Sign up for free and get started straight away! Sounds great, right? That’s how companies like HubSpot appeal to new customers – but before you sign up, read this article about HubSpot’s pricing in 2024.
By planning out a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution you can save a lot of money as your business grows. Likewise, if you don’t plan for the features you will need, you can easily end up investing a lot more in HubSpot and similar services than you originally anticipated.
What is HubSpot?
If you’re reading this then you probably already know that HubSpot is a CRM platform – founded in 2006, originally as a marketing hub, which allows you to combine many tools for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service to manage various aspects of customer interactions.
All the tools are divided among different Hubs, which include the HubSpot Marketing Hub (Microsoft’s nearest comparison is Dynamics 365 Customer Insight Journeys), the Sales Hub (comparable with Dynamics 365 Sales), the Customer Service Hub (comparable with Dynamics 365 Customer Service) and the CMS or Content Management Solution Hub (which can be compared with Microsoft Power Pages).
HubSpot also has the Operations Hub and the Commerce Hub, providing commerce tools for mid-sized business to business companies built around quotes, invoices and payments.
Is HubSpot free?
HubSpot advertises that users can benefit from a range of free tools that will always be free. You can go to the HubSpot website, sign up to a free account and within minutes you will already have access to the Free tier of all their Hubs, such as the Marketing Hub, the Sales Hub etc.
But… there’s been a very recent change which we’ll go into further in this article. Skip to that bit now if you like. Prior to March 2024, every Hub had a free tier and the secret to understanding HubSpot pricing plans was to understand where free stopped and premium began, and at what point your business would outgrow the free offerings.
Understanding the limitations of HubSpot’s free seats:
Branding
Firstly, if your business is seeking a professional, consistent, branded look and feel across all of its customer touchpoints, it is worth noting that with the free tier everything will have HubSpot’s branding on it.
Technical support
With any robust CRM solution, technical support is an absolute must to ensure you are getting the most from the product. Understandably, with the free tiers of HubSpot, there is no technical support included.
Required fields and custom fields
When it comes to capturing accurate, clean, non-duplicated data (basically the foundations from which a CRM solution is built), there’s another snag with HubSpot’s free offerings. The Free tiers do not allow you to add required fields that must be filled in before the user can submit a form. With Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can set it so a user must fill in a field. With HubSpot’s Free tier, you also only get a maximum of 10 custom fields in total, so the customisation options are extremely limited. This does improve when you pay for the Starter tier because you will get access to 1,000 custom fields and you can have required fields too.
Automation
Automation has been a huge part of marketing and establishing business processes that work for many years, but HubSpot’s Free tiers do not include automation. Even when you pay and upgrade from Free to their ‘Starter’ option, the automation is very limited.
Reports
If you would like to build a business dashboard, stakeholder reports or other analytical reports, you do not have the option to create custom reports in the Free or the Starter versions of HubSpot.
Shared Inbox
If you are considering multiple CRM solutions for your organisation and multiple HubSpot Hubs, bear in mind that you will only get one shared inbox for all of these with the free version, and even the paid Starter version.
HubSpot Pricing 2024: How much is HubSpot?
Changes to HubSpot pricing plans, March 2024
Please note that on March 5, 2024, HubSpot began rolling out an updated, seat-based pricing model to all hub products and editions. This applies to new customers purchasing Starter, Professional, or Enterprise subscriptions, with “no short-term change for existing customers”. See more about that here.
The main difference with the new pricing model is that free seats are being scaled back considerably. Under the new HubSpot pricing plans, only five free users will be possible on the Free tier. Free users were also previously able to have edit access on paid tiers too, but now they will need to upgrade to a billable Core Seat. HubSpot previously marketed the platform with “unlimited users” for the free tier, but now users are being asked to upgrade.
HubSpot Pricing prior to March 2024
Prior to March 2024, HubSpot advertised that certain features were free for all users, and “available to everyone on your team”. For example, free users of Sales Hub Professional could access a range of features such as contact management, documents, the shared inbox, prospects, all free tools, deal pipelines etc. The functionality was more limited than the paid seats, but free users could edit content.
HubSpot Pricing with Core Seats and View-Only Seats
As of March 5, 2024, the Free edition has been limited to five free users. HubSpot has introduced Core Seats, which among other things give users “edit access to purchased Hubs”. There are also View-Only Seats, which are free and unlimited for paid portals, and don’t allow users to edit things.
For example, the Starter tier has just one seat type, the Core Seat, meaning no free seats with edit access on this tier after March 5.
