Make review (UK): pricing, credits and whether it suits a side hustle or small business

What is Make?

Make (make.com) is a no-code automation tool. You connect apps you already use, such as Gmail, Google Sheets, a form tool, an accounting package or a social media account, and Make moves information between them without you copying and pasting. On the pricing page footer the company is now shown as Celonis, Inc.

Make calls each automation a scenario. In Make’s own words, a scenario “triggers when it receives data from one app”, transforms the data however you need, and then sends it on to another app. You build them on a visual canvas, joining apps (“modules”) with lines.

UK customers can sign up and pay online; the catches are currency and VAT, covered below.

How Make pricing works: credits, not tasks

Since 27 August 2025, Make bills in credits. Before that the unit was “operations”. Make’s help centre says existing operations were converted to credits one-for-one and that plan prices did not change.

The basics, from Make’s pricing page and help centre:

• Most actions cost 1 credit. Reading a row, searching for a record, creating, updating or deleting something in an app, or transforming data with Make’s built-in tools each count.
• A single run can use several credits: Make says “anywhere from two credits to thousands”.
• Some modules are free. The Router module and error handlers (Rollback, Break, Resume, Commit, Ignore) do not use credits.
• Make’s own AI features cost more. When you use Make’s built-in AI Provider (in Make AI Agents and the Make AI Toolkit), credits are based on the AI tokens used as well as operations. If you connect your own OpenAI or Anthropic Claude account on a paid plan, Make charges credits per operation and you pay the AI provider for tokens separately.
• Credits expire. Unused credits expire at the end of the term. Extra credits you buy are treated the same way.
• Running out stops your scenarios. They pause until you add credits. Incoming webhooks queue up (within your queue limit) and are processed when you top up.

On paid plans you can buy extra credits in bundles of 1,000 or 10,000, or switch on auto-purchase of 10,000 credits before you run out (Core, Pro and Teams only).

Make’s pricing page lists prices in US dollars. The table below shows the entry level for each plan, 10,000 credits a month, which is where the credit slider starts. More credits cost more. The pound figures are our own rough conversion, not Make’s prices: we used the European Central Bank reference rates for 22 October 2026 (€1 = $1.1205 and €1 = £0.83770), which works out at about $1 = £0.748. Your card provider’s rate and any foreign transaction fee will differ.

A few other points from the pricing page that matter for a small budget:

• Yearly billing saves about 25% on Core, Pro and Teams (the page shows “Save 25%”), but you pay for the year up front.
• Unlimited users on every plan, including Free, so a partner or VA can help you build without an extra seat fee.
• Usage allowances scale with credits. For every 10,000 credits you get 5 GB of data transfer, 10 MB of data storage, 10 MB of incomplete-execution storage and a webhook queue of 667. The Free plan gets 512 MB of data transfer and 1 MB of data storage.
• Cancelling keeps your paid plan until the end of the billing period, then the account drops to Free. Downgrading charges your card immediately for the new plan and stops any active scenarios that rely on higher-plan features.
• Discounts: Make mentions a Start-up Plan for businesses with under 20 employees (“50% off Business”, subject to qualifying) and discounts for charities and non-profits by contacting them.

Currency and VAT for UK buyers

We could not find a GBP price list from Make. Its prices are shown in dollars, so expect your bank to convert the charge.

On VAT, Make’s help page on payment details says “only customers in the US pay sales tax”. It does not say whether UK VAT is added for UK customers. It does let you add a company name and Company Tax ID in your billing details so invoices are issued to your business. [ROB TO FILL: at checkout, note whether VAT appears on the total for a UK account, and what the invoice shows]

If you are VAT-registered and buy a service from a supplier based outside the UK, GOV.UK guidance says the reverse charge usually applies: you account for the VAT yourself on your VAT Return and, in most cases, reclaim the same amount, so there is no net cost. You also have to record the value in sterling. This is general information, not tax advice; check with your accountant.

Payment methods

Make’s help centre lists credit and debit cards, digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Cash App Pay), Link, Klarna and ACH direct debit for US bank accounts. It says available methods vary by region, and you see the options for your country at checkout.

Key features

• Visual scenario builder. Drag-and-drop canvas with routers and filters on every plan, including Free. Routers let one trigger branch into several paths.
• App integrations. The pricing page advertises “3,500+ apps” on all plans. (The same page also says 3,000+ in one place and “more than 1,000 3rd party apps” in its FAQ, so treat the exact number with care.) You can also build custom apps for any service with a public API.
• Scheduling. Free plan scenarios can run at most every 15 minutes; paid plans down to every minute. Webhook triggers can start a scenario as soon as data arrives.
• Hosting. Make lists its hosting as AWS in the EU or North America.

AI features and AI agents

Make has put AI front and centre. According to its pricing page, these are included on every plan, including Free:

• Maia by Make: build automations and AI agents by describing them in plain English.
• Make AI Agents (marked Beta): agents that decide which steps to take, using Make’s AI Provider or your own AI key. Make highlights a “Reasoning panel” that shows each decision an agent makes.
• Make AI Toolkit, AI Content Extractor (pulls text and data out of files) and AI Web Search (Beta).
• MCP server: in Make’s words, “connect your AI to your Make scenarios from anywhere”.

The cost to watch is credits. Make’s built-in AI features charge by tokens as well as operations, so a long document or a chatty agent can use more credits than a simple one-step action. For example, its “Large” tier (GPT-5 mini) gives 3,616 input or 452 output tokens per credit. If you plan heavy AI use, compare that with connecting your own OpenAI or Claude account on a paid plan.

Ideas for UK side hustles and small businesses

These are ideas for the kind of thing Make is built for, not results we have achieved. Check the apps you use are on Make’s integrations list before you start, and think about where customer data ends up (UK GDPR still applies).

• Lead capture: when someone fills in the enquiry form on your website, add them to a Google Sheet or CRM, send an acknowledgement email, and ping you on your phone.
• Invoices and admin: when an invoice is marked paid in your accounting software, send a thank-you email and log the payment in a spreadsheet you share with your bookkeeper.
• Social posting: when you add a row to a content calendar sheet, prepare a draft post for one or more platforms. Consider a manual approval step before anything goes live.
• Email triage with AI: summarise incoming enquiries and label them by type. Watch the credit cost of AI steps.

[ROB TO FILL: who Make is best for, in your words, after testing]

All three automate work between apps, but they count usage differently, so a “credit”, a “task” and an “execution” are not the same thing. Every figure below comes from each company’s own pricing page on 22 October 2026. The approximate pounds use the same ECB rates as above.

In short: Zapier has the biggest advertised app list and can bill in pounds, but costs more to start. n8n charges per run rather than per step and can be self-hosted free, which suits technical users with long workflows. Make sits between: visual, cheap to start, priced per step. [ROB TO FILL: link to the Make vs Zapier comparison when published]