How-to

15 AI automations every solopreneur should set up (with Make)

When you run the business alone, admin eats the hours you should spend on clients and content: copying leads into a sheet, chasing invoices, writing the same follow-up email for the tenth time. Automation tools connect your apps so that work happens on its own, and AI steps can now handle the parts that used to need a person, like summarising, sorting and drafting. Here are 15 automations worth setting up, grouped by job, with the apps involved and a rough credit cost for each so you can see what fits your plan.

Last updated 26 October 2026

Disclosure: some links are affiliate links. If you buy through them we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. It never decides our picks. How we make money.

Why we use Make for these

Every automation below has three or more steps, and several need branching (a router that sends good leads one way and the rest another). Make allows multi-step scenarios with routers and filters on every plan, including Free. Zapier's free plan is limited to two-step Zaps with 100 tasks a month, and its paid plans start at $19.99 a month billed annually for 750 tasks. For a one-person business doing a few hundred runs a month, Make is usually the cheaper route. Our Make vs Zapier comparison has the full price breakdown.

Make plan	Price (annual / monthly)	Credits a month	Good for
Free	$0	1,000	Your 2 most important automations, at a 15-minute minimum interval
Core	$9 / $10.59	10,000	Most solopreneurs: all 15 automations at modest volume, runs every minute
Pro	$16 / $18.82	10,000	Extra features such as priority execution; check make.com/pricing

Plan prices were checked on make.com on 20 October 2026; Make's pricing page didn't show plan prices to our fetch on 26 October, so confirm them at checkout. Prices are before tax, and UK VAT may be added.

How credits work, in one paragraph

Make bills in credits. According to Make's pricing FAQ, each module action (reading, searching, creating, updating or transforming data) usually uses 1 credit, while router and error-handler modules use none, and some features on Make's AI provider can use more. A scheduled trigger uses a credit each time it checks, even when it finds nothing new. If you run out, scenarios pause until you add credits; webhooks queue up and are processed when they resume. Unused credits expire at the end of the term. The credit figures below are our own estimates from counting modules, not Make's numbers, so treat them as a guide.

Leads and sales

These are the ones that make money directly: every enquiry gets an answer fast, even when you're with a client.

1. New enquiry to CRM, with an instant reply

Trigger: A new form submission (Tally, Typeform, Google Forms or your site's form via webhook).
Steps: Add the contact to your CRM or a Google Sheet, send a short personal-sounding reply from Gmail with your booking link, and ping you on Slack or by email.
Rough cost: About 4 per enquiry (trigger plus three actions).

Speed of reply matters more than polish. This makes your first response go out in minutes, not the next morning.

2. AI lead triage

Trigger: The same new enquiry.
Steps: Send the message to an AI module (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude or Make's own AI) with a prompt that sorts it into 'good fit', 'not a fit' or 'needs info' and writes a two-line summary. A router then sends good fits to you straight away and files the rest.
Rough cost: About 4 to 6 per enquiry, plus AI usage (see the AI costs section).

You read a summary and a label instead of every message in full, and you never miss the one that matters.

3. Payment to onboarding

Trigger: A successful Stripe payment (or a new sale in Gumroad, Systeme.io or your checkout tool).
Steps: Add a row to your income sheet, tag the buyer in your email tool so they get your welcome sequence, and create a client folder in Google Drive.
Rough cost: About 4 per sale.

Nobody waits for access, and your income sheet is always up to date for your accountant.

4. Follow-up on quotes that went quiet

Trigger: A daily scheduled run.
Steps: Search your CRM or sheet for proposals sent more than five days ago with no reply, and create a Gmail draft follow-up for each one for you to check and send.
Rough cost: 1 for the search plus about 1 per draft.

Most lost deals are forgotten, not refused. Drafts rather than automatic sends keep you in control of the tone.

Clients and bookings

For coaches, consultants and freelancers who live in their calendar.

5. Booking to intake form

Trigger: A new booking in Calendly, Cal.com, TidyCal or Google Calendar.
Steps: Send the client your intake form, add them to your CRM, and create a prep note in Notion or Google Docs with their answers once the form comes back.
Rough cost: About 4 per booking.

You walk into every call prepared without spending ten minutes hunting for context.

6. Meeting notes to follow-up email draft

Trigger: A new summary from your AI note taker (by email, webhook or a shared folder, depending on the tool).
Steps: An AI module turns the summary into a follow-up email with agreed actions and next steps, saved as a Gmail draft, and adds the actions to your task list.
Rough cost: About 4 per call, plus AI usage.

