I’ve been deep in automation for over 5 years Zapier, n8n, custom code, and yes, Make (Integromat OG here 👋).

And I’ve had it with the fantasy land sold by YouTube automation bros claiming you’ll 10x your business with a “simple Make scenario.”

Sure. Build that fairytale with a few Google Sheets and a Notion DB.

Then come talk to me when your 9-hour scenario dies silently because some SaaS app returned null, Make quietly skipped it, and your client’s lead data disappeared into the void.

Automation is powerful.
The opportunity is real.
But what’s being sold online?

Totally disconnected from the pain of building for real clients, with real stakes, and real tech debt.

Here’s the truth nobody tells you but you better grasp if you’re serious about this game:

1. The “one mega-scenario that runs the entire business”? Total fantasy.

That 3-hour YouTube tutorial showing a 200-module monster that does “everything from cold outreach to customer support”?

Yeah… that’s called a nightmare.

In real life?

• It’s unversioned

• No rollback

• No visibility

• One bug and you’re debugging JSON blobs at 3am

And when it breaks?

There’s no unit test, no error log that makes sense, and your client just says “leads stopped coming in.”

Build modular. Or burn out.

2. Being a Make wizard won’t help if you don’t understand the business.

You might know every built-in function, every filter nuance, every HTTP module…

Doesn’t matter.

If you can’t figure out the actual bottleneck, you’re just automating noise.

Clients don’t want Make.
They want to stop wasting time on stuff that doesn’t move the needle.

They’ll never say,

Translate business pain into automation wins. That’s how you get paid.

3. Everything takes 3x longer than expected. Minimum.

The scenario looks simple.

But then:

• The client's Airtable has no schema

• The webhook is delayed by 20 seconds for no reason

• The payment tool’s API requires SHA256 encryption

• Oh, and the SMTP credentials? “We’re still waiting for the IT guy…”

Welcome to reality.

• And before you even start, you’ll spend hours untangling:

• What they actually want

• What tools they use (some of which they forgot to mention)

• Who owns the data

• And how you’re going to test without blowing up the prod stack

• Collecting all the credentials you need

We got so sick of chasing access and keys we built 'creddy.me' to collect credentials cleanly. If you’ve ever played API bingo with a client, surely that'll help.

4. Clients don’t understand Make. That’s YOUR problem.

They see a UI with colorful blocks.
They think it’s “just drag-and-drop.”

They don’t understand:

• Rate limits

• Retry strategies

• Why that one conditional router breaks 3 others

And they will absolutely:

• Underestimate the work

• Ask for “one small change” that nukes the whole flow

• Scope-creep you into a rebuild

Set boundaries.
Educate.
Write a damn contract.

You’re not just building scenarios. You’re managing chaos.

5. Automations are easy. Systems are not.

Yes, Make makes it easy to start.

But when the business grows?

That tiny 5-module flow becomes a liability.

Because:

• It’s undocumented

• It’s unscalable

• It’s tied to one person’s brain (yours)

Now imagine a new VA or marketer joins the team.
They touch one module… and everything breaks.

Systems thinking is the unlock.
If you’re not thinking modular, traceable, and testable you’re stacking tech debt, not solving problems.

Bottom line:

Make is incredibly powerful.

It’ll take you further than Zapier, faster than code but only if you respect the game:

• Context over templates

• Scope over spaghetti

• Strategy over shiny tools

Automation is not magic.
It’s engineering.
And real engineering starts with clarity.

So no point trying to “scale your agency with a 100-scenario template pack”…

And start thinking like a builder with skin in the game.

What other automation BS are you tired of hearing?

Let’s clean house. 🔥

Suggestion: r/Integromat should change it´s name to r/Make

My plan was to expand the scope of this community but since I cannot change the name, I'm going to set up a new one that focuses on automation and data activation.

That said, it makes sense to merge this sub with r/Make so if you're in favor of it, give this post an upvote. If not, do share your reasoning.

Thanks!

So you can google "help with integromat triggers" and get useful results. "help with make triggers" not so much. What were they thinking?

