Make

If you go looking for the founder story on make.com, you won't find it. The homepage doesn't mention who built Make or why. It talks about its customers instead. The most telling line comes from Conor Power, Digital Process Improvement Manager at Stellantis &You: "We literally refer to Make as the glue of our organization." That framing is the closest thing to an origin story the site gives you. Make wants to be the layer every app and AI model plugs into, and it points to 500,000+ teams as proof that the idea stuck. It also runs its own conference, Make Waves '26, in Prague on 19 to 20 October, pitched as a way to "step into AI's glass box."

That glass box idea is the real thesis. Make's core is a visual workflow builder with 3,500+ app integrations, including Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Slack, Notion, Airtable, Snowflake, NetSuite, OpenAI and Google Gemini. On top of that it has added AI agents where you set goals, provide tools and define limits, then watch the reasoning. There's a new prompt-based builder called Maia, and a Make MCP server that lets you build and run automations from Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini. The bet is that you shouldn't have to trust a black box: every agent and automation sits in one visual view, with Make Grid for observability across your stack, third-party resources included.

For technical founders, the appeal is that you can start on a free plan with no credit card and no time limit, then drop into JavaScript or Python when drag-and-drop isn't enough. Paid plans start at $10.59/mo. On the enterprise side, Make lists GDPR, SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 compliance, SSO, role-based access and audit logs. The honest caveat is that the site is long on positioning and short on specifics about how its agents behave under load, and much of the governance story is routed through a sales conversation. If you want a visual, inspectable alternative to Zapier that can grow into AI agents, it's a strong candidate. Just expect to learn the details by building, not by reading.