What does HubSpot’s new seats-based pricing model mean for free users?
Up until this point, there may have been a few staff who used some of the tools like deal pipelines, but have not used the software enough to warrant a paid seat, so they’ve been on free seats. But with the change to HubSpot pricing plans, if they have to update pipelines, they will now need to purchase a Core Seat to get edit access.
To edit records, you will now need to purchase a Core Seat where users can access most of the core CRM functionality. If you have people in your team who just want to see what’s going on, they can now get a free View Only seat.
How to calculate HubSpot costs
Just to provide some examples of HubSpot pricing, let’s look at marketing, sales and support.
HubSpot Marketing Hub pricing
If we look at HubSpot marketing pricing, you’ll likely be looking at starting with HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional, as the tiers below that have too many limitations to compete with other tools and they only come with one inbox. Professional includes 2,000 marketing contacts, which isn’t a lot.
HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional is £702 per month, including three seats, with an onboarding fee of £2,600.
You do get forms and unlimited email automations with the Professional tier of HubSpot Marketing. If you need more capabilities, such as up to 10,000 contacts and field-level permissions (standard in a Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment), you can pay a £6,090 onboarding fee and get Enterprise for £3,000 a month.
HubSpot Sales Hub pricing
With HubSpot Sales Hub, your product library is limited to 100 products with the free tier and one deal pipeline. You also won’t get forms, quotes or forecasting. To get quotes and forms (limited to 10 actions) you would need to upgrade to Starter. If you need sales automation workflows (the sort of things you would do with Microsoft Power Automate), you would need to consider the Professional tier, and pay an onboarding fee of £1,310 as well as £77/mo/seat (HubSpot Sales Hub pricing used to include five users for £396, so now it’s more flexible, but if you have people on your team who need to edit any of the pipelines, they will need either the Sales Hub Professional seat or a Core Seat for £40/mo/seat). For more advanced sales forecasting, custom objects, and a sandbox feature, it would be the Enterprise tier you’d need to go for, with a £3,050 onboarding fee and £135/mo for one sales seat.
HubSpot support costs
When you have a look at HubSpot’s recommended services, you can see that ‘Inbound Consulting’ costs £440 per month, or you can upgrade that to get five hours of consulting per month at £1,530 per month. If you want access to a technical consultant for five hours per month, that’s £1,570.
HubSpot costs vs Microsoft Dynamics 365 – an example with Strategy 365
With a straightforward implementation of Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise, you would be looking at £4,495 for our most popular package (Quick Start 365), then licences for 15 users (£78.10 x 15 = £1,171.50), plus you might add our entry-level support package for two days of support over 12 months (15 hours), which would be £2,100.
So, with Strategy 365, the cost in the first year would be £7,766.50, and subsequent years would be £3,271.50.
With HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise, you would be looking at the Enterprise Onboarding fee of £3,050 to implement HubSpot Sales Hub, but that option doesn’t include full customisation like Strategy 365’s offering does. Then licences for each user as £135, so for 15 users, that’s £2,025.00 per month. You will definitely need a support package with HubSpot, so the nearest option to Strategy 365’s entry-level two-day package would be HubSpot’s “Technical Consulting: Premium” package, which gives 16 hours of a consultant’s time, and costs £3,920.
The cost in the first year would be £8,995, and then for subsequent years it would be £5,945.
HubSpot has a lot of limitations compared to a Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution, so that’s another consideration. Overall, you can save £1228.50 on the first year and £2,673.50 for each subsequent year. So, over 5 years (prices are subject to change, but just to give an example), the HubSpot solution would have cost £38,720 and the Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution would have cost £24,124 – a saving of over £14k!
Conclusion
If your business is still quite small and you’ve got to that point where you need a CRM solution at a very basic level, HubSpot’s free tools can really help you get your head around what a CRM system can do for your company. However, as your business grows, you’ll soon discover that you will need to start paying for more and more capabilities, and this is where costs can really start to spiral with HubSpot’s paid tiers. If your business is already established, chances are you may have outgrown many of the smaller tiers already and you would be looking at the Enterprise-level solutions.
There’s always the chance that you may end up paying a premium-level price when you need one extra feature, because you would need to upgrade to the next tier to get it. By planning out what features you are likely to need, you can get a more realistic idea of the cost of your CRM solution.
As official Microsoft Partners, our team can advise you on exactly what you need to get up and running with a CRM solution, and thanks to our Quick Start packages, we can often achieve this in just five working days, not months!
Contact our team today on 01782 916 920.
