The real cost of HubSpot: a small business reality check

The real cost of HubSpot hits hard

On the face of it, HubSpot’s starter plan sounds great. But most small businesses quickly outgrow it, and are upgraded to a professional plan (usually Marketing Hub Professional), with a massive sudden price hike (like the 6900% increase this business owner complained about on Reddit—eeek!). HubSpot’s marketing promises make it sound ideal: all-in-one platform, seamless integrations, professional automation. But before you hand over that credit card for what could become your biggest monthly software expense, let me share what I’ve learned working with small service-based businesses.

To get the functionality that makes HubSpot fly—mainly automations—most small businesses will quickly outgrow the free or starter plan tiers and need the Marketing Hub Professional plan at A$1,151/US$800 per month. That’s nearly A$14,000/US$9600 per year. Over three years, you’re looking at approximately A$41,400/US$28,800 just for your marketing platform running costs. And that’s the entry level cost for this tier without any extra add-ons or credit bundles you may need.

I have one client who has been upgraded to the Enterprise tier, which comes with a A$5200/US$3600 per month fee, and still needs extra paid add-ons to do what they need. Most small businesses can negotiate a discount from HubSpot, but it’s still a seriously hefty chunk of your marketing budget before you’ve even started building a marketing strategy, managing your marketing systems, creating marketing content, and measuring the impact of your marketing efforts.

Sidenote on setup fees and ongoing costs

Of course, these aren’t the only costs most small businesses are looking at for their marketing software. Add to this the HubSpot setup fees that start at A$4320/US$3000, which is roughly the same as the setup costs regardless of the system/s you’re setting up. And add on the help you will need from digital consultants to keep it all running smoothly.

Both the setup fees and consulting help are costs you’ll want to budget for, regardless of the platform you choose to use. As these costs are similar regardless of the approach you use, they won’t be considered a factor in this comparison. These are worth mentioning, though, as they are costs that you have less/more budget for depending on the budget available after spending on software, and that setup and ongoing help is often the key to the strategic success of your marketing systems.

The math that changes everything

I’m pretty sure I pull out my calculator to do this exact calculation a few times every year. The numbers are always starker than I remember (hence, I decided to write this down!).

The same functionality that most small service-based businesses need out of HubSpot can be achieved for around A$200/US$130 per month by leveraging their website (an essential business asset that every business has/needs), a cost-effective email marketing tool with decent automations, and a simple customer relationship management tool. That’s a three-year saving of approximately A$34,200.

Even if we get lavish and add on more bells and whistles to up this to A$300/US$200 per month, you’re still looking at a 3-year saving of over A$30k/US$20k! Imagine the benefits of pouring that back into your marketing budget, or into another business activity that really needs some investment?

A real client story: from HubSpot frustration to streamlined success

A Melbourne-based corporate training business came to me struggling with HubSpot. This was initially a secondary concern, as they’d been referred to me because they needed help building their new website. But HubSpot quickly became the core focus as it was creating major roadblocks in almost all of our strategic decisions around how best to achieve their business goals. What we discovered changed their entire approach.

When HubSpot becomes a roadblock

Limited form functionality:

HubSpot forms were too restrictive for their needs. They were losing leads due to cumbersome forms and needed to implement conditional logic to make forms less overwhelming for their website visitors—showing users only relevant fields based on their responses. I immediately saw that Gravity Forms, a WordPress plugin, would offer far more flexibility for their needs, with the added bonus that I could include it for all of my clients in my monthly WordPress Care Plan, so it’d essentially be free for them.

Clunky event management:

My client had been using Eventbrite to book attendees for their professional training workshops, which meant double data entry and pulling users away from their website at checkout. Eventbrite is offered as a HubSpot integration, so a lot of businesses use it just because it’s there, and they don’t know what other tools might do the same job. Since my client’s professional audience found them through networks rather than generic event sites, Eventbrite added no value. Gravity Forms could handle payments directly, keeping users in their ecosystem, and event signups and attendances could still be recorded against their users without needing an extra tool for this at all.

