What Happens to Your Automations If Your Provider Goes Bust?

It’s not a comfortable question to ask, but it’s worth asking anyway: what happens to your business automations if the company providing them disappears, gets acquired, or radically changes their business model?

Most business owners have never considered this. You sign up for Zapier or Make.com, build some automations, connect them to your core systems, and then you don’t think about it again. Your automations are working. Tasks are running. Data is moving between systems. Life is good.

But behind the scenes, you’ve made an implicit bet. You’ve bet that this company will remain in business and continue operating their service under terms you find acceptable. You’ve bet that they won’t suddenly sunset a feature you depend on. You’ve bet that they won’t change pricing by 400 percent like some of these platforms have done before. You’ve bet that if they get acquired, the new owners will care about your business as much as the original founders did.

History suggests those are risky bets.

Recent Platforms Have Already Proven This Risk

Zapier has raised pricing multiple times. In 2021, they increased monthly costs significantly and removed unlimited connected accounts from their lower tiers. If you’d built your business on Zapier’s cheap tier, suddenly your entire automation infrastructure became 50 percent more expensive overnight.

Make.com has been in acquisition talks periodically. When automation platforms get acquired, the first thing that usually changes is pricing. Integration roadmaps shift. Feature development that doesn’t fit the acquirer’s priorities gets deprioritised or killed.

IFTTT, a popular automation platform for consumer workflows, pivoted multiple times and eventually started charging for features that were previously free. Thousands of users woke up to find their automations had been disabled.

Smaller platforms disappear more frequently. Automation builders who outsource to freelancers on platforms like PipedreamGhostInspector experience the full force of this risk when the platform shuts down or changes terms.

The pattern is clear: cloud-based automation platforms have every incentive to increase revenue from existing users once they’re locked in. You can’t easily move your automations to a competitor because they’re built in the platform’s proprietary format. You’re trapped.

The Freelancer Scenario

There’s another version of this risk that affects many UK businesses. You hire a freelancer to build your automations. The freelancer is excellent. They build you a beautiful Make.com workflow that saves you hours every week.

Then the freelancer gets sick. Or they take a job elsewhere. Or they retire. Or they decide they’re too busy to maintain your automations. Now you own something that nobody else understands. You’re paying a retained retainer to keep one person checking on it. If that person disappears, your system goes with them.

This is less about the platform going bust and more about knowledge lock-in. You’ve outsourced both the execution and the understanding of a critical business system. That’s a dangerous position.

What You’re Actually Betting On

When you build automations on a platform like Zapier or Make.com, you’re betting on three things simultaneously:

First, you’re betting on the company’s continued existence. Zapier has venture funding and is well-established, so this is a relatively safe bet. But Make.com has had more turbulent financing, and smaller platforms are much riskier.

Second, you’re betting on pricing stability. There’s no guarantee. The platform can change your plan fees, introduce minimum monthly charges, or remove features you rely on without significant notice.

Third, you’re betting that the platform’s feature set will continue to meet your needs. If the platform pivots its roadmap or discontinues an integration you depend on, you have limited options. You can’t modify the platform yourself. You can’t fork the code. You can’t move your workflows to a competitor without rebuilding everything from scratch.

That third bet is the sticky one. Unlike traditional software where you can choose from multiple vendors for similar functionality, automation platforms create proprietary workflow formats. Your workflows are locked inside their system.

The Exit Problem

Here’s the problem nobody talks about: exit costs. If you’ve been running automations on a platform for three years, and you want to move, what does that cost?

If you’re on Zapier, the cost is rebuilding every Zap. That’s not a data migration. That’s rebuilding the entire logic from scratch in a new system. If you have fifteen Zaps, that’s weeks of work or thousands of pounds to hire someone to do it.

If you’re on Make.com, it’s the same story. Their scenario format is different from n8n’s. They’re not compatible. Moving means rebuilding.

Now imagine you’ve built thirty automations across your business. A significant portion of your operational efficiency depends on them. Moving platforms isn’t a weekend project. It’s a major undertaking that most business owners will never choose to do, which is exactly why these platforms have such high switching costs.

That’s not an accident. It’s the business model. Lock in customers with proprietary formats, increase switching costs, then gradually increase pricing knowing that moving is more expensive than staying.

The Self-Hosted Alternative

There’s a different way to think about automation infrastructure. What if you owned it completely? What if your automations were built in a system you control, running on infrastructure you control, using integrations that are portable and standard?

