What is Zapier and how can it save me time?

The problem Zapier solves is straightforward and familiar. Every time you manually copy information from one tool to another, every time you do a task that follows a predictable pattern of if this happens then do that, and every time you check one system to trigger an action in another, you are doing work that a computer can do faster and more reliably than you can. Zapier automates these connections without requiring you to write code or hire a developer. It is the plumbing that keeps your software stack synchronized without requiring a human to do the synchronizing.

A Zap is Zapier's term for an automated workflow. Every Zap has a trigger, something that happens in one app, and an action, something that Zapier does in another app in response. A new row added to a Google Sheet triggers an email to be sent from Gmail. A form submission on your website triggers a contact to be created in your CRM. A new customer created in Stripe triggers a personalized welcome email in Mailchimp and a new task in Asana. Multi-step Zaps chain multiple actions from a single trigger, allowing a single event to set off a cascade of automated responses across several tools simultaneously.

The time savings from Zapier accumulate in ways that are easy to underestimate. A task that takes two minutes to do manually sounds trivial in isolation. If that task happens fifty times per week, it consumes almost two hours of time per week and close to one hundred hours per year. A Zap that automates that task takes one to two hours to set up and then runs indefinitely. The return on setup time is achieved within the first week for any task that happens more than a few times per day.

The most common high-value Zaps for year-one businesses are lead capture automations that create CRM contacts from form submissions, email list additions from new customers or subscribers captured in other tools, calendar event creation from booking confirmations, Slack or notification alerts triggered by important business events, and invoice creation from project management milestones. Each of these eliminates a manual step in a workflow that most businesses perform frequently enough to justify the setup time.

Zapier's free plan allows five single-step Zaps with a limited number of runs per month. The Starter plan at about twenty dollars per month adds multi-step Zaps and significantly more runs, which is the threshold where Zapier becomes useful for most business workflows. The value of paid tiers scales with the volume of automations you run and the complexity of the workflows you need. Most year-one businesses will find the Starter plan sufficient to automate their most time-consuming manual data transfer tasks.

Zapier is worth learning if you use more than three tools in your business and find yourself regularly copying information between them, because the automation payoff compounds with every new connection you build and every repetitive task you remove from your personal to-do list.