You probably don't need to upgrade HubSpot yet

A prospect called me a couple weeks ago about upgrading to HubSpot Professional. She’d been quoted about $1,500 a month and she wanted help getting it set up.

I told her not to buy it.

She wanted the upgrade for one thing, and that was workflows. So that’s $18,000 a year to turn on automation, and the rest of what she’d be paying for she was never going to open. We put her on a $40 a month tool instead and built the same thing. I’d rather lose the bigger project and keep the client.

Who this is for

You, if money is actually tight right now. Pre-seed or seed, you’re still doing most of the selling yourself, maybe there’s a first rep or a first marketer.

If you’re at fifty people with a marketing team and real pipeline, go buy Professional. I mean that. Most of the companies I work with are on paid tiers and they should be. This is about not paying for it three years before you need it.

Where the money actually is

The thing you’re running into is really common, and it’s not that HubSpot is expensive. It’s that the pricing looks like one number when it’s really three, so people budget against the wrong one.

Free is real, and it’s smaller than you’ve probably heard. It used to hold a million contacts. If you set up your account after September 2024, it holds a thousand, with two users. A lot of articles out there still quote the old number.

Starter is cheap. Fifteen to twenty dollars per person per month, depending on which hub you’re buying and whatever promo is running.

Then the price jumps. The second you want a real workflow, a sequence, or a custom report, the cheapest way in is Sales Hub Professional at $90 per person per month. If what you want is marketing automation, that’s Marketing Hub Professional at $800 a month. Both of those have a one-time onboarding fee on top, which I’ve seen quoted at $1,500 and $3,000.

Those are list prices on annual billing, checked August 2026. Sources are at the bottom and you should check them before you budget against anything.

Nobody buys Professional because they want everything in it, right? They buy it because they needed one thing sitting behind it. Everything below is one of those things.

What you’re actually paying for

The CRM stays. I made that case last post and I’m not going to do it again here. Somebody has to own who this person is, what you sold them, and what happened after.

What I don’t buy anymore is that the CRM and the twelve things bolted onto it have to come from the same bill.

So here’s what’s actually behind the paywall.

Workflows. Starter gives you what HubSpot calls simple workflows, which means one workflow per trigger and ten steps maximum. That’s enough to fill in a field automatically. It’s nowhere near enough to route a lead based on any kind of if-this-then-that logic. Real automation starts at Professional.

Sequences. Professional. Some older accounts seem to have kept limited access on Starter, so go check your own portal before you take my word for it.

Custom reports. Professional. Starter doesn’t have a report builder at all.

Website tools. Free, except your pages carry HubSpot branding. Content Hub Starter’s main job is taking that branding off. And look, charging fifteen bucks a seat to remove your own logo from my website is a little much, HubSpot. The features people actually want, like A/B testing and SEO recommendations, are up at Professional.

Now here’s what is not behind the paywall. The CRM itself, your contacts and companies and deals, your forms, live chat, meeting links, and the API.

That last one is the important one, so let me say what it is. The API is a way for other software to read and write your CRM data directly, without a person clicking anything. It’s free on every tier, including the free one. So what HubSpot sells you is the software for working with your data. Getting at the data itself doesn’t cost anything.

Everything below uses that free access to do something you would otherwise be paying for.

One more thing that matters later. Once you’re on any paid tier, view-only seats are free and there’s no limit on them. So the day you do upgrade, only the people who actually edit records need a paid seat. Almost nobody knows that.

Automations

This is the one that had my prospect looking at $18,000, and it’s the most common reason an early company upgrades. You want a lead to route somewhere, or a field to fill itself in, or a follow-up to go out on its own.

I use Gumloop for basically every automation I build now, mine and my clients’. Runs about $40 a month. It’s a canvas with boxes and arrows on it, so if you’ve ever used Zapier you’ll be fine in about ten minutes. I’ve written up why I went with it over Zapier, but the part that matters here is that it talks to HubSpot through that free API, and it costs about 2% of what the workflow upgrade costs.

