Two automation platforms can quote you the same workload and land more than a thousand dollars a month apart, without either of them being expensive. The difference is the meter. One counts every step your workflow takes, one counts the whole run as a single event, one counts the people who can open the app, one counts the robots doing unattended work, and one counts tokens burned by a model. Pick the meter that matches the shape of your work and the bill stays boring. Pick the wrong one and you end up rationing automation to keep under a cap — which is the opposite of the point.
Here is how the five meters actually price out, using listed figures observed on 9 September 2026, and how to read your own workload against them.
The five meters, and what each one counts
Tasks. Zapier bills per action step that runs successfully. A workflow with twelve steps consumes roughly twelve times more meter than a workflow with one, for the same business event. The free plan carries 100 tasks a month, which is enough to prove a concept and not enough to run anything.
Executions. n8n bills the whole workflow run as one unit, no matter how many nodes it contains. Its cloud pricing was listed at €24 a month for 2,500 executions on Starter, €60 for 10,000 on Pro, and €800 for 40,000 on Business — roughly AUD 43, AUD 108 and AUD 1,440 at about 1.80 AUD to the euro. Users, workflows and integrations are unlimited on cloud plans; complexity is free and volume is what you pay for. There is also a free self-hosted Community Edition, which moves the cost from a licence line to a hosting and maintenance line rather than removing it.
Seats, split two ways. Retool separates builders from end users: the people who create apps and the people who merely use them. Published figures put the Team plan at roughly USD 10 per builder and USD 5 per internal user per month on annual billing, with Business around USD 50 per builder and USD 15 per internal user, and external users metered separately again. The free tier covers up to 5 users with 500 workflow runs a month and 5 GB of database capacity.
Bots. Microsoft prices Power Automate on a mix of per-user and per-bot lines. The pricing page lists Power Automate Premium at USD 15 per user per month billed yearly, Process at USD 150 per bot per month, and Hosted Process at USD 215 per bot per month. At about 1.55 AUD to the US dollar that is roughly AUD 23, AUD 233 and AUD 333. The distinction matters: a per-user licence prices automation as something each desk holds, a per-bot licence prices it as shared infrastructure.
Credits. The newest meter and the least predictable. Copilot Studio is licensed tenant-wide and sold in packs of 25,000 Copilot Credits at USD 200 per pack per month, about AUD 310. Microsoft 365 Copilot itself is a separate per-seat product at USD 30 per user per month billed yearly for enterprise, with business plans starting from USD 18. Zapier moved in the same direction: AI by Zapier steps shifted to model-based pricing from 15 June 2026, so AI steps no longer behave like ordinary task consumption.
A worked example: fifteen people, one workload
Take a 15-person professional services firm. Three people build and maintain automations, twelve use them. The core workload is client onboarding: about 60 jobs a week, each one triggering a workflow that touches the CRM, generates a document, files it, updates the practice management system and notifies two people. Call it twelve steps per job.
That is roughly 260 business events a month and roughly 3,100 individual steps. The same work, measured five ways:
| Meter | What it reads | Indicative monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Tasks | ~3,100 billable steps | A mid-tier task plan, and every extra step in the workflow moves the number |
| Executions | ~260 runs | Comfortably inside n8n's 2,500-execution Starter tier at about AUD 43 |
| Seats | 3 builders + 12 internal users | Retool Team ≈ USD 90 (about AUD 140); Business ≈ USD 330 (about AUD 512) |
| Per user (Power Automate Premium) | 15 licensed users | USD 225, about AUD 350 |
| Per bot (Process) | 1 unattended bot | USD 150, about AUD 233 |
The spread is the whole point. On an execution meter, adding four more steps to the onboarding workflow costs nothing. On a task meter, it adds a third to the bill. On a seat meter, volume is irrelevant and headcount is everything — hire five more consultants and the automation cost rises even if the workflow count does not. On a per-bot meter, one shared unattended process is cheaper than licensing fifteen desks, but only if the work genuinely is unattended and centralised.
So the first question is not which platform is best. It is which axis your business grows along. Firms that grow by adding people should be nervous about seat meters. Firms that grow by adding transaction volume should be nervous about task meters. Firms that grow by adding workflow complexity — more integrations, more branches, more exception handling — should strongly prefer execution meters, because complexity is exactly what task pricing punishes. That mapping is the first thing worth settling when you are scoping an automation and AI build, well before anyone compares connector libraries.
Currency and residency move the number more than features do
Almost none of these prices are quoted in Australian dollars. n8n lists in euros, Microsoft and Retool in US dollars. Every conversion above is indicative and moves with the exchange rate, which means an annual commitment made in a good month can be materially worse in a bad one. Budget with headroom, and treat any vendor comparison that omits currency as incomplete.
Residency changes the shortlist outright. n8n's cloud platform is hosted in the European Union, and the no-code data residency question is one most SMEs only ask after the first client security questionnaire arrives. If Australian residency is a hard requirement — common in healthcare, financial services, government suppliers and larger professional services engagements — n8n cloud is not the fit, but self-hosted n8n on Australian infrastructure is. That trade swaps a licence line for hosting, upgrades, backups and monitoring, and it needs an owner.
On the model side, OpenAI announced on 25 November 2025 that data residency is available in Australia for eligible business customers, and Azure OpenAI can be deployed in the Australia East region so that prompts, responses and inference stay in Australian datacentres. That makes an Australian-resident AI layer achievable on either commercial platform or your own infrastructure — it just has to be decided up front, because retrofitting residency after a workflow is live means rebuilding the integration layer, not flipping a setting.
The governance tier is where budgets break
The surprise in most automation budgets is not the meter. It is discovering that the controls you need to run the thing safely sit two tiers above the one you costed. SSO and SAML, Git-backed version control, and separate development and production environments are commonly bundled into higher plans across this category, n8n included. None of those are luxuries once more than one person is editing workflows that touch client data. Version control is what lets you roll back a broken change; environments are what stop someone testing against live records; SSO is what your first serious client security review asks about.
Budget as though you will need them within twelve months, because you will. A plan that looks cheap at AUD 43 a month and a plan that includes governance at AUD 1,440 a month are not the same product being sold at different prices — they are different products, and the second one is the one you run a business on.
The other under-budgeted line is upkeep. Automations break when upstream apps change their APIs, when a form field is renamed, when a licence lapses. Someone has to own that. If no name is attached to the workflows, the true cost of the platform is the failure nobody notices for three weeks.
The first move
Before you look at another pricing page, measure your own workload in all five units: runs per month, steps per run, people who build versus people who only view, unattended processes that could run as a shared bot, and how many of those steps involve a model call. Four numbers and a list. That single page tells you which meter is cheap for you and which one quietly penalises the way your business grows.
If you would rather have someone else do that arithmetic against real vendor pricing, IOTAI will map your workload to each meter, convert the shortlist into AUD with the residency constraint applied, and give you a scoped build cost and a payback figure for the two or three workflows worth doing first — including a straight answer if the numbers say it is not worth doing yet. Run your figures through the ROI calculator or send us the workload and we will come back with the comparison.