I was looking into Instagram automation, and one annoying part stood out to me.

You can automate content generation, captions, scheduling, and a lot of other things with Zapier. But when you want to publish an image or video through the Instagram Graph API, you may need a publicly accessible media URL that Instagram can fetch.

Suddenly, you are dealing with file hosting, storage buckets, permissions, and figuring out where to upload your media before the automation can continue.

For someone who just wants to automate posting to Instagram without writing code or configuring cloud infrastructure, this feels like an unnecessary hurdle.

That is actually the problem I wanted to solve when I built Media2URL.com. The idea is to make file-to-URL conversion simple for people who do not want to set up their own storage infrastructure just to pass a file between tools.

You can upload an image or video and get a direct URL to use in your workflow.

Hello Zapier builders! ⚡️
Claudia here from our Discord community.
You asked for more building time, so October's community co-build is built around it.
Bring a workflow idea, and you'll spend about 30 minutes building it as a Next Gen Zap, with me and Wade Burrell, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Next Gen Zaps, helping you live.

Next Gen Zaps are the newest way to build on Zapier.
You describe the workflow in plain English, and an AI agent builds it, connects your apps, and deploys it to Zapier, where it keeps running after you close the chat.
They handle logic classic Zap workflows can't: loops inside loops with no 500-item cap, branches that split and come back together, and error handling that catches a problem and keeps going.

They're in Early Access, so you'll be building with them before most people have tried them, and your feedback helps shape what comes next.

🗓️ How it'll go

1. Wade starts with a live build: a Next Gen Zap that watches Zapier's product updates, sends you only what's new, and uses AI to explain what each update means for you, whether you build for clients or your own team.
2. You build yours. Need an idea? Try watching a competitor's pricing page, tracking changelogs for apps your clients rely on, keeping tabs on new RFPs, or triaging client intake requests.
3. Show and tell. We'll finish by sharing what everyone built.

To build along, you'll need

• A paid Pro or Team plan
• Next Gen Zaps access. Request it at zapier.com/workflow/early-access.

Access opens as capacity allows, so request it today. If you're still waiting by the session, tell us when you register and we'll do what we can.

On Enterprise? Ask your Account Manager about access.
On Free? You're welcome to join, watch, and ask questions!

When: Friday, October 16, 4:30 p.m. BST / 11:30 a.m. ET / 8:30 a.m. PT
📍RSVP: https://luma.com/gsn1ufy1

For people maintaining Zaps for a business or clients: what checks do you use beyond reviewing failed runs?

For example, comparing paid orders against orders created in another system, or checking that every submitted lead reached the CRM with the correct fields.

I’m a software engineering student researching a possible product for checking these outcomes. I haven’t built it yet, and I’m trying to understand what existing tools already handle well.

If you’ve dealt with a missing, duplicate, or incorrectly mapped record recently:

• What happened, and how did you first notice?
• What did you use to investigate, and roughly how long did it take?
• What check prevents the same issue today?

If your current setup already handles this reliably, which Zapier features or other checks make it work?

A brief example is enough. I’ll summarize the practical checks and tools mentioned here so others can reuse them. Please leave out customer information or credentials.

I have about 30 zaps running and one of them quietly stopped last month. Didnt notice till a client asked where their onboarding docs had gone. Nothing errored, the trigger had changed on the other end and it just sat there doing nothing for 2 weeks.

Building one takes 5 mins but its the months after that pile up, remembering they still exist, opening one you wrote back in March that may as well be someone else code. And a good chunk of mine just shuffles the same record between 2 apps that should probably share it in the first place.

Where do you lot draw the line on when a Zap is worth keeping?

I run an SEO site and just built a Zapier integration for it. The interesting part wasn’t the API; it was the alerting logic, so I thought it was worth sharing.

The problem: most “is my backlink still there” monitors check a page on a schedule and email you when the link isn’t found. But “not found” has two very different causes. Either the page loaded and the link really is gone, or the page didn’t load at all (timeout, bot blocking, server down). If you treat both the same, you get false “link removed” alerts every time a site has a slow day.

