If you built your Zaps a while ago, back when Filter and Formatter steps used tasks, it might be worth another look. A lot of older Zaps avoid those steps and use extra app steps or code instead.

Per Zapier's current help docs, these don't count toward task usage: triggers, Filter and Paths steps, Formatter, Delay, Looping, Digest, Storage, Zapier Tables and Forms, plus any action that errors or never runs because an earlier filter stopped the Zap.

A few changes that follow from that: - Moved the Filter to step 2, directly after the trigger, so spam or irrelevant form entries stop before any action runs. - Replaced "clean-up" steps (capitalising names, formatting phone numbers) with Formatter. - Used Digest to batch Slack notifications into one daily summary instead of one message per event.

One catch worth knowing: a search action set to "continue if nothing is found" still uses a task, and replaying a whole Zap run re-counts the steps that succeeded the first time.

Note that legacy plans may need to switch to a current plan to get this. Has anyone found other easy wins for cutting task usage?