If you love building scenarios, Make is genuinely great at it. We mean that.
Credit where it's due: Make is one of the best-value builder tools on the internet. Cheap to start. A visual canvas that's honestly fun. Routers, filters, webhooks, iterators — if you enjoy wiring modules together, you can build almost anything and lose a very happy weekend doing it.
If that's you — a tinkerer with time, who wants to design exactly how data moves between apps — Make is a fair pick, and this page won't talk you out of it.
We're really good at something else: execution.
Sterling is for the owner who doesn't want a canvas. They want the report. They want the campaign drafted, the CRM clean, the reconciliation done — and they want a say before anything reaches a customer or can't be undone. You don't design how the work happens. You delegate the work.
Comparison table
| Sterling | Make | |
|---|---|---|
| What you're buying | An AI coworker in Slack — you delegate a job, it finishes it | A visual scenario builder — you design the automation, module by module |
| Setup | Add to Slack, connect your apps, type the job. Minutes, no code | You build the scenario: triggers, modules, routers, filters, error handling |
| Skill required | Plain English | Comfort with routers, filters, webhooks, and data mapping — fun for tinkerers, work for everyone else |
| When week three hits | No scenarios to break — Sterling works the job and asks in your thread when something needs your call | The scenario errors and the debugging is yours. "you have to redo half of your work!" — a Trustpilot reviewer, on Make |
| Who owns maintenance | Sterling owns the loop; recurring jobs run on schedule with the same approval gate every time | You (or your consultant) own every scenario you've ever built |
| Writes to your systems | Sends, posts, charges, and deletes wait for your go in the Slack thread — the internal writes you delegate just happen | Runs whatever the scenario says; any human checkpoint is a step you design in yourself |
| Team access control | Per-user access on each tool — off, view, or full — set by you, plus your go before anything leaves your business | Platform roles cover who can edit and run scenarios — not a per-action gate on what ships |
| Pricing shape | Credit-based: $50/month = 20,000 credits for the whole team, no per-seat charges. 80% low-balance alert in Slack, $25 top-ups, pauses when credits run out | Cheap entry tiers metered by operations — every module run counts, and busy scenarios burn through them |
| Where it lives | The Slack you already have open all day | Its own dashboard and canvas — one more tab |
| The output | Finished work: the audit built, the campaign drafted, the CRM updated — you give the go before anything leaves your business | Data moved between apps exactly as you designed — the judgment calls stay yours to build |
Every scenario works on day one. The bill comes due on week three.
You know the Tuesday. You built the scenario — twelve modules, two routers, a filter you were only half sure about — and it ran. Green circles all the way down. You felt like a wizard.
Then something changes. A field in Shopify. An app update. A new feature on the platform itself. One Make customer put it plainly on Trustpilot:
"Whenever they introduce new feature everything breaks. Fun thing it runs, but you have to redo half of your work!" — a Trustpilot reviewer, on Make
And here's the part that costs real money: broken scenarios don't always announce themselves. One owner, on automations they were running themselves:
"Last month one of mine got stuck retrying and quietly burned through credits for two days before I noticed. Silent failures." — a Reddit user
So the abandoned carts sit unrecovered. The follow-ups don't go out. You find out when the numbers look weird — and as another owner learned the expensive way, "It's impossible to make a good decision if you have bad information."
A small-business owner on Reddit named the actual test every automation fails:
"for a small business the real question is what happens on week three when an edge case shows up. If the answer is 'call the consultant', the automation is dead." — a Reddit owner
On a scenario builder, the answer is always the same: it's you. Your evening. Your Friday. You didn't buy software — you took a second job as its mechanic.
Sterling doesn't give you a better canvas. It takes the job off your desk.
Here's what an owner in that same Reddit thread actually asked for: "small businesses do not want to have an automation platform at all they want a system that keeps on running by itself."
