How Make and n8n Count an Empty Poll (We Checked)

If you build “email me when my RSS feed has a new item” in Make or n8n, the trigger checks the feed on a schedule, and most of those checks find nothing. Whether an empty check costs you anything decides how long a free plan lasts. We built the same automation in both tools and checked how each one counts it. Some of this we measured on our own accounts and some we only read in the vendors’ docs, and we mark which is which.

We’re a Make affiliate (this page has no affiliate link); n8n declined our application.

Short version

Make: an empty check costs one credit

Make’s help center says that a trigger module runs once to check for data and counts as one operation per check, regardless of how many items it returns, and that credits replaced “operations” as the billing unit (one operation is one credit for non-AI apps).

We checked that against our own run history on the free plan, on October 11, 2026. A manual run where the RSS module found nothing new, and the Gmail module therefore never ran, cost 1 credit (1 operation, 0 data transfer). A run that reached Gmail cost 2 credits, and it cost 2 whether the Gmail step succeeded or failed with a 403 error.

New scenarios in our account were set to “Every 15 minutes”, and the schedule dialog says the value “Must be higher than or equal to 15” on the free plan. The field is in minutes.

What that means over a month, if only the trigger runs (our arithmetic from the 1-credit measurement, not a month of real usage; we ran the scenario manually and never left it scheduled):

At the default, a 1,000-credit month lasts about 10 days with nothing happening. To set 6 hours you type 360. Steps For your own interval and item count, try the Make credit calculator. after the trigger add credits only on checks that find items.

n8n: polling triggers count only when they find something

n8n’s page on how executions count says a polling node, “like Google Drive Trigger”, counts one execution only when it finds new data, and polls that return no results don’t count. A Schedule Trigger counts one execution every time it fires. Manual runs from the editor don’t count, and only production runs count toward a quota. An execution is a whole run of the workflow, however many steps it has.

Whether an RSS workflow is a polling one depends on the node it uses. We exported our August workflow from n8n’s dashboard and read the file: it uses the RSS Feed Trigger, which is a polling node (its interval had been set to 6 hours). So by n8n’s rules an empty check would not have counted. We haven’t measured this on a live account.

The catch is the free allowance. n8n Cloud has no ongoing free plan: it is a 14-day trial capped at 1,000 executions, and no card is needed. Our trial account from August had expired when we opened it in October: the dashboard said “Your trial has expired”, our workflow was paused, and the only way it offered to resume the workflow was a paid plan, 20 euros a month billed annually or 24 billed monthly (it also let us download the workflow). More on that screen, and where n8n’s docs differ from it, is in what you see when the n8n trial expires.

The self-hosted Community Edition is free, which we didn’t test.

What we got wrong first

In our first n8n review we wrote that its default 1-minute poll would use up the free allowance in about 17 hours. We had assumed n8n counts like Make and had not read its page on this. That was wrong for a polling trigger, and we’ve corrected it with a dated note in the n8n review and the Make vs n8n comparison. The Make review has the related correction about Gmail permission errors.

What to do with this

• In Make, open the schedule before you switch the scenario on. The default is the most expensive setting the free plan allows.
• Match the interval to how often the feed changes. Our own feed posts a few times a week, so six hours only means an email can arrive that much later. A feed that posts every few minutes is a different case, and we haven’t tested one.
• To see what a run cost in Make, open the scenario’s History tab. The Credits and Operations columns show it per run.
• In n8n, check which trigger node you have. Polling nodes and the Schedule Trigger are counted differently.

We haven’t tested webhooks, which avoid polling by having the source push the event, or Make’s aggregator modules, so we can’t say what they cost. Pricing and limits change; check each vendor’s pricing page before you rely on a number here.

Tools mentioned in this guide