Make is 5x cheaper than Zapier — and 6 other AI tool facts worth knowing this week

Welcome to the first issue. Each week: one lead story, a few benchmark notes, and one tool worth knowing. Under 5 minutes to read.

Lead Story

01 — Make.com vs Zapier: the pricing math nobody does for you

At 3,000 operations per month, Make Core costs $9/month. Zapier Starter costs $49/month. Same workflow volume. Same basic capability. A 5x price difference.

This is not a hidden deal — it is sitting on both pricing pages. The gap exists because Zapier prices on "tasks" (each action step counts separately) while Make prices on "operations" (the whole scenario run counts as one unit for simple flows). At scale this difference compounds fast.

Where Zapier still wins: the app library is larger (6,000+ integrations vs Make's ~1,500), and the UI is noticeably simpler for non-technical users. If you are running more than 20 steps in a single workflow, Zapier's task-counting model also starts to look better relative to Make's operation pricing. The 5x figure is real at 3,000 ops — it narrows or inverts at higher complexity.

Bottom line: If you are currently on Zapier's paid plan and running simple automations at moderate volume, the migration math almost always favors Make. If you have complex multi-step Zaps built by a team that knows the tool, switching costs are real and should be factored in.

Full comparison with pricing tables →

Benchmark Update

02 — Claude 3.7 Sonnet HumanEval: 93.7% vs GPT-4o's 90.2%

On the HumanEval coding benchmark (source: arXiv:2107.03374), Claude 3.7 Sonnet scores 93.7% vs GPT-4o at 90.2%. A 3.5 percentage point gap on a well-established benchmark is meaningful — not noise.

What this means in practice: Claude's edge shows up most clearly in code refactoring, handling large codebases in a single context window (200K tokens vs GPT-4o's 128K), and nuanced multi-step reasoning tasks. It does not mean Claude will write better marketing copy or answer general knowledge questions more accurately — those gaps are much narrower.

If your primary use is writing, summarization, or casual chat, the benchmark difference is unlikely to change your day-to-day experience. If you are building or refactoring code, it is worth testing. Full comparison →

Benchmark Update

03 — ElevenLabs Turbo v2.5 vs Cartesia Sonic-3: latency in real terms

Published specs: ElevenLabs Turbo v2.5 at 75ms first-audio latency, Cartesia Sonic-3 at 90ms. ElevenLabs is faster on paper by 15ms.

In practice, a 15ms difference in voice latency is imperceptible to a human listener. The more material variable for most voice agent builders is the rest of the pipeline — your LLM response time, STT processing, and network round-trip. Optimize those first. The TTS layer is rarely the bottleneck.

Where to focus instead: Cartesia's voice cloning quality and pricing at scale tend to favor it for high-volume production. ElevenLabs has a larger voice library and broader language support. Full breakdown →

Tool to Know

04 — Ideogram 2.0: text-in-image rendering gets meaningfully better

Accurate text rendering inside AI-generated images has been a documented weakness across Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion. Ideogram 2.0 benchmarks show a measurable improvement on this specific task — the model is purpose-built to handle it.

Free tier is available. If you generate graphics that include readable text — product mockups, social headers, ad creatives — it is worth one test session at no cost before writing it off as a niche tool.

See how it compares to Midjourney alternatives →

This Week's Comparison

05 — ChatGPT vs Gemini: updated with Gemini 1.5 Pro data

Our ChatGPT vs Gemini comparison has been updated to include Gemini 1.5 Pro benchmark data and revised pricing. The 1.5 Pro model narrows the gap in several reasoning benchmarks while maintaining Google's edge in multimodal tasks and native Google Workspace integration.

If you are a heavy Google Docs / Sheets user evaluating whether Gemini or ChatGPT fits better into your stack, this is the comparison to read. Read the updated comparison →

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