Managing High Volume of Event Triggers and Action Costs in Make (ex-Integromat)

How To
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Hello Make Community,

We’re relatively new to using Make, and we’re facing some challenges with managing event triggers, particularly in comparison to how things worked for us on Zapier. Our main concern revolves around monitoring Google Calendar events and email actions efficiently without inflating costs.

Here’s the situation:

  • We have recurring Google Calendar events that we need to monitor continuously, but on Make, each check counts as an action, which can add up quickly. For example, running a check every 15 minutes for a single calendar could lead to about 100 actions per day, and up to 3,000 actions per month, just for one calendar.
  • If we have 5-6 meetings a day, we could potentially be looking at 18,000 actions a month, just for monitoring calendars. This seems quite costly.

Additionally, we receive a large volume of emails—between 100 to 500 per day. We’re considering setting up email triggers every 15 minutes, but we’re unsure how actions are calculated when, for example, multiple emails (20 or more) arrive in a single 15-minute window. Would that count as 20 actions?

So our questions are:

  1. How can we optimize the frequency of event checks (especially for Google Calendar and emails) to avoid inflating our action count while ensuring timely triggers?
  2. Are there any best practices for minimizing action usage in these scenarios without compromising performance?
  3. What would be the recommended setup if we are handling multiple calendars and a high volume of emails daily?

Any guidance or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help!

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When you poll data sych as with these two types of modules only a single operation is consumed regardless of how many bundles were extracted. Now if you add another module right after the trigger it will run through each bundle. Depending on what your trying to do you may be able to aggreagate those bundles into an array. From there you can filter through the bundles or perform a batch operation if there is a module for the app your using.

Now unfortunately there are no instant triggers for google calendar. There is a push notification that can be sent but instead I changed the setting on the calendar to get an email notification. From there I use a mailhook to instantly get the notification into Make. Now if you aren’t setting up too many meetings this might be a most cost efficient way to moniter the calendar events.

Mailhooks can be used in the same way for your emails but seeing how you get hundreds of emails it might be better for the data to be polled in batches.

Hope this helps!

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Not in Make, but you can set up webhooks on the Google side and a Webhook trigger on the Make side, if you’re willing to go through all the trouble!

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