Zapier App to show $$ savings

You know Zapier saves time, but how much money is it saving you?

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If Shopify can show the estimated meeting cost in Google, Zapier should show estimated cost-savings for Zaps.

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Put Zapier’s cost-savings in your reports and you’ve got a more compelling report to show to clients, your team, or your business.

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So, today I’m going to show you how to find out how much money Zapier puts back into your pocket. We’ll use Zapier’s new products to get this done.

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Let’s go.

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Calculating a Zap’s Cost-Savings

There’s no straight-forward formula to calculate the exact time and/or cost savings of a Zap. There are so many variables to consider (accuracy, effort, length, context-switching, etc.).

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But here’s what you can do to get your own conservative estimate. 

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Choose two Zaps in your account: the most complex and the simplest. Start a timer and manually perform the tasks for each Zap. Take the total time spent and divide it by the total tasks you performed.

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If the average time spent per task was 12 seconds and you make $80,000/year, then each task in Zapier saves you $0.13.

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If you use 10,000 tasks in a month, you’ll be saving $1,300/month minus the Zapier plan cost which could be $200/month. So, a savings of $1,100/month.

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The Setup in Zapier

Yep, we’re going to use Zapier’s newest products Tables and Interfaces. Remember, they are still in beta. So, until more functionality is added to make this whole process easier, there’s a bit of legwork. 

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The first thing we need to do is create a Table that shows each Zap, the monthly runs, the total runs, the cost per run, and the monthly and total savings. Name it “Zapier Savings.”

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There are some calculations you need to do to get things working. For instance, every month the monthly cost savings and runs need to be reset. Also, each cost savings calculation needs to be made.

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Here are some of the Zaps you can create to make this easier moving forward:

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1. [Zapier Manager]>[Tables] When new Zap created and turned on, add to “Zapier Savings” Table.
2. [Zapier Manager]>[Tables]>[Looping] When new invoice received, find all records, loop and update monthly runs and cost to 0.

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You’ll also need to create a Sub-Zap that each Zap calls to increment the run counts in the Table and recalculates totals.

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The Zap Savings Interface

Once the engine is purring under the hood, you can put together an Interface to show the data. Here’s what it could look like:

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When you click into each Zap Info, you can see more details:

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One caveat here is that the Total amount I’ve included in the bold text does not update dynamically, yet. 

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There’s so much more you could do, here. You could add a Zap to send this report weekly or monthly to whoever needs to see it. Or they could bookmark the Interface and check it whenever they’d like.

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To recap:

• A viewable Zap’s cost-savings would help make the case for more automation
• Calculate per task savings and apply to Zaps
• Use Zaps, Tables, and Interfaces to create a Zap Savings app

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That’s all for this week!

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Happy Building,

Bryce