earns $400 a year is reading the replies: sorting "paid it Tuesday" from "send it to my accounts team" from "we dispute line 3", and routing each one. If you get 60 replies a month, that's well inside 400 free activities. Start there and only upgrade when you blow the ceiling.
n8n is the better structural fit for high-volume chasing, because one nightly run over the whole ledger costs 30 or 31 executions a month whether you have 40 overdue invoices or 4,000. The page also tells you it keeps a limited number of saved executions per plan, with a storage cap in Cloud and a retention window in days — and that hitting those limits doesn't stop workflows, it only trims history. If you ever need to prove in a dispute that a reminder went out on 14 March, that retention window is a purchasing criterion, not a footnote.
What you cannot do today is compare it on money. Starter, Business and Community Edition are named; no figures accompany them in the text we read. There is a Start-up Plan giving 50% off Business for companies under 20 employees, and annual billing is marked "Save 17%". Get the base numbers before you assume the discount makes it cheap.
- Line 1: last month's actual chase count. Forty is a reasonable mid-size figure — use yours.
- Line 2: minutes per chase, door to door. Six minutes is generous for a paste-and-send and optimistic if you personalise each one.
- Line 3: multiply, divide by 60, multiply by your loaded hourly rate. Forty chases × 6 minutes = 240 minutes = 4 hours. At $25 an hour, that's $100 a month.
- Line 4: subtract the licence. Professional at $19.99 leaves $80 a month. Team at $69 leaves $31. Professional plus Agents Pro at $33.33 costs $53.32 and still leaves $46.68.
Every one of those is positive in month one, which tells you the licence price is not the decision. The decision is whether the automation actually removes the four hours or just relocates them into checking that the automation did the right thing. Budget a genuine review habit: ten minutes a week reading the log. That's another 8.7 hours a year — $217 at $25 — and it is the honest cost of running the thing.
Connecting your accounting system, mapping the fields, deciding what counts as overdue, writing three escalating templates, testing against real customers without emailing someone who paid yesterday — that is the expensive part, and it's paid in your time, not the vendor's. Whatever you think it will take, the first working version usually costs more than the first year of Professional. That's not an argument against automating; a $240 licence plus a day of setup against $1,200 a year of recovered admin time is still an obvious trade. It's an argument against buying the biggest plan on day one.
If you chase fewer than about 15 invoices a month with a simple three-touch sequence, start on Zapier Free and its 100 tasks, because you will find out what your sequence actually needs to be before you've spent anything, and a task quota is a cheap way to discover you were over-engineering.
If you chase 20 to 80 invoices a month, one person owns the process, and the sequence is fixed, pick Zapier Professional from $19.99 a month. $239.88 a year is under ten hours at $25, and any chase list that long is costing you three or four hours a month.
If a second person needs to edit or even see the workflow when the owner is away, pick Zapier Team from $69 a month. The gap over Professional is about $49 a month, which is two hours of admin — far less than rebuilding an undocumented automation after the person who made it leaves. Confirm how many seats $69 includes first; the page doesn't say.
If your chase volume runs into the hundreds and you'd rather loop the whole ledger once a night than fire a workflow per invoice, price n8n, because executions are counted regardless of complexity and one daily schedule is 30 or 31 a month no matter how big the debtor list grows. You'll have to request the figures — they aren't on the page we read.
If you're mostly drowning in replies rather than in sends, add Zapier Agents. Try the free 400 activities a month first, and only move to Agents Pro at $400 a year when you consistently exceed it.
- Open Zapier's "About task usage rates" link and count what your specific chase sequence consumes per invoice, then multiply by your monthly chase volume.
- Ask Zapier, or read on the plan page, how many tasks Professional and Team include, and what happens the month you go over — the non-profit discount page explicitly excludes pay-per-task charges, which implies overage charges exist.
- Flip the monthly/yearly toggle on the Zapier pricing page and confirm whether $19.99 and $69 are the monthly-billed or yearly-billed figures before you budget $239.88.
- Confirm the seat count included in Team at $69 before you promise your bookkeeper and your accountant access.
- Get n8n's Starter and Business prices and execution quotas in writing, and ask whether you qualify for the 50% Start-up discount under the 20-employee rule and how long it lasts.
- Check n8n's saved-execution retention window on your intended plan and decide whether you need a permanent record of every reminder sent for dispute purposes — if you do, plan to log chases into your own system rather than relying on execution history.
Build it on Zapier Free first. One hundred tasks a month is enough to prove the sequence works and to find the three edge cases that will embarrass you — the customer who paid by cheque, the credit note, the invoice on hold. Move to Professional at $19.99 a month once the sequence stops changing weekly; $239.88 a year is recovered by the second month at any realistic chase volume. Skip Agents until reply-handling is genuinely the bottleneck, then use the free 400 activities before paying $400. Only go looking for n8n numbers if your chase volume is high enough that per-step billing starts to sting — and get those numbers on the page, not from anyone's memory.
Loistrofi does not take vendor briefings or speak to sales teams. Every figure here comes from a page the vendor publishes itself, checked on Sep 2, 2026. Where a number could not be confirmed at source, it is marked rather than smoothed over.