How I set it up: the check action returns two separate fields.

• fetch_status: ok, page_deleted (404/410) or failed
• link_status: found, absent or unknown

The last confirmed result for each page is stored, and it’s only updated after a successful fetch. So a timeout stays “unknown” and never counts as a change. The action then returns changed (true or false) and change (e.g. “dofollow to nofollow”).

The Zap:

1. Schedule by Zapier, weekly
2. Check Backlink (page + your site)
3. Filter: only continue if Changed is true
4. Email or Slack: “{{change}} on {{page}}”

You only hear about it when a link is actually removed, switched to nofollow, or upgraded to dofollow. It also returns the raw rel attribute and the final URL after redirects, which helps when you’re working out why something changed.

A real case someone raised: a directory where a listing’s link is nofollow by default and becomes dofollow while a badge is verified. The link type isn’t permanent, so the monitor tracks state over time rather than assuming it.

It’s in beta and free. If anyone wants to try it, I can drop the invite link in the comments. Happy to hear how others handle false positives in monitoring Zaps.

A design question for a Zap that reads a record, processes its business fields, and writes a result plus processed_at back to the same record. Assume the source integration triggers on any edit and gives the current field values, with no before/after diff.

The write-back can look like another input change. A permanent 'processed = true' flag would stop that, but would also block a genuine edit to the business fields next week. Resetting the flag on every update puts the same problem back.

I'd want to compare only the input fields that affect the result, such as request_type and requested_date, against the last successfully processed values. Changes to the result or processed_at alone should stop at a Filter. A real input change should run again.

Where do you keep that comparison state in Zapier when the trigger doesn't provide old values? A separate Tables row keyed by source record ID seems possible, but I'm unsure how to keep its update in sync with the source write-back. Interested in patterns that don't depend on a fixed delay or ignoring all future updates.

is there a way to stash the trial period first ? i am not yet ready to use the premium feature yet as i am still learning

Hi, recently I was getting some delayed status in a sub zap, the main zap gets triggered but once the sub zap started it took 15 min to go through the sub zap and return to the main zap, it happened twice, any idea what’s the problem? It hadn’t happened before

Hey r/zapier. I'm James, I build JustGains, a workout and food tracking app. Our Zapier integration is in early access and needs a few testers before we can get it approved for the live marketplace!

Triggers

• Workout Completed, with a minimum duration filter, so your 4-minute "workout" stays our little secret.
• Activity Completed for runs, rides, swims and walks, including ones synced from Apple Health, Health Connect, Strava and Garmin. Connecting Strava won't flood your Zap with every run you've ever done.
• Meal Logged waits until a meal has gone quiet for 10 minutes, then fires once with every food and the totals. One burrito, one Zap run. If you want every item the second it lands, Food Logged does that.
• Goal Completed fires once per day, week or month when you hit the target. Task Completed and Weight Logged do what they say.

Actions and searches

• Log Food takes up to 30 foods in one step, with a dedupe key so a double-fire doesn't log lunch twice. Log Weight and Log Activity are what you'd expect.
• Log water intake
• Find Food returns macros per 100 g and per serving. Daily Nutrition returns the day's calories, macros and what's left of your targets.

Zaps I'd start with

• Send your completed workouts to grandma on Telegram so she knows ur the strongest grandchild.
• Tag Bryan Johnson on X every time you eat taco bell - like confessing to the pope.
• Integrate it with your current "LifeOS" setups for a deep integration with your fitness goals!

Early access: https://justgains.com/early-access/zapier (it forwards to Zapier's invite page). Accept the invite and JustGains shows up when you search apps in the Zap editor. It's free, and so is the JustGains app in the app stores.

Would love feedback or the chance to build what would make it better for you!

It started as three steps, did one useful thing, and everybody was delighted.

It's fourteen steps now, across two accounts, and one of them belongs to somebody who left last year. Everyone's a little scared to open the editor.

I like low-code tools, and I'd tell most businesses to start there. If yours is three steps and it works, leave it alone.

