Why I stopped using Zapier for everything

Zapier is the right tool for the first three months of any automation problem. Past that, the things that made it fast at the start (the opaque connectors, the per-task pricing, the implicit ordering) become the things that slow you down.

My current default: prototype in Zapier or Make, then port anything that runs more than 5,000 times a month onto a small Python service with a proper queue. Boring, observable, owned by one person.