That's Sterling. An AI coworker in your Slack. You don't map triggers and modules — you type the job: "Run our weekly Shopify and Klaviyo audit." Sterling connects to your stack, pulls the numbers, compares ROAS across channels, flags what moved, and drafts the recovery campaign.
Then it stops. Because anything that leaves your business or can't be undone — every send to a customer, every charge, every delete — waits in your thread for your go.
Sterling does everything up to the send. The send is yours.
And when week three shows up? It shows up as a question in a thread you're already reading — not a silent failure you discover in the numbers two weeks later. Week three is where automations go to die. Sterling doesn't have flows to break — it has a job.
The work comes back finished
Sterling connects to Shopify, Klaviyo, Meta and Google Ads, QuickBooks, and your CRM — 3,000+ apps — and does the task end to end. Not a data hand-off you still have to think about: the report built, the campaign drafted in your voice, the leads sitting clean in the CRM. Say it's Monday and the weekly numbers are due — on Make, that's a scenario you designed and now maintain. With Sterling, it's one message you sent last week, and the report is in the thread before you've finished your coffee.
Nothing gets sent, charged, or deleted without your go
Anything that leaves your business — a send to a customer, a charge, a delete — waits for your go in the Slack thread, each teammate's access is off, view, or full — per person, per tool — and every action lands in the audit log. A skeptical owner on Reddit already wrote the acceptance test for this category: "if there's no exception queue, audit log, and big red pause button, it's not automation, it's just a faster way to lose money." Sterling is built for exactly that: the whole job runs in a Slack thread you can see, the audit log is standard, and pause is a dashboard button. On a scenario builder, every one of those safeguards is something you'd have to design yourself.
Week three is a question, not an outage
There is no scenario to snap when a field changes. Sterling works the job, and when it hits something that needs your judgment, that lands as a question in your Slack — you say go, say no, or type what to do differently. Recurring jobs run on schedule with the same gate every single time. Your Friday stays yours.
A price your team can reason about
$50 a month gets your whole team a coworker — 20,000 credits that cover the jobs you actually delegate: the weekly audit, the campaign drafts, the CRM updates. No per-seat charges. No operations math at 11pm to figure out what a busy scenario just cost you. Run low? Sterling pings you in Slack at 80% — before it matters. A top-up is $25 for 10,000 credits, decided by you, not discovered on an invoice.
How it works
1. Add Sterling to your Slack and connect your apps. Minutes, no code, no IT contractor — Shopify, Klaviyo, your ad accounts, QuickBooks, the CRM. 2. Type the job. "Run our weekly Shopify and Klaviyo audit." "Draft the win-back campaign for lapsed subscribers." Plain English, in the thread. 3. Say go. The finished work arrives in Slack. Anything that leaves your business — a send to a customer, a charge, a delete — waits for your go, executes, and gets logged. Recurring jobs repeat on schedule — same gate, every time.
Frequently Asked Questions
I'm not technical. Is this for me? That's exactly who it's for. There's no canvas, no modules, no data mapping. If you can type a Slack message, you can delegate to Sterling. Setup takes minutes. Screening a hire doesn't.
Here's the offer, all of it:
- $50/month = 20,000 credits for your whole team — the weekly audits, the campaign drafts, the CRM updates, the reconciliations.
- Your first 20,000 credits are free — and they run on your real stack, not a demo store.
- No contracts. Cancel from the dashboard. Pause is a button.
The weekly audit is the best first test, because you know exactly how long it takes you by hand — and exactly how long your last scenario survived. If the finished report is worth less than $50 a month to you, stop there; you've spent nothing.
Worst case? You got a free audit of your own store. The downside of not trying is the Friday you already know by heart.
P.S.
A Trustpilot reviewer summed up life on Make in one line: "Fun thing it runs, but you have to redo half of your work!" That's the deal every scenario builder offers — power now, maintenance forever. Sterling's deal is different: it does the work, you keep the veto, and your first 20,000 credits are free.