Move your Zapier automations to Whisk
Zapier is a good way to connect two systems when not much is happening. When an automation gets busy, the bill grows with it, because Zapier charges for every step of every run. Moving a busy Zap into an app on Whisk turns that into a flat price. An AI coding assistant can write the app from a description of the Zap.
What a busy Zap costs
Take a business that sells supplies to trade customers. When a customer places an order on its website, a Zap does five things: finds or creates the customer in the accounting system, creates the invoice, adds a row to the dispatch sheet, posts in the warehouse's chat channel, and marks the order as accepted in the online store.
Zapier counts each of those five actions as a task. The order coming in doesn't count, and nor do filters or formatting steps.
| Orders a month | Tasks a month | Zapier Professional plan, billed monthly |
|---|---|---|
| 140 | 700 | $29.99 (the 750 task plan) |
| 400 | 2,000 | $73.50 |
| 1,000 | 5,000 | $133.50 |
| 2,000 | 10,000 | $193.50 |
| 4,000 | 20,000 | $283.50 |
At 60 orders a working day, that's about 1,300 orders a month and 6,500 tasks, which needs the 10,000 task plan. Every step you add, like updating stock or texting the driver, adds another task to every order. Add a second Zap for quotes, and they share the same allowance.
Prices are in US dollars, from Zapier's pricing page in October 2026. Billed yearly, each tier costs about a third less. Past the plan's tasks, your Zaps pause, or, if you've turned on pay-per-task, the extra tasks are charged at a higher rate.
The same thing on Whisk
On Whisk, the order is one run of a workflow in your app, however many steps it has. A thousand orders a month is a thousand runs.
Every business runs one app free, and the free app includes 10,000 runs a month. That's enough for the business above, with room for the order volume to grow several times. Starter is $49 a month for 10 apps and 100,000 runs. Runs are an allowance, not a meter: if you ever went past it, new runs wait until next month or until you change plans. Going over never adds a charge for runs.
Steps are also free to add. Checking stock, texting the driver and updating the customer's account balance don't change the price.
What else changes
Moving the Zap into an app isn't only about cost.
- It tries again properly. If the accounting system is down, the step waits and tries again. The steps that already worked aren't repeated, so nobody gets two invoices.
- You can see what happened. Every run is recorded with each step's result, so when someone asks about an order, you can see exactly what was done.
- It can do more than pass data along. The app can hold its own data, show a screen to the warehouse, or wait for someone to approve an order over a customer's credit limit.
- The keys are kept in one place. Your accounting and store keys are kept in Whisk's secrets, not spread across Zaps.
Moving a Zap
Open the Zap in Zapier and write down what it does, step by step, in plain words. Include the trigger, each action, any filters and paths, and which fields go where. A screenshot of each step works too.
Then open an AI coding assistant like Claude Code, Cursor or Codex, give it your notes and this prompt:
Read https://whisk.run/skill and follow it. Build an app that replaces this Zapier Zap (steps attached). When a new order arrives from our online store, run it as a Whisk workflow: find or create the customer in our accounting system, create the invoice, add the order to a dispatch list the warehouse can open in the browser, post in our chat channel and mark the order as accepted in the store. Make each step its own workflow step so a failure retries only that step. Ask me for the access keys you need through Whisk's secrets. Deploy it to Whisk when it passes whisk doctor.
Many online stores and accounting systems can send their events straight to the app, so there's nothing checking for new orders every few minutes. The AI sets that up and tells you the web address to give the store.
Run both side by side for a few days, with the Zap's last step turned off, and compare. When the app matches, turn the Zap off.
What to leave in Zapier
Zapier connects to thousands of services, and plenty of Zaps run a few times a week. Those cost little and aren't worth moving. Move the busy ones, and the ones the business can't afford to get wrong.