Zapier vs BotFerry: $193.50 a month, in tasks
Zapier's Slack action carries a Thread TS field, so a Zap can put an operator's reply in the right thread. It bills a task for every action step that runs, roughly two per relayed hop, and the plan that covers 5,000 hops lists $193.50 a month billed monthly. BotFerry Starter is 9€ for the same 5,000.
Prices checked 28 July 2026. Written by the BotFerry team, so read the Zapier column as a competitor's account of a competitor and follow the source link before you decide.
The short version
Pick Zapier if you already run it and the relay is one branch of a Zap doing five other things. Nothing here matches its reach across thousands of apps.
Pick BotFerry if the relay is the job. The task meter is what makes Zapier expensive for this, and relaying messages is the one thing that generates tasks on every single message.
BotFerry vs Zapier, side by side
Swipe the table sideways for the other columns.
| BotFerry This is us | Zapier | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Flat monthly, whole workspace | Per task, seats by plan |
| Entry price | 9€ / mo Starter: 3 bots, unlimited operators | $29.99 / mo Pro monthly, 750 tasks, 1 seat; free tier 100 |
| Five operators, one month | 9€ / mo | $29.99 / mo |
| Volume on the entry plan | 5,000 messages | 750 tasks, near 375 relays |
| Operator replies land back in the original thread | Yes | If you build it |
| Flat price, operators not billed per seat | Yes | Seats gated by plan |
| You create the Slack app and hold the token | Yes | Not published |
| Relay vendor keeps no message content | Yes | No |
| Several separate front doors on one plan | Yes | Yes |
| One private thread per request | Yes | If you build it |
| Attachments relay both directions | Yes | If you build it |
| Internal notes the requester never sees | Yes | If you build it |
| Ticket statuses, assignment, queues | No | No |
| SLA timers and escalation | No | No |
| Reporting and analytics | Activity log only | Task history only |
| AI drafting or AI agents | No | Via AI app steps |
| Email or web chat intake | No | Via other app steps |
| One-click install, no app to build | No | No |
Prices read 28 July 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page, linked below. BotFerry bills in euro, the others list dollars, so treat the two currencies as separate numbers rather than a converted total.
The volume row does not compare like with like. One BotFerry message is a single hop across the ferry, either a mention carried into your ops channel or a reply carried back. A ticket, conversation, or credit elsewhere covers a whole exchange. Seat prices in the rows above are directly comparable.
Sources: Zapier
The task arithmetic
Zapier counts a task for each action step that runs. Triggers are free, which is one point in its favour over Make, where the trigger costs an operation. Count the actions and you have the per-message price.
The inbound branch fires on a mention, writes the thread pairing to storage, and posts into your ops channel. Two actions, two tasks. The reply branch fires on an operator message, reads the pairing back, and posts into the requester's thread. Two more. So about two tasks for every hop across the ferry, four for a question and its answer.
Now the price list. Pro starts at $29.99 a month billed monthly for 750 tasks, which is around 375 relayed messages. Matching BotFerry Starter's 5,000 needs roughly 10,000 tasks: $193.50 a month on Pro billed monthly, or $129 billed annually. Team, if two people need to edit the Zap, is $253.50 monthly at that volume.
Set against 9€, that is not a comparison about features. A busy channel is the worst possible shape for per-task billing, because every message is a task and quiet months subsidise nothing.
The free plan cannot do it
Zapier's free tier allows two-step Zaps. The relay needs three at minimum: the trigger, the step that reads or writes the thread pairing, and the step that posts the message. Drop the pairing step and the reply has nowhere to go. Free also caps you at 100 tasks a month, so even a working design would run out in an afternoon.
Make's free tier is more generous at 1,000 operations, and it comes with its own disqualifier: a fifteen-minute floor between scenario runs. Both free tiers are places to prototype and neither is a place to answer people.
What you still have to build
Slack hands you a mention and, later, an unrelated message in another channel. Connecting the two is yours. Store the ops thread timestamp against the source channel ID and the source thread timestamp, then look it up on every reply and pass what you find to the Thread TS field. Miss the lookup and the answer sits in the ops channel where the person who asked cannot see it.
Then the loop. Your bot posts into the ops channel, the ops trigger fires on that post, the Zap relays it to the source channel, and the source trigger fires on that. Filter on the bot ID or you have built something that spends tasks in a circle. Filters do not cost tasks, which is the one part of this that is cheap.
After that comes the tail nobody plans for. Retries when Slack rate-limits you, rather than a failed run in the history. Thread replies triggering correctly, which has its own Zapier help article because the default trigger behaviour catches people out. Files, edited messages, and a record of which events relayed and which did not.
What BotFerry hands you instead
The pairing, the loop prevention, the rate-limit retries and the subtype checks, single-sourced in one filter rather than spread across Zap branches. Attachments in both directions, with a warning posted into the thread when a file fails instead of a file that quietly disappeared. Operator replies beginning with // stay in the ops channel as internal notes, files included.
A per-bot activity log answers the question you will actually get asked, which is why one specific message never arrived. Type, reason, timestamp. No message content is stored, so there is nothing on our side to export or leak.
You also create the Slack app and hold the token, so revoking BotFerry is a click in your own Slack admin. Whether Zapier lets you swap its Slack connection for an app you own, we could not confirm from their docs, so that row reads "Not published" rather than a guess.
If you want the DIY route anyway
Use Make rather than Zapier. Same capability for this job, $9 against $193.50 at the volume that matters, and Make charges its trigger as an operation while Zapier does not, which narrows the per-hop gap and leaves the price gap wide open.
Keep Zapier for what it is unmatched at: the Zap where a Slack reply is step six of eight, and the other seven touch systems no relay will ever reach.