I was on a call with a bloke last week. Good business, twenty-odd staff, growing steadily. He was chuffed because he'd just "automated everything."
I asked him what he'd set up.
He listed it out: Typeform talks to Mailchimp, Mailchimp talks to HubSpot, HubSpot talks to his calendar, his calendar talks to Slack, and Slack sends a notification to his phone. Six tools, all connected through Zapier.
"Brilliant," I said. "What's that costing you?"
He didn't know offhand. We worked it out on the call.
Just the Zapier bill, at his usage volume, was coming in at around $69 a month. Not catastrophic. But we kept pulling the thread.
Two of those tools he was connecting, HubSpot and Google Calendar, have a native integration. Built in. Free. No Zapier needed. He'd been paying for a bridge between two things that have their own bridge already.
That's the integration tax. And almost every small business I talk to is paying it.
What Is the Integration Tax?
Here's the thing about automation tools like Zapier or Make. They are genuinely useful. There are situations where there is no native connection between two bits of software and you genuinely need a middleware layer to get them talking.
But there are also thousands of businesses paying a monthly fee to connect tools that would connect for free if someone had just looked at the settings page.
The integration tax is what you pay when:
- You use Zapier to connect two tools that already have a built-in integration with each other
- You run data through three different apps to accomplish something one app could do on its own
- You pay for a premium tier on an automation platform because your task count is high, when the actual issue is that your Zaps are doing unnecessary round-trips
It is not a scam. Nobody is ripping you off. It is just waste. Quiet, monthly, recurring waste.
The Numbers Add Up Faster Than You Think
Zapier's Professional plan starts at $19.99 a month billed annually, and that gives you 2,000 tasks. Sounds reasonable.
But tasks count per action, not per Zap. If a single automation has four steps, one new lead triggers four tasks. Get 200 new leads a month and that's 800 tasks gone on one workflow. Add another Zap for bookings, one for reviews, one for appointment reminders. You're at the Team plan before you know it, which starts at $69 a month.
On the Team plan, billed monthly rather than annually, you're at over $100 a month. That's $1,200 a year. For middleware.
Middleware you might not need.
Vendr, a software procurement platform, reports that the median business pays $15,000 a year for Zapier once you account for actual task volume, team seats, and annual contracts. That's the median. Not the outlier. The middle of the pack.
Now, some businesses genuinely need that. They have complex, multi-platform workflows and Zapier is the right tool. Fine.
But plenty of others are paying $69 a month because they set up some Zaps in 2022, nobody has reviewed them since, and two of the tools they're connecting have since released native integrations that nobody noticed.
The Most Common Ways This Happens
Connecting tools that already talk to each other. GoHighLevel, for example, has over 50 native integrations built in. Stripe, Google, Facebook, Zoom, Shopify, QuickBooks. These are direct, first-party connections. You plug them in through the settings page. No Zapier. No task count. No monthly bill on top. I've seen GHL users running Zapier to connect Facebook Leads to GHL. That integration is built in. It's in the sidebar. It takes five minutes to set up. They didn't need Zapier at all.
Running data through unnecessary stops. A lead comes in on a form, goes to Zapier, gets pushed to a spreadsheet, Zapier picks it up from the spreadsheet, pushes it to the CRM. Why the spreadsheet? Because at some point someone added it as a logging step and now the whole workflow depends on it. The spreadsheet is a toll booth in the middle of a motorway.
Duplicating work that already exists in the CRM. If your CRM has a pipeline, automated follow-up sequences, and appointment booking built in, and you're using separate tools for each of those things connected by Zapier, you're paying for work your CRM is already doing. Or could do. For the price you're already paying it.
Task count creep. Multi-step Zaps where the first step does something, the second step checks a condition, the third step sends an email, the fourth step updates a record. That's four tasks per lead. The same outcome might be achievable in a single workflow step inside your existing platform.
The Question to Ask About Every Zap You Have Running
For each automation, ask this: does either of the tools I'm connecting have a native way to talk to the other?
That's it. Start there.
If the answer is yes, you can probably replace the Zap with the built-in integration. Takes fifteen minutes. Saves you money every month forever.
If the answer is no, keep the Zap. That's exactly what Zapier is for.
The problem is nobody asks the question. The Zap goes live, works fine, and gets forgotten. The bill gets paid automatically. Nobody reviews it.
What to Do This Week
Pull up your Zapier account. Look at your active Zaps. For each one, note the two tools it connects.
Then check both tools' integration or settings pages. Do they have a direct connection option? If yes, set up the native integration and turn off the Zap.
While you're there, look at your task usage. If you're regularly hitting your plan limit, check whether any of your high-volume Zaps are doing multiple steps when fewer would do the same job.
Then look at your CRM or your main platform. What does it actually do natively? Most small business owners I talk to are using 30% of what they're paying for in their main platform, and 100% of what they're paying for in the middleware connecting it to other things they don't need.
It is not exciting work. It is not glamorous. But spending two hours on this can genuinely save you a few hundred quid a year. Do the maths on what that costs versus what you get back.
The Bigger Pattern
The integration tax is one symptom of a wider problem. Tools get added to fix a specific pain point. They work. The pain point goes away. Nobody cancels the subscription because cancelling things is a hassle and the monthly fee isn't big enough to feel urgent.
Two years later you've got eight tools doing a job that three could do, four Zapier workflows doing things that two of those tools could handle natively, and a tech stack that costs three times what it needs to.
This is not a failure of discipline. This is just what happens when you're running a business and you're busy. Nobody has time to audit their software stack. Until I sit down with them and we do it together, and then they realise they've been paying a few thousand a year in tools they don't need.
The integration tax is one of the easiest things to fix. You don't need to rebuild anything. You don't need new tools. You just need someone to go through what you've already got and find the bits that are redundant.
Start with Zapier. It is usually the most obvious place to look. And if you find a few Zaps connecting tools that already talk natively, you'll have paid for this blog post many times over.
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If your tech stack is costing you more than it should, let's have a proper look at it together. Book a free strategy call at steventann.com/book-a-call and I'll tell you exactly where the waste is and what to do about it. No pitch. No upsell. Just a straight answer.
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About Steven Tann: Steven is "The Bloke Who Fixes Your Tech Stack." With over 10 years in the trenches helping more than 7,000 small and medium businesses, he cuts through the guru fluff and builds AI, marketing and automation systems that actually work for real business owners. No jargon. No upsells. Just sorted. Find out more at steventann.com.