The follow-up goes out the same day. See our Fathom vs Otter vs Fireflies guide for getting the notes free.

7. Invoice reminders that aren't awkward

Trigger: A daily scheduled run.
Steps: Check your invoicing tool or sheet for invoices past due, send a polite reminder, and flag anything over 30 days to you.
Rough cost: 1 for the search plus about 1 per overdue invoice.

Many invoicing tools have built-in reminders, so check yours first. Use this when your invoices live in a sheet or when you want one place to see overdue money.

8. Testimonial request after a project

Trigger: A project or deal marked 'complete' in your CRM or sheet.
Steps: Wait a few days, then email a short feedback form. Good replies go into a 'testimonials' sheet you can quote from (with permission).
Rough cost: About 3 per project.

Asking at the right moment gets far more replies than remembering to ask months later.

Content and audience

Where AI does the most heavy lifting. Keep a human check before anything is published.

9. Blog post or newsletter to social drafts

Trigger: A new item in your blog's RSS feed or newsletter archive.
Steps: An AI module writes three or four short posts from the article in your voice (using a saved brief in the prompt), and saves them as drafts in a sheet, Notion or your scheduler for you to edit.
Rough cost: About 3 to 5 per article, plus AI usage.

One piece of writing becomes a week of posts. Compare schedulers in Buffer vs Metricool vs Later.

10. Idea inbox

Trigger: A message to yourself: an email to a dedicated address, a Telegram or Slack message, or a voice note transcribed by an AI module.
Steps: Clean it up into a one-line idea with a suggested angle and add it to your content sheet or Notion board.
Rough cost: About 3 per idea, plus AI usage.

Ideas arrive on walks, not at your desk. This stops them disappearing.

11. New subscriber tagging

Trigger: A new subscriber in Kit, beehiiv or Systeme.io (or a signup form webhook).
Steps: Add them to a sheet, tag them by the page or lead magnet they came from, and notify you if the email domain looks like a company you'd want as a client.
Rough cost: About 3 per subscriber.

You learn which content actually grows your list. Most email tools handle the welcome email itself, so automate around it, not instead of it.

12. Brand and competitor watch

Trigger: A scheduled run once a day.
Steps: Pull new items from RSS feeds or Google Alerts feeds for your name, product and competitors, have an AI module summarise anything new in a few lines, and email you one digest.
Rough cost: Roughly 2 per feed checked plus 1 per new item; check feeds daily rather than every 15 minutes to save credits.

One short email a day instead of checking five sites.

Admin and money

Boring, repetitive and exactly what automation is for.

13. Receipts to a bookkeeping folder

Trigger: A new email with a PDF attachment matching your filters (for example, 'receipt' or 'invoice' from known senders).
Steps: Save the attachment to a dated Google Drive or Dropbox folder and add a row to an expenses sheet. An AI module can pull the supplier, date and amount from the text.
Rough cost: About 3 to 4 per receipt, plus AI usage if you extract fields.

Year-end and VAT returns stop being a scavenger hunt. Check the extracted amounts; AI can misread them.

14. Inbox triage and draft replies

Trigger: New emails in a chosen Gmail label or inbox.
Steps: An AI module classifies each email (client, lead, admin, newsletter) and, for common questions, writes a draft reply from your FAQ notes. Drafts only, never auto-send.
Rough cost: About 3 per email, plus AI usage. This one can use credits fast on a busy inbox, so filter to one label first.

You open your inbox to sorted mail and half-written replies.

15. Monday numbers email

Trigger: A scheduled run every Monday morning.
Steps: Pull last week's sales from Stripe, new subscribers from your email tool and new leads from your CRM sheet, and email yourself a short summary. An AI step can add a two-line comment on what changed.
Rough cost: About 5 to 6 per week.

You see the business in one email instead of logging into four dashboards.

What the AI steps cost

You have two ways to add AI to a Make scenario. Make's own AI provider works without any extra account and charges in credits based on the tokens used. On paid plans you can instead connect your own OpenAI or Anthropic API key and pay the provider directly. Note that a ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro chat subscription is separate from API access and doesn't cover automation usage.

For the short jobs in this guide (summarise a lead, label an email, draft a follow-up), each AI call handles a small amount of text. Put a filter before the AI step so it only runs on items that need it, and you keep both credits and API costs down. If you're choosing an assistant for the writing itself, our best AI writing tools guide compares ChatGPT, Claude, Copy.ai and Jasper.

