Ecommerce Automation
Make to n8n Migration Case Study: $4,320 a Year Saved
A client was paying $360 a month to run a fixed set of automations on Make. We rebuilt the same workflows on self-hosted n8n for about $30 a month, with no change in reliability. Same automations, different invoice.
Client
A recurring e-commerce automation client running a fixed set of always-on workflows. Anonymized.
Stack
The problem
The client was paying $360 a month, about $4,320 a year, to run a fixed set of automations on Make. The workload was stable; the bill was not small. Like a lot of teams, they assumed the platform was load-bearing, that moving off it would mean rebuilding everything from scratch and risking the reliability they depended on.
What we did
We rebuilt the same workflows on self-hosted n8n, where the equivalent run cost is about $30 a month. The automations and their reliability did not change; only the invoice did. The part that used to make migrations painful, the connector and glue code between systems, now gets written with Claude Code in an afternoon instead of over days.
The lesson
Platform lock-in is mostly a story we tell ourselves. The glue code was always the real work, and that work is now cheap. If you are paying more than a couple hundred dollars a month for Make or Zapier on a steady workload, there is probably a migration hiding in plain sight.
“Same automations. Same reliability. Different invoice.”
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