The two pieces every Zap needs
Trigger: the event that starts the Zap. "A new row is added to this spreadsheet." "A new email arrives with this subject line." "A form is submitted." Every Zap has exactly one trigger.
Action: what happens in response. "Send a Slack message." "Create a task in a project tool." "Add a row to a different spreadsheet." A Zap can have one action or a chain of several, each running in order after the trigger fires.
A concrete example
Trigger: a new response comes in on a contact form. Action 1: create a new contact record in a CRM. Action 2: send a Slack message to the sales channel with the lead's details. Action 3: add the lead's email to a mailing list. One trigger, three actions, three tasks consumed each time the Zap runs, as covered in the pricing guide.
Zapier triggers: instant vs polling
Every Zapier trigger is one of two kinds, and which one you get depends on the app, not on your plan. Instant triggers are webhooks: the source app pushes the event to Zapier the moment it happens. Zapier's own glossary is unambiguous about these — triggers labelled Instant “will always trigger Zap workflows immediately (regardless of pricing plan)”. Polling triggers are everything else: Zapier calls the app on a schedule and asks whether anything is new, because not every app offers webhooks. The schedule is the part your plan buys.
| Plan | Entry price | Polling interval |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 · 100 tasks/mo | 15 min |
| Professional | from $19.99/mo billed annually ($29.99 billed monthly) | 2 min |
| Team | from $69/mo billed annually ($103.50 billed monthly) | 1 min |
| Enterprise | custom | 1 min |
Read from zapier.com/pricing on 30 August 2026: the page ships a per-plan polling interval next to each plan's task allowance, which is where these four numbers come from. Entry price is the cheapest task tier on each plan; both the price and the task allowance climb steeply above it, and the interval does not change with the tier.
What that costs you in practice: on the free plan a polling trigger can sit on an event for a quarter of an hour before the Zap fires, and the two-minute interval is most of what the first paid tier buys you in responsiveness. An instant trigger ignores all of it. So if latency is the thing that matters, the question to ask before you upgrade is whether your trigger app offers an Instant event at all — if it does, the free plan is already as fast as Enterprise.
Filters and paths, the two common additions
- Filter: a condition that stops the Zap unless it's met. "Only continue if the form's 'company size' field is over 50," so the Zap doesn't run for every single submission.
- Paths: branching logic, sending the Zap down one of several possible action chains depending on the data. "If the deal size is over $10,000, notify the enterprise team; otherwise, notify the standard sales queue."
Neither is required. A large share of useful Zaps are just trigger plus one or two plain actions, no filters or branches at all.
How many actions the free plan lets you chain
Checked against zapier.com/pricing on 30 August 2026.
Frequently asked
Can a Zap have more than one action?
Yes. A single trigger can fire a chain of multiple actions in sequence, each one a separate task for billing purposes. Multi-step Zaps require a paid plan; Zapier's free tier only allows one trigger and one action, what Zapier's own pricing page now calls a "two-step" Zap.
How does Zapier know when to check for a trigger?
Two ways: instant triggers use webhooks, the source app notifies Zapier the moment something happens, with no delay. Polling triggers have Zapier check the source app on a schedule: every 15 minutes on the free plan, every 2 minutes on Professional, every 1 minute on Team and Enterprise (zapier.com/pricing, 30 August 2026).
What's the difference between a Zap and a workflow?
None, functionally. "Zap" is Zapier's specific brand name for what other platforms call a workflow, scenario, or flow. The underlying concept, trigger plus actions, is the same across tools.