The Fan-Out Tax (Why a 3-Step Zap Can Cost 20x a 30-Step One)
This page contains one affiliate link, marked where it appears. It costs you nothing extra. Three actions processing 200 spreadsheet rows costs 600 tasks on Zapier’s published task definition. Thirty actions processing one form submission costs 30. The shorter workflow is 20 times more expensive, and nothing on the pricing page tells you that. Call it the fan-out tax: the gap between what your automation looks like it should cost and what it actually costs, created entirely by how many items each run touches. It is invisible if you are counting steps, which is exactly what everyone does. ...