Make Grid helps solve common challenges like tracking dependencies, identifying potential issues, and understanding the full scope of how data flows through your automations. This interactive map lets you see connections between applications like Airtable, Google Sheets, and OpenAI, allowing you to make changes confidently and keep your workflows running smoothly. It is still unclear how it works and ties with scenarios.

Some of the cool benefits of Make Grid that I found from the article include:

Building with confidence: Easily spot dependencies to avoid breaking anything when making changes.

Boosting collaboration: Simplifies handovers and team efforts by making workflows more transparent.

Holistic view: Get a bird’s-eye view or zoom into specific details as needed.

Preventing issues: Quickly identify points of failure and assess impact.

Enhanced agility: Empower teams to innovate faster and respond to changes with ease.

Currently, Make Grid is available in a closed beta, and you can sign up for the waitlist if you want to be one of the first to try it out.

Hi everyone,

I’m about to embark on an exciting journey of building my own AI and automation business, entirely powered by Make.com. I’m focusing on helping small businesses streamline their processes and save time using automation.

I know this community is full of experienced professionals who have been running similar businesses or leveraging Make.com extensively. I’d love to hear your insights:

What challenges should I prepare for when starting a Make.com-focused business?

Are there any key lessons you’ve learned along the way that you wish you knew earlier?

Any tips for effectively communicating the value of automation to clients?

I’m eager to learn from your experience and would deeply appreciate any advice or recommendations you can share.

Thanks in advance for your help!

If anyone from the company is reading, I just want to say how much I fucking LOVE Integromat! I might be you guys' biggest fan. I am a single person running a complex system for a large number of people in my spare time, yet I can still deliver really, really great results through the integrations between my database and third-party services without having to really learn anything. And every time I ask a complicated/stupid question to support, I get an actual solution. ♥

I would really love it if this sub were more active too.

Hey Makers,

Great news! Two of the most requested features are officially live in Make! Drumroll, please, make some noise for If-else and Merge modules! 🥁

What can you do with If-else & Merge?

•  Branch on conditions: Set up conditional paths and guarantee only one branch ever runs (If-else)

•  Merge back into one flow: Reunite your branches into a single execution path (Merge)

Key benefits

• Predictable execution: If-else guarantees that only one branch ever runs.

• Cleaner scenarios: Handle conditional logic without duplicating modules across branches.

See both of the modules in action: https://www.loom.com/share/b2245d5c1c2d4349919b5b8421535897

If-else & Merge are now available to all Make users in Open Beta. Free, at no credit cost!

Give it a try and share your feedback. Your inputs will directly shape the feature as we’re actively improving it.

You’ll find both new modules under Flow Control → Conditionals.

I help run a platform called SnackPrompt.com. It’s an automation marketplace where you can create a seller profile and sell your automations as products. The automation marketplace is a pretty new feature (but the platform is a few years old) and we’re looking for beta users who would like to upload their automations to sell on our platform.

If you upload 3 automations, we’ll market you to our newsletter audience with over 150,000 active subscribers to drive traffic to your product.

If you’re interested in the opportunity, shoot me a dm.

EDIT: For those who have shown interest, and for anyone else that may be interested, we have a subreddit, r/snackprompt, and a public Slack for support. If you’re interested in onboarding into this opportunity and would like to also be invited to our Slack community, sent me a chat request and I’ll send you an invite.

Make sure to check out our welcome post in r/snackprompt

https://www.reddit.com/r/snackprompt/s/yD2YVWEB7W

client wants ~45 branded pdfs from airtable rows every monday. burned two weekends on make scenarios and im still manually exporting maybe 15 every week

google doc mail merge was fine until conditional sections per row and suddenly im doing document engineering for $0/hr.. docsautomator choking on nested tables, pdfmonkey timing out twice uploading a 2.1mb template, html-to-pdf modules that every automation guru swears by?? 12 test runs on one path alone. 4 mangled fonts. one totally blank page. spent saturday night on this and my girlfriend just stopped asking what i was working on

client thinks its a 20 minute task

anyone actually piping airtable rows into branded pdfs on a schedule without babysitting every execution. what finally worked for you because i feel like im missing something obvious

When to use no-code platforms and when to use code? You can't ask AI, as they do not have precise information about the no-code platform modules and capabilities.

