I've been using Zapier on and off for about three years now, and honestly, it's hard to hate. When someone on the team needs to pipe data from one app to another, Zapier is still the answer I give. The interface clicks immediately even for non-technical people, and the integration library is just absurd in the best way. I've connected things I genuinely didn't expect to work together.
Where I've started to feel friction is the AI stuff. I get what they're trying to do, but it feels like the AI steps were added onto a workflow engine rather than built together from scratch. I tested it on a few things that needed actual multi-step reasoning and kept hitting walls. Context doesn't carry the way you'd want. It's like asking a great organizer to also be your strategist.
The pricing thing is real. We moved two high-volume zaps off the platform last quarter purely to cut the bill. Task-based pricing sounds reasonable until you're actually running something at scale. Zapier is great until it isn't, and usually that's when either the complexity or the volume pushes past what the model was designed for.