That’s what self-hosted n8n offers. Anyone can sign up for n8n cloud or self-host. The challenge is architecture. n8n is open-source automation software that runs on your own server. You host it on a DigitalOcean droplet or your own infrastructure. You own the automation workflows. You own the data. You own the integrations.

If you decide to move hosting providers, you copy your self-hosted n8n instance to a new server. If you decide to switch to a different automation platform, your n8n workflows can be exported and imported to another system (n8n’s format is JSON, which is portable). If n8n’s creators decide to change their business model in ways that don’t work for you, you’re running open-source software. The code is yours. You can fork it.

Here’s what this looks like in practice. A scheduled n8n workflow checks your Xero account every morning for overdue invoices. It finds any invoices past due date, creates follow-up tasks in Airtable, and sends you a Slack summary showing who owes what. If your automation provider disappeared tomorrow, that workflow keeps running on your server. It continues checking Xero every morning, creating tasks, sending alerts. You own the logic. You own the data flow. You own the outcome.

This is not theoretical. It’s a real technical capability that changes the economics of automation entirely.

The Trade-offs Are Real

I’ll be honest about the trade-offs because they matter. Self-hosted n8n requires someone to monitor the server, apply security patches, and keep the system running. If something breaks, you need someone who understands infrastructure. This is not zero-effort automation.

This is where the managed service layer comes in. You self-host n8n, Airtable holds your data, your QuickBooks or Xero holds your financial records. We manage the infrastructure, monitor for issues, apply patches, and handle the technical overhead. Your business owns everything, but you don’t have to become a sysadmin.

The cost is lower than most cloud-based platforms because we’re handling operational support, not hosting charges. But yes, it’s an ongoing cost.

The alternative is to outsource automation entirely to a platform like Zapier. That’s simpler operationally. It requires no server knowledge. But you’ve accepted the lock-in and pricing risk as the cost of that simplicity.

Both models work. The question is which risk you’d rather take.

Data Portability and Compliance

There’s a compliance angle too. GDPR and UK data protection regulations give your customers the right to know where their data is stored and the right to retrieve it. When your data lives inside Zapier’s or Make.com’s systems, you have less direct control over where it is and how long it’s kept.

When you use self-hosted infrastructure with Airtable for data and n8n for orchestration, you maintain direct control. Your data is in Airtable’s UK servers (if you choose) and your automations run on infrastructure you control. You have full audit trails and can demonstrate compliance more clearly.

For regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, legal), this is not a minor point. Some clients require this level of control and won’t work with you if your data runs through third-party SaaS platforms.

What This Means for Your Business

If you’re considering building automations for your small business, the vendor lock-in question is worth thinking through now, not later.

If you’re running on Zapier or Make.com today, ask yourself: could I afford to rebuild these automations on a different platform if I needed to? How much would that cost? How much revenue depends on these automations continuing to work? How comfortable are you with the pricing risk?

If you’re building new automations, consider where they should live. Cloud platforms are easy to start with but expensive to exit. Self-hosted automation requires infrastructure management but gives you control and true ownership.

For most UK businesses, the answer is self-hosted n8n with managed service support. You get control without the infrastructure headache. Your automations are portable. Your data is yours. If Perkins SmartOps disappeared tomorrow, your automations would keep running. You own them completely.

The Right Architecture for Your Business

Here’s what we recommend for businesses that want reliable, owner-controlled automation:

Your business owns a self-hosted n8n instance running on a simple cloud server (we typically use DigitalOcean). Your data lives in Airtable and your core systems (QuickBooks, Xero, HubSpot, Slack). n8n orchestrates everything, moving data and triggering actions across those systems. Your team uses a managed service to handle server monitoring and updates, but you own the infrastructure.

If you ever want to move to different hosting or use a different automation platform, your workflows are portable. Your data is yours. Your integrations are standard. You’re not locked in.

Builds are a one-time project fee, and managed service is a straightforward monthly cost. Get in touch for current pricing.

Compare that to the cost of rebuilding everything if your cloud platform decides to change their terms. The math is compelling.

Next Steps

If you’re currently on Zapier or Make.com and wondering whether to stay or explore self-hosted alternatives, it’s worth a conversation. If you’re building new automations and want to avoid vendor lock-in from the start, we should talk about what that looks like for your business.

The uncomfortable question at the start of this article is actually one you can avoid. Ownership and control are possible. They just require building on the right infrastructure.

If you want to explore what that looks like for your business, drop me an email at [email protected].