What Make's Free Plan Actually Gets You (We Tested It)

Make’s free plan says “1,000 credits a month”, which doesn’t tell you much until you know what a credit buys. We built one real automation on it (watch our own RSS feed and email us when a new item appears), debugged it over about half an hour of runs, and read the usage meter afterwards. This page is what we measured and what we only read on Make’s own pages. We’re a Make affiliate; this page has no affiliate link.

What building and debugging one scenario cost: 10 credits

On October 12, 2026, the account dashboard showed 990 of 1,000 credits left, 0 of 2 active scenarios, and 4.3 KB of the 512 MB data transfer used. The account had three scenarios: a Gmail-only test that used 1 credit, an older RSS-to-Gmail one from August that used 0, and the RSS-to-Gmail scenario we spent October 11 debugging, which used 9. Those 9 are the five runs in the history table below: one run where the feed had nothing new (1 credit), and four runs that reached Gmail (2 credits each, whether Gmail failed with a 403 or succeeded).

So half an hour of trial and error on a two-module scenario used about 1% of the month. Manual runs from the editor still spend credits on Make; that part we saw directly, because every run in that table was started by hand.

The limits, and which one you’ll meet first

These are the free-plan limits on Make’s pricing page as of October 12, 2026:

Of these, the one we saw bite is the schedule. New scenarios in our account were set to “Every 15 minutes”, the lowest the free plan allows, and the schedule dialog says the value “Must be higher than or equal to 15”. At that interval a trigger alone costs about 2,880 credits in a month (96 checks a day, one credit each), nearly three times the allowance, so the credit limit is reached long before the others. We covered the arithmetic in how Make and n8n count an empty poll.

The others we never reached. We never tried to switch on a third scenario, never ran anything near five minutes, and the account’s total data transfer was 4.3 KB. The 2-scenario cap and the 7-day log are worth planning around, but we’re only repeating Make’s numbers there.

A budget you can do on paper

Make’s help center says each module action counts one credit (one operation per credit for non-AI apps), and a trigger counts one per check. So a scenario’s monthly cost is roughly:

checks a month + (new items a month × modules after the trigger)

For our RSS-to-Gmail scenario with the schedule at every 6 hours (360 minutes) and about 12 new items a month, that is 120 checks plus 12 emails, about 132 credits, which leaves most of the 1,000. This is arithmetic from the per-credit rule we measured, not a month of real usage; we ran the scenario by hand and never left it scheduled. To try your own numbers, use the Make credit calculator.

When the credits run out

We didn’t run out, so this is from Make’s own pricing FAQ: scenarios stop running until credits are added; incoming webhooks are queued up to your storage and processed afterwards; and polling triggers look for records since the last run that succeeded. Make also warns at 75% and 90% of the allowance.

What we didn’t test

Paid plans, running out of credits, webhooks as an alternative to polling, and Make’s aggregator and iterator modules, which can multiply the credit cost of a single run. If any of those matter to you, check Make’s pricing page and its credits help page before relying on this one. Limits and prices change.

For the full hands-on write-up, including the Gmail permission trap we hit, see our Make review. For how it compares with n8n on the same task, see the Make vs n8n comparison.

Tools mentioned in this guide