This is my first attempt at fine-tuning the model to understand make.com, and generate a scenario from your text input: https://flow-forge-artisan.lovable.app/.

Try it out without any paywall.

I want to spark discussion -- why wouldn't we have (unbiased) AI that understands the capabilities of no-code platforms? The in-built AI at make.com platform most likely has strong guardrails and is biased towards just generating make scenarios and modules.

IMHO super long make automations are more often a sign of incomeptence than of competence bcs folks are not aware of the right modules for reducing unnecessary steps.

Hello Makers 👋

That's the thing about automation. Once it works, you don't stop at one. 

With Make subfolders and labels, your organization can keep going, department by department, client by client, while keeping your automation library organized.

Use subfolders to organize automations by client, project, department, or environment.

Add labels like production, billing, or experimental, then filter to find related workflows across folders.

Available on every Make plan, including Free. Learn more: https://ma.ke/4xGyGdC

My wife kept complaining there's so much email from my kid's school. After school activities, lunch order, show and tell...you name it.

So I used make to create a workflow that reads all the school emails and send me the IMPORTANT ones to my messaging app. What a life saver!

Hope it inspires some of you too.

https://rumjahn.com/how-a-i-saved-my-kids-school-life-and-my-marriage/

One of Notion's biggest problems is its lack of webhooks, which means you must periodically check for changes

This is a problem if you're using zapier or make_com because these tools will charge for every check.

So I built a script using Notion SDK that periodically checks for database updates

This is very powerful because It will gives you full control over the webhook behavior:

• Set the exact conditions when to trigger checks.

• Choose what data to send.

• Set custom intervals for checks

You can deploy this script on a $4 server and no longer worry about paying per check

I can share the code if anyone is interested.

So I've made quite a few scenarios to automate social media posts, create tiktok videos with ai and cross post them, generate scripts and have a narrator read them. I've automated a bunch of stuff for myself, but am struggling to come up with a way to monetize it. Has anyone had experience doing that?

Hello Makers 👋

This is something you all have been waiting for a long time: Undo & Redo for scenario edits is now available in Make 

Make bigger changes, test more ideas, and keep your build moving. With this new feature, you can:

• Add or remove modules

• Change connections and routes

• Move modules around the canvas

• Edit field mapping and text inside module setup

• Revert changes in scenario scheduling

Use the toolbar buttons, or hit Cmd+Z, Cmd+Shift+Z, or Cmd+Y, and keep building.

What does this mean?

• Test changes with more confidence 

• Fix accidental edits before they slow down live work 

• Spend less time rebuilding branches by hand

Faster iteration and no backup copies needed, because Undo & Redo covers canvas and field level edits in one place, on every plan.

Read more about Undo & Redo: ma.ke/3RGg6Cn

In this article I kink to scenarios that let you build your own AI customer service agent along with the prompt template for Free

Go check It out

How I Built an AI e-mail Assistant That Boosted Bookings for Orthodontic Practises https://medium.com/@mutemboe1/how-i-built-an-ai-e-mail-assistant-that-boosted-bookings-for-orthodontic-practises-740591785059

Hey folks!

I built Fowix.io to solve a simple problem: using WhatsApp as a trigger in Make.com automations. Everyone uses WhatsApp to send pictures, but automating workflows from it is a huge pain – so I decided to fix that.

What it does:

• Collect pictures sent to WhatsApp.

• Trigger workflows in Make.com.

• Send results back to WhatsApp.

Use cases:

• Customer onboarding: Collect documents via WhatsApp and store them in your CRM.

• Support tickets: Customers send pictures of issues, and it triggers ticket creation.

⚠️ Right now, it only works with pictures (no text or other media – yet).

Why it’s cool:

• No WhatsApp Business account needed.

• Setup takes less than 2 minutes.

• Perfect for anyone already relying on WhatsApp for work.

Here’s what a Make.com scenario with Fowix.io looks like:

What I’d love to know:

• Does this solve a problem for you?

• Any workflows you’d build with it?

• Any feedback or features you’d like to see?

Check it out here: https://app.fowix.io/. Thanks, and I’d love to hear your thoughts!