Automation
Automation 101. What it actually is
Automation is one of those words that sounds technical but is not. The plain definition: connecting tools so they share data without a human re-typing it. Form to inbox. Inbox to spreadsheet. Spreadsheet to invoice. The interesting question is not "what is automation." It is "which tool do I use, and when."
5 min read · published May 21, 2026
The three real options
There are three honest ways to automate something today. Pick one based on how unusual your workflow is and how long you expect it to live.
- Zapier or Make. No-code, $20-$50 a month, takes minutes to set up. Best for standard flows that connect two big SaaS tools.
- n8n. Self-hosted or n8n Cloud, around $20 a month plus infra. Best when you need branching logic, retries, or data transformations Zapier cannot do.
- Custom code. Node or Python on Vercel, AWS, or Railway. Best when the workflow is core to your business, runs at high volume, or needs something the off-the-shelf tools cannot.
When Zapier is enough
New form fill in Typeform creates a row in Airtable. New Stripe charge sends a Slack message. New customer in Shopify gets a tag in HubSpot. If you can describe it in one sentence and both tools have a Zapier connector, use Zapier. The 30 minutes you save building it from scratch is worth the $20 a month.
When you need n8n
n8n shines when the flow has branches. "If the lead is from California, send to the local rep. If it is over $10K in expected ARR, route to the founder. Otherwise, the standard sequence." Zapier can do this with effort. n8n does it natively. Self-hosting n8n on a $5 Hetzner box also costs less than a Zapier Pro plan.
When you need custom code
Three signals. The flow runs more than a thousand times a day. The flow needs an LLM call with a precise prompt and post-processing. The flow is the product, not just internal plumbing. At that point you write a small Next.js API route or a Cloudflare Worker and you stop paying per task.
Where Dewgo fits
We start with the cheapest tool that works. Most clients land on Zapier or Make for the first automation, because $30 a month is the right answer when the volume is small. We move them to n8n or custom code when the math turns over: usually around 5,000 task runs a month, or when the workflow needs an AI step Zapier handles poorly.
Our setup fee covers the wiring. The monthly covers tuning, monitoring, and the inevitable third-party API change that breaks something on a Tuesday morning.
The first one to build
Whatever your team does most often that involves reading from one tool and writing to another. That is your highest-ROI automation. Not the impressive AI demo. The boring email-to-spreadsheet pipe nobody wants to talk about.