Limit the number of times your Zap runs each day (week, month, etc)

  • 12 November 2020
  • 12 replies
  • 3331 views
Limit the number of times your Zap runs each day (week, month, etc)
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Before I jump into this one, I do want to clarify that this won’t limit the number of times your Zap is triggered. It will, however, allow you to control how many times your Zap can perform the actions in your chosen time period.

The most common use case is probably the daily limit, so that’s what I’ll focus on here. But the same principles apply if you’d like to limit the weekly or monthly actions, for example.

Why might someone want to limit how many times their Zap performs actions every day?

- the trigger is an RSS feed and they don’t want to perform an action *every* time a new post is added
- the trigger is new tweets and the account in question is super active, so they’d like to limit how many times they perform actions

I’m sure there are other use cases! 

The Challenge

You really enjoy Zapier’s blog posts (of course you do!) and want to share the content on Twitter. But sometimes there can be 3 posts every day and you only want to share one item daily.

The Solution

This can be done in a single Zap but I think it’s a little tidier to use 2 Zaps. Also, it saves some tasks by using separate Zaps.

Zap 1 - RSS to Twitter

Trigger: RSS Feed
Action: Storage: Get Value
Filter: Only continue if value is 0
Action: Storage: Increment Value by 1
Action: Twitter

Explanation

The first Storage action retrieves the value from the key (you can call it whatever you want — like “daily limit”) and the Zap only continues if that value is 0. It will only be 0 if this is the first time that day that the Zap has triggered. The second Storage action then increments the value by 1. This means that every subsequent time the Zap triggers before it’s reset (using the second Zap) the filter will stop it.

Zap 2 - Reset Daily Count

Trigger: Schedule - Daily
Action: Storage: Set Value (to 0)

Explanation 

This one is pretty straightforward. Every day (you could choose midnight as the time, for example) set the value at your “daily limit” key to 0. As mentioned above, this means that the first time Zap 1 triggers, it will pass the filter. And it won’t pass the filter again until Zap 2 has reset the value to 0.

The 1-Zap Solution (uses one extra task per day)

Trigger: RSS Feed
Action: Storage: Get Value
Filter: Only continue if value is 0
Action: Storage: Increment Value by 1
Action: Twitter
Action: Delay Until (11:59pm)
Action: Storage: Set Value (to 0)

Explanation 

With this single Zap we replace the 2nd Zap above by delaying until 11:59pm then resetting the value to 0. The reason we delay until 11:59pm is that it will always be on that same day, and after the time the Zap has triggered (unless of course the Zap happens to trigger exactly at 11:59pm). If we choose midnight, that’s technically already past and as you can see below, the Zap will continue instead of delaying.

NOTE: You could also use “tomorrow at midnight” for the Date/Time Delayed Until instead of just “11:59pm”.

Hopefully this helps you out, and as always, if you have any questions or suggestions about this workflow we’d love to hear them!


This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

12 replies

Userlevel 4
Badge +1

Hey @apdraft!

I actually walked through this workflow in my talk at last year’s ZapConnect!

In my workflow, we wanted only one of the daily posts to appear on a feed that has 20+ each day. Here’s what it looks like:

 

Trigger: Schedule by Zapier

Action: Webhooks by Zapier

Action: Post to Facebook Pages

 

In the Webhooks step, we use a GET request to the RSS feed. This will return the 10 - 20 items in your feed. As the sample feed we used had more than 20 items, we mapped the detail from item #13, knowing that each day, the item that was at the 13th spot would be different from the previous day.

 

In your case, because you know there are 5 - 10 items each day, you could still trigger once a day, but then map multiple items, for example, #1, #3, #5, and you’d still have unique items that get sent to Slack. And, the Zap would only run once a day.

 

Let me know how that works for you!

 

PS: @ivarsmas It looks like this workflow might work for your needs as well!

 

Userlevel 1

Hey everyone,

Any update on this? Did anyone figure out how to limit (daily) actions taken when, for example, the trigger is a new item on RSS feed?