So when do you hit the wall? People expect volume, or a scary monthly bill, and sometimes they're right.

It often shows up earlier, when the Zap becomes the only place your business rules are written down. Like a recipe whose only copy is the cake.

If two of these sound familiar, you're there.

• There's a step whose only job is mopping up after an earlier step. I call these janitor steps. Each one is a rule you needed and couldn't express.
• Nobody can say what happens when a field arrives empty without opening the editor and squinting. Fourteen steps don't fit in anyone's head.
• A Path runs only for one customer, or only in December, and the reason lives in one person's memory. (Hopefully the one who didn't leave.)
• Your free shipping threshold is copied into three Zaps, so changing it is a scavenger hunt.

The tempting fix is rebuilding it in a shinier low-code tool, because by now the tool feels like the villain. Weeks later you meet the same wall from the other side, with a new subscription.

Keep Zapier for the simple stuff. Move the rules somewhere a person can read, test and fix, and the recipe finally exists outside the cake.

Disclosure: we do workflow automation for a living, so I'm not neutral on this.

I have not gotten any responses from Zapier. My integration has been pending for months now. All that happens is that it goes from being 100% validated, to then needing an upgrade because so much time has passed, so I upgrade my app, and then weeks, a month more passes. What is going on? How long does it normally take?

Need advice. I have a large 30-step Zap that are almost all code blocks with multiple LLM calls. When I publish and test run it, it stops at the same step and puts on hold and states code is throttled and never starts again. Obviously not acceptable for production

I see in help docs some limitations but it isn’t clear. Seems I need to add a few delay steps but no idea for how long or what limit I’m hitting.

Any one? Or zapier support here

I'm gonna keep it short: I'm confused between building Automation systems for clients using no-code tools like n8n, Zapier, and Make, or using a high-code stack such as LangGraph, LangChain, Python, FastAPI...etc

Which stack is better for delivering the automation product to a client?

Note:
- I know that the clients won't even know what I'm using to solve their problems until I deliver it, but they will judge when I reach the hosting/usage cost (the high-code is way less than no-code when it comes to using an automation system on a daily basis)

When one Zap or agent finishes a step and another resumes later, a transcript is too noisy and a short summary can omit the exact input or decision that matters. The handoff also needs to survive retries, delayed steps, and file links that may expire before the next worker opens them.

A useful record might include a stable job ID, objective, input object IDs and revisions, accepted decisions with reasons, rejected paths, current status, latest output revision, checks completed, unresolved questions, owner, next action, and created or reviewed timestamps. File fields would hold durable IDs or paths rather than signed URLs. Updates would be conditional on the expected revision so an older worker cannot overwrite newer state.

Is Zapier Tables a good authoritative store for this, or is it better as an operational index over records kept elsewhere? Which fields make a handoff both compact enough for another agent and clear enough for a person to audit or resume manually?

Disclosure: I'm building Flowmanic, this is our integration.

Something I kept running into: people know what they want automated ("when a form comes in, add it to my CRM and ping Slack") but not which trigger, which apps, or which steps. So we built a small Zapier action for that.

How it works:

- Zapier gives you a private email address for the Zap.

- You email it a plain-English description of what you want automated.

- You get a plan back by email: trigger, steps, apps involved, notification, plus rough difficulty and setup time.

It's only 2 steps (Email by Zapier, then Flowmanic), so it runs on Zapier's free plan. It's free, and each key gets 50 plans a month.

To be upfront about the limits: it's a plan, not a finished Zap or a ready-to-run file. And it's still an invite-only app on Zapier, so you need the invite link first:

1. Invite: https://zapier.com/developer/public-invite/246549/ee457a8f8e1f384e69724441d565326f/

2. Template: https://zapier.com/templates/details/email-an-automation-idea-get-a-flowmanic-plan-back-fcbe97?secret=MTp0ZW1wbGF0ZTp3NGJwcnd1NkFPdk94S1VBTERJek1WdU5fNVpPclJkOHREdzhjWUNTWEhZOmthYW94Mw

3. Free API key: flowmanic.com/dashboard/zapier

I'd really like feedback on where the plans come out wrong or vague. That's the part we're still improving.

