We deleted Zapier. Here's what we replaced it with.

Our Zapier bill had quietly grown to $389/month. Not because anyone made a big decision — because every workflow we wired up over two years sat in the same account, each consuming tasks, each renewing automatically.

We deleted it last month. Here's what happened, and what replaced each piece.

The audit

Before deleting, we pulled the actual list of zaps. There were 47. We assumed most were doing real work. The audit showed:

→ 11 zaps had not fired in 60+ days (dead workflows we'd forgotten to delete) → 14 zaps were doing trivial things that didn't need automation (we just hadn't gotten around to removing them) → 22 zaps were doing actual operational work

So we had 22 workflows we genuinely cared about. The question became: where do they live now?

What we replaced each one with

1. Native integrations we'd ignored. 6 of the 22 zaps were doing things our tools could do natively. Slack alerts from HubSpot, calendar invites from Typeform, etc. We'd built zaps because Zapier was where we instinctively built things. Native integrations took 5 minutes each and were faster + more reliable.

2. Avery NXR agents. 12 of the 22 zaps were doing AI-shaped work — classifying incoming requests, summarizing inputs, drafting responses, routing based on content. These became Avery NXR agents. Each rebuild took 15-40 minutes. Output quality improved because we could use specialized local models instead of Zapier's generic AI nodes.

3. Direct webhook + script. 4 of the 22 were doing simple data shuffling that didn't need either AI or workflow software. We wrote tiny scripts (15-30 lines of code each) and put them on a cheap server. Cost: $5/month for the server. Done.

The math

Zapier: $389/month = $4,668/year.

Replacement: → Native integrations: $0 incremental → Avery NXR Pro for the small team that builds agents: $174/month ($29 × 6 users) → $5/month server for scripts

New total: ~$179/month = $2,148/year.

Annual savings: $2,520.

But the savings number understates the change. The bigger shifts:

What changed beyond cost

Workflows became inspectable. With Zapier, when something broke, debugging meant clicking through their UI and looking at task history one execution at a time. With Avery NXR's audit ledger and local logs, debugging is grep. With our scripts, it's just code.

Output quality on AI tasks improved. Zapier's AI features rely on generic cloud LLMs sized for breadth. Our Avery NXR agents use models we picked for the specific work. Classification accuracy went up. Summary quality went up.

Triggers became more flexible. We can now trigger on things Zapier didn't expose well — local file changes, scheduled runs at any cadence, agent-to-agent calls, custom webhooks. The set of triggerable events is the full operating system, not Zapier's curated trigger library.

Data exposure shrank. Every Zapier task involved data leaving our infrastructure and passing through theirs. For most workflows, that was fine. For some (anything involving customer data, employee data, vendor invoices), it was a slow leak we'd rather not have. Now: data stays on our machines or in our infrastructure.

What we kept Zapier for

Honest answer: nothing. We didn't find a single workflow that Zapier was the right home for.

That's not a knock on Zapier. It's a great product that solved a real problem in a specific era — when getting two SaaS apps to talk to each other was hard and AI capabilities weren't widely available. The era passed. Native integrations got better. Local AI agents became viable. Direct scripting got easier.

Try this audit yourself

If you've been on Zapier (or Make, or n8n cloud) for 18+ months without auditing, you almost certainly have:

→ Dead workflows still consuming task budget → Workflows that should be native integrations → AI-shaped workflows that would run better as local agents

The audit takes one afternoon. The savings + capability improvements compound for years.

→ avery.software — Free Desktop tier, no card. See if local-first agents fit the workflows you'd otherwise rebuild in Zapier.