The other one I use is Val.town, and it’s for a different kind of job. Sometimes the thing you need isn’t really a workflow, it’s a small script that runs on a schedule. Check something every night, text me if it looks wrong. A drag-and-drop builder makes you click through a lot of boxes to say something you could write out in a few lines. Val.town is where you write those lines, and there’s nothing to set up. It runs $25 a month.

If you’re not technical, send those two paragraphs to whoever is. You don’t need a developer on staff for either one.

Two things I’d tell you either way. Anything running outside the CRM can break without telling you, so whatever you build has to alert you when it fails. Mine text me. And if it writes to the CRM, one person needs to own it.

n8n is the third option worth knowing about. Same idea as Gumloop, except you run it on your own server, so what limits you is your hardware instead of a monthly credit balance.

Email

Marketing Hub Professional is $800 a month, and at this stage it’s almost always bought to send a newsletter and a few nurture emails.

That’s an email tool’s job, and email tools are cheap and there are about forty of them. What’s changed lately is that the free tiers have moved a lot, mostly down, so whatever somebody told you two years ago is probably wrong now.

On price alone Kit is the most you get for nothing on that list, at ten thousand subscribers. I haven’t used it myself. Two warnings on the others. MailerLite used to be the answer everybody gave and its free tier has been cut twice, down to 250 people in June. And Mailchimp’s free tier is 500 sends a month, which isn’t enough to run anything on.

Past that, it really doesn’t matter much which one you pick. They all send a newsletter, they all do autoresponders, they all handle a signup form. Pick one that solves your email problem and move on.

The pushback I get is always the same, which is that the email data won’t be in the CRM. Most of these push contacts and activity back into HubSpot on their own or through the free API. And what you actually need in the CRM is whether somebody opened, clicked, or unsubscribed, which is a few fields and a nightly job, not some big migration.

Sequences

This is the one I’ll get argued with about, so let me be specific about what I mean.

A sequence tool does two things. It sends a series of emails on a schedule with a name swapped in, and it stops when somebody replies. The stopping part is useful. The sending part is a template, and templates are why every prospecting email in your inbox reads the same.

What I do instead is keep the research and the writing in an AI workspace that knows the company, the person, and what we actually sell. I use Claude’s Cowork for it. It reads the account, drafts something for that specific person, I edit it, it goes out. The difference isn’t speed, because templates are already fast. It’s that the email is about the person instead of about a segment they got dropped into.

The limit here is real. This works when you’re sending dozens a week and the person writing is the person selling. It stops working the second you’ve got reps to manage, because then somebody needs to see which step in the sequence is converting, and that reporting is the actual thing you’re buying. So if you’re doing your own outbound, this is better. Once you’ve got a sales team, go buy the tool.

Your website

This is the easiest one on the list, and you’re looking at the proof of it.

revductive.com has no CMS. No page builder, no theme, no drag-and-drop editor. It’s built with Astro, which is a free tool that turns your site into plain files instead of something that runs on a server. That makes it fast, and hosting it on Cloudflare Pages costs nothing. Not cheap. NOTHING.

I’m not a front-end developer and I didn’t become one to do this. I described what I wanted, went back and forth on the design with AI for a while, and had it build the thing, same as I’d hand it any other job. The time went into deciding what the pages should say, which a CMS was never going to do for me anyway.

The usual objection is that a marketer can’t update the site without a developer. I used to say that too and I don’t think it holds up anymore. The blog posts are markdown files sitting in GitHub. You can edit one in the browser, and if that’s still too technical, you can give somebody their own Claude account pointed at the repo and they can describe the change in plain English.

Where it does still hold up is new page layouts, or anybody who needs to see the page before it goes out. That’s the honest reason to buy a CMS. Wanting to fix a headline isn’t.

Two other things a CMS usually comes with that you can get for free:

• The cookie banner. HubSpot’s tracking script is also a cookie banner, on the free tier. I’ve never paid for a separate one.
• Analytics. Google Analytics is free and HubSpot’s own tracking is free. Between the two you know who showed up, what they read, and which contact it turned into.

Forms and popups

This one’s a specific trick, and it removes one of the most common reasons people upgrade.