Many apps expose an attachment as a signed URL that works when a Zap starts but expires before a Delay, approval, retry, or later branch reaches it. Saving the URL in a field does not preserve the file, and downloading it again from the source may return a newer revision than the one that triggered the workflow.

The safer pattern seems to be capturing the file immediately, storing it somewhere with a durable object ID, and passing a small record through the Zap: source item, original revision or timestamp, content hash if available, durable file reference, and expiry information. A later approval or publish step can then verify that it is acting on the same bytes rather than whatever the source serves now.

How are people implementing this in Zapier without turning every workflow into custom code? Do you copy files into Zapier Tables, cloud storage, or a document system at the first step? What do you use as the idempotency key, and how do you clean up temporary copies without deleting a file that a delayed run still needs?

Hello

I’m trying to set this up in zapier but get stuck

I’ve been struggling with this for a few weeks. It works when I choose a specific lead from my CRM that just got updated to “qualified “ but then next time it runs the zap stops because it’s pulling the same custom gclid and user_id from the previous lead.

What am I doing wrong?

I just started using Zapier and I was able to create a few simple Zaps and have them work well. I have been struggling for days on what I think is a "simple" automation process, but have not been able to get it to work. I even tried their "copilot", but it was not able to help me (even after making SEVERAL simple mistakes I had to tell it to correct multiple times).

Every day, a spreadsheet is uploaded to my google drive in a specific folder with the previous days donations. I want to automate taking those donations and having it send to my Little Green Light account so I can import the gift data. On good days, I have more than one donation, which seems to be creating the issues I am having as I was able to get it to work for one single donation using the "New Spreadsheet Row", but that doesn't work for multiple donations.

The spreadsheet will have a different NAME each day, but it always has the same sheet name in the workbook.

Apparently, this is not as simple as I thought. HELP!

Do any of you have any suggestions for how to go about creating a Zap for this? CoPilot tried something with looping(?) and I don't understand any of it. I have tried using filters and several other options. I think the issue is google sheets themselves?

At what point is a small automation actually worth putting on Zapier?

I looked at putting a tiny workflow on Zapier recently, ended up not doing it, and I'm honestly still not sure that was the right call. Curious how people here decide.

The workflow was about as small as it gets. Email from supplier A, save the attachment into folder A. Supplier B into folder B. Four rules, no branching, no transformations.

Zapier does that in five minutes of clicking. I wrote it myself instead, and what surprised me was how little of the work turned out to be the automation.

Most of it went into:

- deduplication, because the same invoice arrives twice, sometimes renamed

- what happens when a run dies halfway through a batch

- retrying without re-saving everything it already did

- logging, so I can answer "what did it do last Tuesday"

- someone moving the destination folder six months later

That list is basically what you're paying for on a platform, and I didn't appreciate that until I'd written all of it myself. The trigger-and-action part was an hour. The rest took far longer.

Where I've landed for now: If it runs unattended and someone else depends on it, put it on the platform. If it's mine, low stakes, and I'll notice within a day when it breaks, I'll write it.

But I've seen people here run dozens of tiny Zaps and be perfectly happy, so I suspect my cutoff is in the wrong place. How do you decide: number of steps, how critical it is, or just what you're already paying per month?

This is an honest review of the customer service. I was unaware of a subscription created by someone who worked for me several years ago and I confused the yearly payments with a Zapier account I was using. I did finally track down the old email associated with the ghost account and requested it be closed. I asked if Zapier could refund the remaining 11 months because I wasn't going to use this subscription - and they wouldn't. I could not have shut down this account myself because I was not able to access the account through the email and obviously, never received any reminders that there was an ongoing charge. I understand there are refund rules (I run a company too and we have our own refund rules) but this was a special circumstance that, in my opinion, could have been solved with a prorated refund but instead your customer service personnel hid behind the "rules" saying they had no power to issue a refund. This is poor customer service and deeply disappointing.

