Recurring tasks eat up a lot of time in day-to-day work: sorting emails, copying data from one tool to the next, filing attachments, keeping colleagues informed. Make handles these processes automatically. This article explains what Make is, what you can automate with it and what it costs in 2026. After that, you'll build your first scenario step by step: an AI-powered system that routes incoming emails.
What is Make?
Make is a no-code platform for automating workflows. You connect apps such as Gmail, Slack, monday.com, Google Drive or your CRM and define what should happen automatically when a certain event occurs. You do this in a visual editor where you put individual steps together as building blocks. No coding skills are needed.
Make connects over 3,000 apps and can reach any other interface through HTTP modules. The platform used to be called Integromat and was renamed Make in February 2022.
What can you automate with Make?
Almost any process where data moves between tools can be automated with Make. Typical examples from SMEs:
- Transferring data between CRM, ERP and project management so nobody has to enter it twice
- Automatically creating a project in monday.com from a won deal
- Writing new leads from web forms to the CRM and notifying the sales team in Slack
- Extracting invoices from emails and filing them in accounting software or Google Drive
- Setting up accounts, assigning tasks and sending welcome emails when onboarding new staff
- Combining reports from several sources and sending them out regularly
Since 2025, Make has also offered AI agents that decide on their own which steps to take within a scenario, as well as an MCP server that lets external AI assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT trigger Make scenarios.
Key Make terms
Before you build your first scenario, it's worth knowing four terms.
How much does Make cost in 2026?
Make has a free plan with 1,000 credits per month and 2 active scenarios. That's enough to get to know the platform and test your first simple workflows. With annual billing, paid plans start at 9 USD per month (Core, 10,000 credits), with Pro at 16 USD and Teams at 29 USD. Billing is per organisation, not per person. We explain in detail how costs add up and how to estimate your usage in a separate article.
Tutorial: your first scenario in Make
To get started, we'll build a scenario that automatically categorises incoming emails in a shared inbox (for example info@company.com) and processes them according to their category: as a task in monday.com, as a message in Slack, or as a forwarded email with attachments saved to Google Drive.
Your company receives lots of email enquiries every day that need to go to different teams: marketing, HR or accounting. Instead of assigning each email by hand, Make takes care of these steps:
- Fetching new emails automatically
- Analysing the content with AI and assigning a category
- Forwarding the email to the right team
- Saving attachments to Google Drive where needed
Log in to Make and click "Create a new scenario" in your dashboard. If you don't have an account yet, you can sign up for free.
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Step 1: watch the inbox for new emails
Click the plus button in the middle of the editor to add your first module. Choose Gmail and then "Watch Emails". This module checks the inbox at regular intervals and fetches new emails.
With the first module, you set up the connection to your email account. You then define which folder Make watches and which emails are included.
Here's how to configure the key fields:
| Field | Value | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| Folder | INBOX | Watches the inbox. |
| Criteria | All emails | Fetches all new emails, whether read or unread. |
| Mark as Seen | No | Leaves the emails marked as unread in Gmail. |
| Maximum Results | 1 | Processes one email per run for testing. |
Step 2: categorise the email content with AI
Add an AI module as the second step, for example from OpenAI or Anthropic, that generates a text response. It reads the content of the email and assigns it to a category such as Marketing, HR, Finance or Other. A prompt for this could look like this:
Assign the following email to exactly one of these categories: Marketing, HR, Finance, Other. Reply with the category name only, without any other text.
Email:
{{1.text}}Choose a current model and set the temperature low, for example to 0, so that similar emails are classified the same way. The {{1.text}} placeholder passes the text from the Gmail module. The AI returns a single word, for example "Marketing".
Step 3: route emails with a router
After categorisation, add a router. It splits the scenario into several paths, and a filter on each path determines which emails continue along it: Marketing, HR, Finance or Other.
Click "Add another module", search for "Flow Control" and select "Router".
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