IFTTT cut unlimited free automations down to three, then two

An unlimited free tier became a numbered one

IFTTT launched in 2010 on a simple premise: connect two services with a trigger and an action, free, with no limit on how many of these “applets” a person could run. That changed on 10 September 2020, when IFTTT introduced a paid IFTTT Pro subscription and, according to contemporaneous reporting on the announcement, cut the free plan to just three applets, with Pro priced at $9.99 a month for more advanced, multi-step automations. IFTTT's own current Billing FAQ, a living document retrieved on 16 September 2026, confirms the free plan is still capped, though the number it states today is lower still: “up to two Applets, each with one trigger and one action.”

Who this changed, and how the limit bites

For a casual user running one or two automations, the change was largely invisible; three applets, and later two, cover a single habit like backing up photos or logging work hours. The people affected were anyone who had built a small personal stack of automations over the platform's earlier free-for-all decade, treating IFTTT as connective tissue between several accounts and services. The Billing FAQ describes archived or deleted applets as not counting toward the limit, which is a workaround of sorts, but it still means an existing free-tier setup with more than a handful of live automations could not simply keep running after the change; something had to be turned off or paid for.

A free tier's terms are the vendor's to redraw

The current plans page, also a living document as retrieved, shows a three-tier structure of Free, Pro and Pro+, each defined mainly by how many applets it allows and how fast they run; this describes today's model, not a historical price. What is worth noting editorially is the direction of travel: the free allowance went from unlimited, to three, to two, over roughly a decade, entirely at the vendor's discretion and with no obligation to consult the people relying on it. A free automation that quietly stops running because a limit was reached is a harder failure to notice than an outright shutdown, because nothing announces itself; the applet simply goes stale.

• Is the free tier's limit stated as a fixed number, or as something the vendor can adjust without notice?
• If an automation stopped running tomorrow, would you notice within a day, or only when something downstream broke?
• How many of your free-tier automations could you afford to lose at once, and which ones would you pay to keep?

IFTTT's applet limit is a small mechanism next to an outright shutdown, but it illustrates the same dependency: a free tool's terms are always provisional, and the direction they move is set by the company, not by the habit built on top of them.