The order we'd build them in

Week 1, on the free plan: enquiry to CRM with an instant reply (1), and payment to onboarding (3). Use instant webhook triggers where your apps offer them so you're not spending credits on empty checks.
Week 2: booking to intake form (5) and meeting notes to follow-up draft (6). This is when most people move to Core, since Free allows only two active scenarios.
Week 3: content repurposing (9) and the Monday numbers email (15).
After that: add the rest one at a time, and only keep the ones you'd miss if they stopped.

Tips that save hours of debugging

Write the process down first. If you can't list the steps on paper, the automation won't fix it.
Start from a template. Make has a public template library; search it for your two apps before building from scratch.
Drafts, not sends. For anything a client or subscriber reads, have the scenario create a draft and send it yourself.
Add an error route. Error-handler modules don't use credits, so a simple "email me if this fails" route costs nothing to run.
Keep a master sheet. One Google Sheet with tabs for leads, income, expenses and content gives every scenario a place to write and gives you one place to look.
Watch your usage for the first month. Scheduled triggers and busy inboxes are where credits disappear.

The tools these automations connect

You don't need all of these. Most solopreneurs already use half of them, and every one listed here has a free plan or starting tier:

Email and audience: Kit(opens in new tab) (free up to 10,000 subscribers) or Systeme.io(opens in new tab) (free plan with funnels, email and courses). See Systeme.io vs Kit.
Social scheduling: Metricool(opens in new tab) or Buffer; compare them in Buffer vs Metricool vs Later.
Meeting notes: Fathom has a free plan with unlimited recordings. See Fathom vs Otter vs Fireflies.
Invoicing: see Bonsai vs HoneyBook vs FreshBooks before building reminders, since some include them.
Selling digital products: see Beacons vs Linktree vs Gumroad.

Verdict

The best automation is the one that runs every week without you thinking about it. Start with the two that protect revenue, leads and payments, on Make's free plan. Add AI where it saves reading and writing time, keep drafts in the loop for anything client-facing, and upgrade to Core when you want more than two scenarios running. Fifteen automations sounds like a lot, but most take under an hour each once you've built the first.

Try Make free

Sources: make.com/pricing (plan prices checked 20 October 2026; credit rules and FAQ checked 26 October 2026), make.com/affiliate (checked 26 October 2026), and zapier.com/pricing (checked 20 October 2026). Credit estimates per automation are our own arithmetic from counting modules and will vary with how you build each scenario. These are suggested builds, not a record of our own long-term testing of each one. Make didn't pay for this guide; we earn a commission if you subscribe through our links.

Frequently asked questions

Can I build these automations on Make's free plan?

Some of them. Make Free gives 1,000 credits a month and multi-step scenarios, but only 2 active scenarios and a 15-minute minimum interval (checked 20 October 2026). Pick your two most valuable automations for the free plan, then move to Core ($9 a month billed annually, or $10.59 monthly, for 10,000 credits) when you want more running at once.

How many credits will I use a month?

Count the modules in a scenario: the trigger and most actions use 1 credit each time they run, and routers and error handlers are free. A 4-step lead automation that runs 50 times a month uses about 200 credits. Scheduled triggers use a credit every time they check, even when nothing is new, so check every few hours or daily where speed doesn't matter, or use an instant webhook trigger. Some AI features on Make's own AI provider can use more than 1 credit.

Do I need an OpenAI or Claude subscription for the AI steps?

No. A ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro chat subscription doesn't cover automation use anyway. In Make you can use Make's AI provider, which charges credits based on tokens, or connect your own OpenAI or Anthropic API key on paid plans and pay the provider for API usage directly.

Should I use Zapier instead?

Zapier is easier to start with and connects more apps, but its free plan is limited to two-step Zaps and 100 tasks a month, and paid plans start at $19.99 a month billed annually for 750 tasks. Most of the automations here have three or more steps, which is why we use Make for them. See our Make vs Zapier comparison for the details.

Is it safe to let AI reply to clients automatically?

We'd advise against fully automatic replies for anything client-facing. Have the AI write drafts or summaries and send them yourself. AI can get facts, prices and tone wrong, and a wrong automatic reply is harder to undo than a draft you never sent.

The Solo Stack, every week

One AI tool deep-dive, three quick finds and one workflow to copy. Written for people who run their business alone.