  • Our RSS feed has 5-10 new entries per day
  • I’d like to grab 2-3 of those every day and post to Slack
  • When the limit (3) is reached and new items on the RSS appear, Zapier wouldn’t post/trigger

Thanks!

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

So there’s no solution for this to limit the amount of items posted in a feed per day?? If so, this is overly complicated for what it is. Maybe Zapier is not the solution for me.

 

Let me see if there’s a less task-intensive way to accomplish this. I wasn’t necessarily considering that aspect of it when I wrote this post in 2020. It was more of a “here’s a way to do this”. It really would be a great feature if you could easily set it up per Zap, how many times you’d like it to run per day :)

So there’s no solution for this to limit the amount of items posted in a feed per day?? If so, this is overly complicated for what it is. Maybe Zapier is not the solution for me.

Thanks for your contribution SamB

I have read the Digest by Zapier documentation as an alternative, and as far as I can see it allow to collect information from several actions to run them together, but I need the opposite. My problem is not to compile the result in a zap. I want every time a new item appears in the news RSS Feed to trigger the Zap, but as it happens 70-80 times a day in this feed, I want limit this to only 5-7, to save task and don’t saturate our social media channels. Or only execute 5-7 times a day could be a solution also.

I have also seen as alternative the Schedule by Zapier documentation, to try to limit the execution on a daily basis, but it is not compatible with RSS by Zapier, because both are triggers to start a Zap, and only it is possible use one per Zap. :sweat:

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Hey @ivarsmas,

It sounds like you might benefit from using the Digest by Zapier app instead. It wouldn’t limit the amount of times that a Zap triggers or reduce the number of Tasks used in your existing workflow, but it would allow you to add the daily entries into a digest which gets a released at a specific time you set. You can find out more about using Digest here: Compile data in a digest in Zaps

Hope that helps! :)

Hi nicksimard, thanks for your explanation, but I think it doesn’t make sense for my case.

I have a feed rss with many daily entries and 3 zaps with a trigger on each one, that receives each new rss item from the feed and 1 action that share it in each channel.

I would like to limit this actions runs daily to save Zapier tasks, but with this solution instead of spend 1 action on each of my 3 zaps it spends 4-5 actions, so instead of saving tasks, it spends more of my Starter plan.

I’he tried to do the same with running Javascript, in a single action, but I can’t find the right way. If any here know how, I would appreciate it.

Userlevel 1

guys i love zapier and im zapier user since very long time (even if i just used very few times, because of other priorities)

i usually try to tell things so that everyone gets better 🙂 i did not mention much more than 4-5 letters, no links etc ahah but, i needed to tell you this!!! because its very bad that an awesome tool like zapier, has those limits both for free and paying users. 

also, i would really like to pay premium features (as i usually do with many tools) but the pricing here is to high compared to what i need zapier for

 

thanks again for  replies and time in investigating the issue

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

That’s an interesting approach with the triggers. Thanks for letting us know about this, @seomantis.

I’m glad you were able to find an alternative solution, even if it’s not with Zapier! :)

Userlevel 1

thanks, meanwhile i found out that divlr has this feature of posting only x times per day, or max x times for each trigger. so, that seems a smart and very useful solution to limit posting. 

 

also i think they have smaller paid plans. i think you should do the same in order to be more competitive then them. 

 

thanks

e

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Hey @seomantis, welcome to the Community! :)

That’s correct, as the Filter step in the above examples run after the Storage step, a Task would still be incurred even if the Zap failed to pass the Filter. 

I totally hear you on that, pricing is one of our biggest challenges. It’s really tricky to get right as what works for some won’t be ideal for others. We really appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this and I wanted to let you know that I’ve passed your comments here over to the billing team for review. I can’t promise anything but we do regularly look into ways we can improve our pricing options and all feedback is taken into consideration.

Userlevel 1

It means it costs for each trigger even if it does not push the post?

 

Also, filters are a paid feature. Zapier should make smaller plans, and limit the number of actions in general should be an available feature