HubSpot’s forms are already free. What isn’t free is the popup and CTA builder, and free-tier embedded forms carry “Powered by HubSpot” branding you can’t remove. So people go pay for a tier to get a nicer looking box.

You can skip the embed. Build your own form and send it straight to HubSpot’s submission address, and the contact lands in the CRM exactly like it would have.

If you’re not the person building the site, here’s what to ask for. Don’t embed the HubSpot form, post to their endpoint instead. Whoever builds your site will know what that means. For them, it’s this:

https://api.hsforms.com/submissions/v3/integration/submit/{portalId}/{formGuid}

Pass the visitor’s hubspotutk cookie along as context.hutk and the submission still gets tied to their browsing history instead of coming in anonymous. Two things that will trip you up. You lose HubSpot’s spam filtering, so add a hidden field that bots fill in and people don’t. And HubSpot will reject the whole submission if you send it a field the form doesn’t have, so only send what’s actually there.

That’s what the newsletter box on this site is. Our markup, our styling, no branding on it, and no HubSpot script loading on any page that has it.

Reporting

I covered this last post. Point an AI at the CRM, describe the report you want in plain English, put it on a schedule. This is the easiest one on the list to cancel, because what replaces it is better and cheaper.

When to stop doing this

None of this means paying for software is dumb. I implement this stuff for a living. Every workaround up there stops working at some point, and knowing which one you’re about to hit is more useful than the workarounds are.

Somebody needs to see the thing before it ships. A marketer who wants to lay out a new page and preview it, or an ops person who needs to build a workflow and watch it run, is asking for the interface, not the data. That’s when you buy it.

Somebody needs to know who changed what. Approvals, permissions, a paper trail. Once a discount needs a sign-off, that’s software, not discipline.

You’ve got reps to manage. Covered that above. Go buy the sequence tool.

You’ve got a thing that isn’t a contact, company, deal or ticket. If your business runs on thousands of some other kind of record with its own lifecycle, you need the real thing for it. A spreadsheet and a shared column is fine for pulling a report. It’s not fine as the place your data lives.

Keeping it all connected costs more than the license. This is the one people in my direction get wrong. Six cheap tools each need a connection, a sync, and somebody to notice when one of them breaks. Count that time, and count it at what your time is actually worth. At seed stage that time is usually yours, and your hours are the most expensive ones in the building even though they never show up on an invoice.

What it adds up to

Say you’re seed stage. Two people selling, one doing marketing, a list of about 1,200, and a site that changes a couple times a month.

Buy it from HubSpot and the shortest path to workflows, sequences, reports and an editable site is Marketing Pro at $800, two Sales Pro seats at $180, and Content Pro at $450. So $1,430 a month, plus $4,500 in onboarding. About $21,600 in year one.

Build it the other way and you’re at three Starter seats for around $45 total, Kit at $0 for a list that size, Gumloop at $40, Val.town at $25, the site at $0, and reporting out of an AI subscription you’re already paying for. Under $150 a month.

That’s real, but it isn’t free. Somebody has to build the Gumloop flows, keep the scripts running, notice when something breaks, and update the site. At your size that somebody is you, and your time is worth something even though it never shows up on a bill.

So I’m not going to tell you this saves you twenty grand. What it does right now is buy you convenience you can still cover yourself. The day you can’t cover it, go buy it. What I’d push back on is buying it by accident, one upgrade prompt at a time, because somebody needed a report.

Sources

These are list prices on annual billing, gathered August 2026 from public pricing pages. Vendors change them constantly and a few of these changed while I was writing. Check before you budget.

1. HubSpot Product & Services Catalog
2. HubSpot Sales Hub pricing
3. HubSpot Marketing Hub pricing
4. HubSpot Content Hub pricing
5. HubSpot free tools
6. HubSpot: manage seats and billing
7. HubSpot Forms API
8. Gumloop pricing
9. Val.town pricing
10. Kit pricing
11. Loops pricing
12. Brevo pricing
13. Buttondown pricing
14. MailerLite free plan update
15. Mailchimp pricing
16. Astro

My own prices are on the pricing page.