Gumloop
by Gumloop
Getting-started guide
Build automations by dragging boxes onto a canvas — with AI steps built in, not bolted on.
Last reviewed 2026-09-07 · for Gumloop
Gumloop gives you a blank canvas. You drag boxes onto it, and each box does one small job: fetch the new email, read the attached PDF, ask an AI for the total, add a row to your spreadsheet. Lines between the boxes set the order. Each box is a node — Gumloop's word for one step.
A visual automation builder. You connect your accounts once — Gmail, Slack, Drive, Notion, Airtable and a few hundred others — then build workflows that move information between them while you do something else.
AI steps are ordinary boxes on the canvas: "Ask AI", "Extract Data", "Categorizer". Summarising or pulling fields out of messy text sits mid-workflow instead of in a separate service. Gumloop's own published examples lean that way — contract clause extractors, invoice processors, PDF readers.
Why this over Zapier, Make or n8n, all already on this site? For simple "when this, then that" plumbing, Zapier is easier and free. Gumloop earns its price when the middle of the job needs judgement — reading, classifying, extracting — across a batch.
There is no free plan. Gumloop dropped its permanent free tier in mid-2026; the pricing page now lists Pro and Enterprise plus a 14-day trial. The entry plan is a monthly subscription with an allowance of credits — the platform's unit of spend. Check the pricing page for today's figure, because this company repackaged recently.
So the real question is what fourteen days can show you. Bring a card, and one job worth automating — a folder of invoices, a weekly report you assemble by hand. Open the template gallery rather than a blank canvas and run someone else's finished workflow first.
Simple steps are cheap or free; the AI steps are what you actually pay for, billed on how much text the AI reads and writes, with the bigger, smarter ones costing more per word. Credits currently don't roll over.
Building the workflow is the half you can see. The half you can't is the standing permission that runs it: link your Gmail or Drive and Gumloop can open, read and write in that account on a schedule, at three in the morning, without asking you again.
Documents you push through AI steps go out to third-party AI providers to be processed. Gumloop's privacy policy says that for paying customers it does not use your uploaded data, flows or chat sessions to train any AI, and that those providers are contractually committed not to train on data sent through Gumloop. Better than silence — but treat confidential material as a deliberate decision, not a default.
A Gmail trigger — the event that starts a workflow — watches one label, a document step reads the attachment, an AI step pulls supplier, date and amount, and a row lands in Sheets.
Why this one: Elsewhere, reading a PDF means bolting on a separate parsing service; here it is another box on the same canvas.
Tweak: Flag anything over a threshold into Slack instead of filing it silently.
A Drive trigger watches one folder, a document step reads each new file, an AI step summarises it, and the last step appends the summary to a running doc.
Why this one: It writes a plain-language summary of each new document into a running doc. Looping over the batch costs nothing — only the summarising does — so forty documents is a reasonable trial-week test.
Tweak: Ask for three bullets and one open question instead of a paragraph.
A form or Airtable trigger fires, a categoriser step decides which bucket the submission belongs in, and a router sends it onward.
Why this one: Classification is a first-class node, so "which of these five things is this?" is one box rather than a chain of brittle keyword rules.
Tweak: Add a catch-all branch so anything uncertain reaches a human.
Want the full picture first? See the Gumloop overview for pricing, the free tier and related tools.