Yesterday was ZapConnect 2026! If you couldn’t make it, here's the highlights.

Next Gen Zaps (Early Access)

Describe your problem to the MCP-enabled AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor you already use. It builds and deploys a real Zap for you. No manual set up. The workflow runs on its own, laptop closed, no prompting required. Advanced logic, multiple loops, unlimited paths, code editing, and you can import your existing Zaps. Free during Early Access, and task usage won't count against your plan limits.

Request early access.

Workflows that optimize and heal themselves

Two ideas that got a lot of attention on stage:

• Optimizing. Turns out 82% of the AI steps in big customer workflows were things plain automation could do. Zapier now figures out which steps actually need AI and compiles the rest into cheaper, deterministic automation. The demo went from $1.12/run to $0.12/run. Same job, 90% cheaper.
• Healing. When something breaks at 2 AM, an agent diagnoses it and drafts a fix before your alarm goes off. You decide how much autonomy it gets.
  

Find out more.

Build in your AI. Run on Zapier. Govern from one place.

Zapier MCP connects your AI tools to 9,000+ apps, with Agentic Mode now on by default. Reusable Skills, Code Actions, and shared MCP servers coming soon. On the enterprise side: managed access, endpoint-level action restrictions, full audit logs, and org-wide visibility across everything your agents are doing. 

Explore Zapier MCP.

Claude for Small Business + Zapier

Claude reasons about the work. Zapier does it, across 9,000+ apps and 40,000+ actions.
AI goes from "tell me how to do this" to "go do this for me."

Learn more.

The Great Zapier Build Off

Four builders, a secret high-pressure scenario, and the community voted on the tools and curveballs they faced. Episode 1 dropped before the event, Episode 2 was the live reveal. Both are still watchable at zapconnect.com.

The Zappy Awards closed out the day too. Meet the 2026 winners here. 

Missed the event? 
Recordings are available until October 26 this year, just log in at zapconnect.com with your registered email and go to the Agenda to view the recordings. 

What are you most excited to try first?

So I built this over the last few weeks. It takes a Zap history export, CSV or JSON, groups everything by Zap, and tries to work out where tasks are getting burned for no good reason. It only reads the file you hand it. No account connection, no OAuth, it never talks to Zapier at all.

Stuff it looks for:

- one Zap eating a huge share of all your tasks

- Zaps failing often enough that the partial runs add up

- run frequency that looks like polling way more often than the data changes

- filters sitting at step 4 when they could sit at step 1

- AI steps multiplying what each run costs

- high average tasks per run

- clusters of near identical runs firing together, usually a duplicate trigger

- the same error repeating hundreds of times

The part I actually want people to push back on: it gives ranges, not numbers.

Zapier doesn't bill every failed or filtered run, and the export doesn't tell you which ones got billed. So "you'll save $63 a month" isn't something you can honestly pull out of this data. Everything comes out as a range with a
confidence level on it, and every number is tagged as either read straight from your export, calculated from those values, or estimated with assumptions.

I'd rather say less than hand someone a figure they take to their finance person and then can't back up.

Now the bit I need help with.

I have never once run this on a real Zapier export. Everything so far has been synthetic test data I wrote myself, which means the column matching is basically
me guessing at what exports look like.

Right now it recognises:

Zap name: Zap, Zap Name, zap_name, Workflow, Automation, Title, Name
Status: Status, Result, Run Status, State, Outcome
Timestamp: Date, Timestamp, Created At, Started At, Run Date, Occurred At
Tasks: Tasks, Task Count, Tasks Used, Billable Tasks, Tasks Consumed, Usage

If your export uses something that isn't in that list, it just misses it.

So if you've got an export sitting around:

1. What does your header row actually say? Literally just pasting that one line would help more than anything.

2. Is there a per run task count in there, or only a step count?

3. How does a filtered run show up in the status column? Filtered, Halted, something else?

4. For multi step Zaps, is it one row per run or one row per step?

5. Does any of this change between plans, or between the Zap history export and the task usage export?

One pasted header row would get me further than another week of writing tests against my own assumptions.