How to Cut monday.com Automations So Boards Stay Fast
Short answer: monday.com counts automation runs as actions and meters them by plan: 250 per month on Basic, 500 on Standard, 25,000 on Pro, 250,000 on Enterprise. A board with 30 overlapping recipes will burn the Basic allowance in nine days. Auditing is a one-hour job with the automation log open.
Lag is the other symptom. Boards with heavy automation load take two to four seconds to load instead of under one, and the item view feels sticky.
How do I see which automations cost the most?
Open Automate → Automations on the board, then Activity Log. The log lists each run with a timestamp and the recipe name.
Sort by recipe, not by date. Three things show up immediately:
- Recipes that fire on “when item is created” often run in bursts when someone imports a spreadsheet.
- Recipes checking “every day” or “every hour” cost actions whether or not anything changed.
- Duplicate recipes with slightly different names — usually created by two people solving the same problem — double the cost.
Export the log to CSV if the board has more than 10 recipes. Reading it on screen takes longer than it should.
How do you decide what to delete?
Ask one question about each recipe: if this stopped working, who would notice, and when? If the answer is “nobody” or “next quarter”, delete it.
In practice that kills about 40% of recipes on a mature monday.com board. The ones that survive share a trait: they replace work a human would otherwise do weekly.
| Recipe type | Keep? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Notify owner when status becomes Stuck | Keep | Replaces a manual check |
| Set due date when item moves to In Progress | Keep | Removes typing, zero ambiguity |
| Post a Slack message on every status change | Delete | Noise, high action cost |
| Every day, duplicate item to archive board | Replace with weekly | 7x the actions for no benefit |
| When item created, notify 4 people | Delete | People ignore it after week 2 |
How do you merge overlapping recipes?
Group by trigger. If four recipes start with “when status changes”, they are usually one recipe with a status-group condition.
A concrete rebuild: a board had five recipes notifying different people for different statuses. It became one recipe with a “when status changes to something, notify someone” and a condition on the status group. Actions dropped by roughly 70% because the noisy statuses were removed entirely.
Two monday.com features make this easier. Item default values handle the setup work that a “when item is created” recipe was doing. Column change tracking records who changed what without any automation at all.
What about AI blocks in the mix?
They cost actions too. A summariser block on a weekly schedule is cheap; the same block on a daily schedule across a large board is not, and the output turns into more text nobody reads.
One pattern worth keeping: a weekly AI summary of item updates, sent to a single status item. It costs 4 actions a month and replaces a status meeting. That is the best action-per-value ratio on the platform.
More on that workflow is in our guide to monday.com AI blocks.
Why does the board still feel slow after cleanup?
Because automations are not the only load. Three other things slow boards down, in order of impact:
- Too many columns per item. Boards with 60+ columns render slowly for everyone on every view. Anything nobody filters on can be deleted.
- Long update feeds. Items with 500+ updates load their history on demand and that shows up in the item view.
- Cross-board mirror columns. Each mirror is a lookup. Ten mirrors per board on 2,000 items is a lot of lookups.
Fix in that order. Automations first because they are the cheapest to remove, then columns, then mirrors.
Who should audit
The audit is worth an hour if your board has more than 15 recipes, or if anyone has complained about load times, or if you pay for Basic or Standard where 250-500 actions is a real ceiling.
Do not bother if you are on Pro with five recipes and a team of six. The meters exist to stop runaway automation, and at that scale you will not trip them. Do bother if the board is shared with clients — slow boards are the first thing external reviewers notice, and the fix is invisible to them once it is done.
Quick Summary
- Action limits: 250/month Basic, 500 Standard, 25,000 Pro, 250,000 Enterprise.
- Check Automate → Activity Log and sort by recipe name, not date, to find the expensive ones.
- Expect to delete about 40% of recipes on a mature board without anyone noticing.
- Group recipes by trigger to merge duplicates; the “when status changes” family is usually five recipes that should be one.
- Slow boards are usually 60+ columns or heavy mirror usage, not automations alone.
