hubspot.comcontributed by Samuele Ongaro
The value is the network, the data or the infrastructure. Keep paying.
A customer platform rather than a CRM: contacts shared across marketing, sales and support, with forms, email, automation and reporting built on the same record.
Do not build this if three departments genuinely share the record. That sharing is the product. Marketing, sales and support working from one contact — the form somebody filled in, the deal that followed, the ticket they opened — is an organisational fact with software attached. Rebuilding it means rebuilding four products and then getting three teams to agree, and the second half is the hard one. WHEN TO KEEP PAYING - Three departments actually using it. If they are, the shared record is worth the price - Reporting that spans the funnel and is trusted by all of them FIRST, CHECK WHAT YOU ARE ON - The free tier is genuinely capable, and a great many companies pay for a suite while using one part of it - Look at what your team opened last month. If it is contacts and deals, you are paying a platform price for a CRM, and a CRM is a fortnight WHEN TO BUILD - One team, one process. Then the shape is under Pipedrive and Twenty elsewhere in this catalogue THE TWO THINGS TO TAKE WHATEVER YOU DECIDE **One contact record, shared.** The person who filled in the form, bought the thing and opened the ticket is one row. That single schema decision is the whole idea, and it costs nothing to get right at the start and a migration to fix later **Stage history as an append-only table.** Every stage change with its timestamp. Conversion rates, time in stage and every honest sales number are computed from it, and it cannot be reconstructed after the fact AND THE ONE THAT KEEPS IT TRUE Read-only mailbox and calendar sync, recording one activity per message and meeting — the address, direction, subject, timestamp and a short snippet, never the body. Nobody maintains a CRM by hand for long, and a CRM that is six weeks out of date is a spreadsheet with worse ergonomics. BEFORE YOU MIGRATE ANYTHING Export everything first and check what actually comes out: contacts, deals, activities, email history, form submissions. Some of it will not, and knowing which is the difference between a plan and a surprise. THE ONE-LINE VERSION Check which tier you need before deciding it is expensive. If you build, share one record and record every stage change.
What you lose
- One record shared by marketing, sales and support, which is the entire product
- Marketing automation with forms, landing pages and lifecycle stages already wired to the CRM
- An integration ecosystem that most other tools support before they support anything else
- Reporting across the whole funnel, from ad click to renewal
- Compliance, deduplication and data hygiene at a scale where those are full-time jobs
If you would rather not build
- EspoCRM — open-source, includes marketing modules
- Zoho CRM — paid, cheapest broad alternative
What it costs
read from their page 15 Aug 2026
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed yearly | Last read |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | $20/mo | — | 15 Aug 2026 |
Their pricing page is where these came from. Seeing a different price? Tell us.
The escape hatch
open source · no votes, no paid placement
Twenty
$0Open-source CRM with pipelines, custom objects and a modern interface.
twentyhq/twentyfree · open source
Mautic
$0Marketing automation with campaigns, segments and lead scoring.
mautic/mauticfree · open source
Why this verdict
our own opinion · changed only by a person
19/100
Verdict no at 19: owning the contact record is right, and this prompt builds it well. But HubSpot is bought because three departments share one screen, and assembling that from separate tools means somebody maintaining the seams forever.
History
tracked since 9 Aug 2026 · nothing is ever overwritten
Questions about HubSpot
answered from the record above
Is HubSpot free?
No — the plan we track is $20 a month. Starter Customer Platform from about $20 per seat per month billed annually; marketing contacts and higher tiers escalate quickly.
Can you replace HubSpot by building your own?
KEEP IT. The value is the network, the data or the infrastructure. Keep paying. Replacement score 19 out of 100, build time longer than it saves. Read what you lose before you decide.
How much does HubSpot cost?
$20 a month on Starter — $240 a year. Recorded 9 Aug 2026.
What do you lose by replacing HubSpot?
One record shared by marketing, sales and support, which is the entire product; Marketing automation with forms, landing pages and lifecycle stages already wired to the CRM; An integration ecosystem that most other tools support before they support anything else; Reporting across the whole funnel, from ad click to renewal; Compliance, deduplication and data hygiene at a scale where those are full-time jobs. If any of those carry weight for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to HubSpot?
Yes: Twenty, Mautic. The prompt on this page is for when you want it your way instead.
Related entries
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