I Ditched Zapier and Built WordPress Form Automations for Free

I used to spend $20/month on Zapier. Not because I wanted to — because I felt like I had to.

My setup was simple: a WordPress contact form that sent submissions to a CRM, triggered an email notification, and logged everything to a Google Sheet. Three "Zaps." Three things that should have been trivially easy but somehow required a middleman service charging me $240/year for the privilege.

One day I looked at my Zapier dashboard and realised something embarrassing: 90% of my automations were just moving data from one WordPress plugin to another. I was paying a SaaS company to do what my own server should have been doing all along.

So I cancelled my subscription and rebuilt everything for free. Here's exactly what I did, what worked, and what I'd honestly still use Zapier for.

How I got hooked on Zapier in the first place

It started innocently enough. I had WPForms on one site, a separate CRM tool for managing leads, and no clean way to connect them. Someone recommended Zapier. I signed up, built a zap in 10 minutes, and thought: this is magic.

Then I added another zap. And another. Before long I had:

• Contact form → CRM (create a new contact when someone submits a form)
• Contact form → Email notification (send me a formatted email with the submission details)
• Contact form → Google Sheets (log every submission for reporting)
• Quote request form → CRM + deal creation (create a contact AND a deal in the pipeline)
• Support form → Slack notification (ping a channel when someone needs help)

Five zaps. Two forms. And I'd already blown past the free tier's 100-task limit in the first week.

The Starter plan at $19.99/month covered it. But every few months I'd get the dreaded email: "You've reached 80% of your task limit." And I'd think about upgrading again.

The moment I snapped

It wasn't dramatic. I was building a new client site — a small business with a contact form and a quote request form. The client asked: "Can the form submissions go into some kind of system so we can track leads?"

My instinct was to set up WPForms, connect it to FluentCRM via Zapier, and bill the client for the Zapier subscription. Standard playbook.

Then I did the maths. For this one client:

• WPForms Pro: $199/year (needed for the CRM integration add-on)
• FluentCRM Pro: $129/year
• Zapier Starter: $240/year
• Total: $568/year

For a contact form and a CRM. On a WordPress site. Running on a server the client already pays for.

That's when I started looking for alternatives. Not "cheaper Zapier" alternatives — I wanted to eliminate the entire category. If the form data is already in WordPress, and the CRM is already in WordPress, why is any of this data leaving the building?

What I actually needed (and didn't)

I sat down and listed every Zapier automation I had. Then I sorted them into two columns:

Moving data between WordPress plugins:

• Form → CRM contact creation
• Form → Email notification
• Form → Deal creation
• Form → Tag assignment

Moving data outside WordPress:

• Form → Google Sheets
• Form → Slack channel

The first column — the one costing me the most tasks — was entirely unnecessary. I was using Zapier as glue between two WordPress plugins that should have been talking to each other natively.

The second column? Those were legitimate integrations. But even those turned out to be simpler than I thought.

Replacing Zapier: Form → CRM (the big one)

This was 60% of my Zapier usage: "someone submits a form, create a CRM contact."

The fix was embarrassingly simple. I switched to SkunkForms, which has a CRM built in. Not "connected to" a CRM. Not "integrated with" a CRM. It is the form plugin and the CRM in one.

Every form submission automatically becomes a contact record. The fields map themselves — name goes to name, email goes to email, phone goes to phone. There's no configuration because there's nothing to configure. The data never leaves the database.

I went from a three-plugin, one-SaaS-service setup to a single free plugin that does both jobs. The CRM includes contact records, activity history, deal pipelines, tags, and notes. Everything I was cobbling together with Zapier workflows, just... built in.

Three Zaps eliminated. Cost: $0.

Replacing Zapier: Form → Email notifications

This one seems trivial, but it's one of the most common Zapier workflows for WordPress forms. You want a nicely formatted email when someone submits a form — not the ugly default WordPress notification.

Most form plugins already handle this. SkunkForms includes configurable email notifications per form. You set the recipient, the subject line, and which fields to include. Done.

But I had a more specific workflow: different team members got notified based on the form type. Support requests went to the support inbox. Quote requests went to sales.

With Zapier, this required separate zaps for each routing rule. With SkunkForms, I just set up multiple notification rules on each form. Contact form → hello@domain.com. Support form → support@domain.com. Quote request → sales@domain.com.

One more Zap gone. Still $0.

