Marcus had built DataSync, a SaaS platform for small businesses, on Zapier. "It just works," the marketing said. "No coding required." Two years later, Marcus was spending $2,000 a month on Zapier and had no idea where his data was actually going.
The Problem: "Ghost Data"
It started with customer complaints. "I never got my welcome email," they'd say. "My account was created but nothing works." Marcus would log into Zapier and see that some zaps had failed, but tracing the root cause across 40+ interconnected workflows was nearly impossible. Error visibility was fragmented across multiple systems, making it difficult to understand how one failure cascaded through the entire process.
When we first looked at his Zapier dashboard, it looked like a bowl of spaghetti thrown at a wall. He had 40+ different "zaps" connecting everything: when a new user signed up, it triggered 12 different workflows. Some updated HubSpot, some sent Slack messages, some created Stripe customers, some sent emails. If any one of them failed, the whole process broke, and tracking the failure across all the interconnected zaps was difficult.
"I'd wake up in the morning and check my email, and there'd be 20 support tickets from customers saying their onboarding didn't work," Marcus recalls. "I'd have to manually go into each system and fix things. It was a nightmare."
The No-Code Tax
- Speed: Each step in a Zap adds latency, with polling intervals and sequential API calls. A 10-step workflow involving multiple external services could take 45 seconds to complete, leaving users waiting.
- Cost: Paying per "task" meant that each user signup triggered 12+ workflows, each consuming multiple tasks. Processing 1,000 users could easily cost 12,000+ tasks. At scale, the bills were astronomical.
- Reliability: If one API changed its format, entire workflows would break. While Zapier provides error logs, tracking failures across 40+ interconnected zaps made it difficult to identify and fix issues before customers noticed.
- Visibility: There was no way to see what was happening in real-time. Marcus had to log into Zapier to check if things were working.
The Solution: A Unified Backend
That's when Marcus reached out to First Radicle. He needed to replace his fragile Zapier setup with something reliable, but he was worried about breaking his existing workflows. "I couldn't afford downtime," he said. "My business was running on these zaps."
We started by mapping out every single workflow. What happened when a user signed up? What happened when they made a purchase? What happened when they canceled? We documented all 40+ zaps and their dependencies.
Then we built a single, unified backend service that replaced all of them. Instead of 40 different zaps scattered across Zapier, everything now lived in one place. When a user signed up, the system would:
- Create their account in the database
- Create a Stripe customer (with automatic retry if it failed)
- Sync their information to HubSpot
- Send a welcome email
- Notify the team in Slack
- Log everything for debugging
And if any step failed, the system would automatically retry, alert the team, and queue the task for manual review. No more silent failures.
The Results
The migration took 3 weeks. Within days of going live, Marcus noticed the difference:
Speed
97%
Faster—from 45 seconds to 1.2 seconds
Cost Savings
96%
Reduced from $2,000/mo to $75/mo
Reliability
99.99%
Error rate dropped from 5% to 0.01%
But the real win wasn't just the numbers. Marcus could now:
- See what's happening in real-time: Every action is logged and monitored. If something fails, he gets an immediate alert in Slack with full details.
- Debug issues instantly: Instead of logging into Zapier and guessing what went wrong, he can see exactly what happened, when it happened, and why it failed.
- Scale without breaking the bank: The new system's infrastructure hosting costs approximately $75/month, regardless of how many users he processes. No more per-task pricing that scales linearly with usage.
- Add new features easily: Want to send a text message when a user signs up? Just add it to the service. No need to create a new Zap and hope it doesn't break.
Looking Forward
Six months after the migration, DataSync has processed over 50,000 users without a single onboarding failure. Marcus has added new features, integrated new services, and scaled his business—all without worrying about his infrastructure breaking.
"I used to spend hours every week fixing broken zaps and dealing with customer complaints," Marcus says. "Now I can focus on building my product. It's like I finally have a real platform instead of a house of cards."