Recommendation (short): For steady, ongoing enrichment at 50k records/month, build a serverless pipeline. Use Zapier only for early prototyping, low-volume runs, or if you have zero engineering bandwidth and are willing to pay for convenience.

Why: cost-per-run and control
- At 50k records/month you’re in scale territory where per-task middlemen (Zapier) become expensive and inflexible. Zapier is great for integrations and rapid proof-of-concept, but each record counts as a task, and complex error handling, batching, and retries are limited or costly.
- A serverless pipeline (Lambda/FaaS + queue + datastore) gives you control over batching, concurrency, retry logic, monitoring, and model choice (use cheaper models for drafts and higher-cost models for final enrichment). Operational complexity and upfront engineering are the trade-off.

Decision criteria (pick your priority):
- Volume: >10–20k+/month → favors serverless. 50k/mo long term, serverless almost always wins on total cost and control; use Zapier for testing, connectors, or temporary automation. If you want, I can sketch a minimal serverless architecture and a cost-estimation checklist (tokens per prompt × model price × batching factor) to compare dollar-for-dollar.

Compare Zapier and Make