Base 750 Task limit reached, Zapier plan fee increase.

To keep in spirit with this experiment, as promised me (A human) will continue to document the process of cost, process, and analysis of automated AI content creation solutions. TLDR: zap task limit reached, had to increase plan.

Ok, so it’s been a few weeks since the automation process started. In less than 2 full weeks I ate through 750 “tasks” inside the Zapier platform. Each article uses around 10 tasks. Plus 1 for Tweets. The outline is below:

• Summarize the Article via RSS
• Text Formatter (regex the domain name of the feed)
• Utility Formatter (match the feed url to the WordPress category)
• Generate Blog Title from Article Summary
• Generate Image Description Text from the Title
• Generate Image from Image Description Text
• Create a new post in WordPress
• Upload Image from Generated Image in Dall-E to WordPress

Added: Truncate blog title (sometimes GPT would return a very long string for a title and this would cause permalink and buffer issues when creating tweets)

Added: Create “meta” description from the summary (to be added as an Excerpt, used as meta description in yoast)

Added: Add a new Tweet on X to Buffer when a new WordPress post is created.

When using Yoast, I had to add a couple of custom functions around Opengraph and twitter card meta. (I made a tweet about it). If you want more info, tweet aimemate and ill make a post about what I found.

This means that in order to keep running a single site from the primary feeds used I needed to upgrade the account.
I ended up leveraging the “Pro (2,000 Tasks) Plan”. This is an increased rate from $20/monthly to $49/monthy. It comes with an extra benefit of 2000 monthly tasks (vs 750) and retry automation on failed tasks.

I will let this run to complete the month and post an update of tasks, numbers, and costs for the API/Zapier and Hosting fees in mid-December.

Thanks for checking out the project!

Photo by rc.xyz NFT gallery on Unsplash

Other helpful tips: The image was cropped because a stock image on unspalsh us huge, the image is then compressed using tinypng.com before being uploaded. It is still bigger than I would suggest but I'm on a different computer today and don't have my tooling handy.