Replacing Zapier: Form → Deal creation

This was the automation I was most proud of in Zapier. When someone submitted a quote request, it would:

1. Create a CRM contact
2. Create a deal in the pipeline
3. Assign it to the "New Inquiry" stage
4. Tag the contact as "Quote Request"

Four actions, one Zap. It felt sophisticated.

With SkunkForms + SkunkCRM, this is just how it works. Submit a quote request form → contact created → deal created in your pipeline → tagged automatically. No middleware. No API calls. No task limits.

The pipeline is a Kanban board where you drag deals through stages: New → Contacted → Proposal Sent → Won/Lost. It's not Salesforce, but it's exactly what a small business or freelancer actually needs.

Replacing Zapier: Form → Webhooks (the escape hatch)

Now for the integrations that genuinely needed to leave WordPress — the Google Sheets logging and Slack notifications.

SkunkForms supports webhooks. When a form is submitted, it can fire a POST request to any URL with the submission data as JSON. This is the same mechanism Zapier uses under the hood — except you're cutting out the middleman.

For Google Sheets, I used Google Apps Script. A 10-line script that receives webhook data and appends a row:

function doPost(e) {
  var data = JSON.parse(e.postData.contents);
  var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getActiveSheet();
  sheet.appendRow([
    new Date(),
    data.name,
    data.email,
    data.message
  ]);
  return ContentService.createTextOutput("OK");
}

Deploy it as a web app, paste the URL into SkunkForms' webhook settings. Done. Free forever. No task limits.

For Slack, it's even easier. Create a Slack incoming webhook (free), paste the URL into SkunkForms. Every submission pings your channel with the form data. Took 2 minutes.

Both of these are "set and forget" — no monthly subscription, no usage caps, no middleman that can go down and silently eat your leads.

The final tally

Here's what my setup looked like before and after:

Before (Zapier era):

• WPForms Pro: $199/year
• FluentCRM Pro: $129/year
• Zapier Starter: $240/year
• Total: $568/year

After (Zapier-free):

• SkunkForms (free): $0
• SkunkCRM (free, built in): $0
• Google Apps Script (free): $0
• Slack incoming webhooks (free): $0
• Total: $0/year

Same functionality. Same automations. Zero ongoing cost.

And honestly? The new setup is more reliable. There's no external service that can fail silently. No API rate limits. No "your Zap was turned off because your plan expired." The data stays in WordPress, and the webhooks fire directly from my server.

What I'd still use Zapier for (being honest)

I'm not going to pretend Zapier is useless. It's genuinely great at things that WordPress-native solutions can't touch:

Complex multi-step workflows across SaaS tools. If you need "Typeform submission → Salesforce contact → Mailchimp sequence → Slack notification → Trello card," Zapier is the right tool. That's five different external services with five different APIs. No WordPress plugin is replacing that.

Non-WordPress ecosystems. If your forms aren't on WordPress, this whole article is irrelevant to you. Zapier connects everything to everything, and that's valuable when you're outside the WordPress world.

Conditional logic across services. "If the form submission contains 'enterprise' in the company size field, route to the enterprise sales team in Salesforce AND create a high-priority ticket in Zendesk." That kind of branching logic across multiple external platforms is Zapier's sweet spot.

One-off integrations you'll never touch again. Sometimes you need a weird connection between two obscure tools and you just want it done. Zapier's library of 6,000+ integrations is unbeatable for that.

But here's the thing: most WordPress site owners aren't building complex multi-service automations. They're connecting a form to a CRM. Maybe sending a notification. Maybe logging to a spreadsheet. That's it.

For those workflows — the ones that represent 80% of Zapier's WordPress usage — you don't need Zapier. You need a form plugin that isn't artificially limited.

The lesson

The WordPress ecosystem trained us to think in fragments. Form plugin here, CRM there, automation layer connecting them, email plugin making sure notifications actually send. Each piece works fine on its own, but the integration tax — in money, complexity, and failure points — adds up fast.

Zapier thrives in that gap. It's the duct tape holding together an ecosystem of tools that probably shouldn't have been separate in the first place.

When I switched to a plugin that treats forms and CRM as one thing — because they are one thing — the need for automation middleware just disappeared. Not because I found a better alternative to Zapier, but because I eliminated the problem Zapier was solving.

If you're paying monthly fees to move data between WordPress plugins, you might not need a better integration tool. You might need fewer things to integrate.

Try SkunkForms free →