Automation·Feb 20, 2026·5 min read
Why I stopped using Zapier for client work
It worked until it did not, and when it broke I could not see where. Automation you cannot audit is a liability dressed as leverage.
The lattice creeps up on you
It starts with one Zap. A year later it is forty, connecting tools that each think they own their slice of the data. It is invisible while it works, which is the problem, because the day it breaks I find out from a client, not from the system.
Three ways it fails badly
- Silently: a step stops and nothing tells me.
- Invisibly: the logic is spread across dozens of automations, so there is no one place to look.
- Dangerously: changing one step risks the others, because the dependencies are implicit.
What I run instead
I moved the automation onto the same place the data lives, so every step acts against real state and logs what it did. When something fails, I can see it and fix it, because the whole operation is in one model. I traded a brittle web I could not see for execution I can audit.