The same workflows, minus the Zapier bill

The client depended on Zapier for business-critical connections between forms, customer records, communications and reporting. As usage grew, so did the bill — while limited control over execution data and retention made the platform increasingly difficult to reconcile with the organisation’s compliance requirements. Years of useful automation had accumulated across multiple teams. Individual Zaps worked, but the overall estate was difficult to understand, expensive at scale and dependent on task-based pricing.

The migration could not simply recreate every workflow one by one. The client needed to understand which processes still mattered, remove duplication, retain appropriate execution information and move credentials and personal data into an environment with clearer ownership and controls.

We catalogued active Zaps, triggers, connected systems, owners, task volumes, failure behaviour and data handled by each workflow. This separated business-critical processes from duplicates, abandoned experiments and automations that were better retired than rebuilt.

### Designed a controlled n8n architecture

We created a self-hosted n8n environment with defined access, credential storage, backup, logging and retention responsibilities. Reusable sub-workflows replaced repeated logic and made common actions easier to maintain consistently.