Meeting scheduler lacks functionality:

HubSpot’s meetings tool is basic at best. While it handles simple scheduling, it lacks the sophisticated features that service-based businesses actually need: buffer times between appointments, complex availability rules, different meeting types with varying durations, and seamless integration with existing calendars.

Complex workflow setup:

The client found HubSpot workflows too complicated to set up effectively without constant external help (that they didn’t have budget for because their software costs were eating up all their marketing funds). The workflows look easy enough, but I know from years of experience helping HubSpot clients with their workflows that when your employees aren’t in the system all the time, they forget how to set things up, and you run into regular problems like email sequences not sending or the wrong info being sent to training participants. These are easy mistakes to make, but it should be easier not to make mistakes with this stuff.

Confusing user interface:

Part of the issue with HubSpot’s ease-of-use challenges is the poor user interface — the design (which was updated in 2024 and again in April 2025) can make it hard to find what you need. Because there are so many tools available for integration into a workflow (most of which B2B service providers don’t actually use), it can be harder than it needs to be to quickly get something done. I’ve even come across one team (in a different business) who created an integration with Excel so their team can just keep using Excel and have the data update from there to HubSpot—if this doesn’t scream that they’re not getting what they’re paying for then I don’t know what does.

To be fair to HubSpot, they have made incremental design improvements over the decade or so that I’ve been using their software; it’s just hard to simplify a complex system. Also, for the Salesforce users out there, the HubSpot UI is lightyears ahead! This is a problem inherent to all the big platforms—so many tools in one create complexity and push interface updates further down a never-ending list of higher-priority technical updates in their job queue.

HubSpot tools the business was paying for, but not using:

• Quote and proposal tools — the quote tools couldn’t be formatted the way they wanted, so they used some drag-and-drop templates created in Canva for this instead.
• Sales sequences — overkill for their high-price, low-volume services. We were able to set up some simple automations in Notion to help give them some extra functionality without breaking the bank.
• Automated lead scoring. This is actually a cool HubSpot feature if you have it set up properly to ‘read’ your lead interactions and score users for sales conversion potential. Given my client’s inbound marketing focus for lead generation and lack of appetite for cold calling or other sales outreach strategies, enabling this feature was considered a low business priority that may never be used.
• Advanced reporting features — setup too complex, so they never got started with it, and were unlikely to ever get there. Their reporting needs were actually quite basic and could be achieved in a simpler way.
• Deal pipeline automation — their leads didn’t want this level of automation as it was losing the personal touch they needed once the deal status had moved beyond the automation available in their email sequences (i.e., once a client had moved beyond email, human interaction was required). As they didn’t have a big team, the enterprise benefits of deal pipeline automation were overkill for them.
• SEO features — they hadn’t even looked at these, as they knew their SEO wasn’t firing on all cylinders and needed some love on the strategy side first. From my experience with HubSpot tools as well as a range of other SEO-specific software, pro SEO tools built into your website do a much better job of this, so I knew that even if we got this going in HubSpot, these tools wouldn’t be as comprehensive as we wanted them to be.
• Content strategy tools — these tools would have been useful, but the add-on to their plan for these was too expensive to justify. They decided they were better off having quarterly content strategy sessions and bringing in an expert to advise as needed. This approach kept their content authoritative while achieving their search goals, without becoming generic—a risk associated with some of the built-in tools.
• Customer service features: they had access to chatflows available as part of their plan, but hadn’t set it up. They agreed that this might be useful in the future, but that their business model wasn’t designed for high-volume inquiries that would make the time and financial investment in setting up a decent knowledge base for a chatflow hard to justify. Unless they were massively changing their business trajectory, this seemed like a tool that could wait until the business could justify the investment.

Industry research consistently shows that the most effective marketing technology isn’t necessarily the most expensive—it’s the technology that teams actually use effectively to achieve the business goals.

The HubSpot alternatives that transformed this small business

Advanced forms:

I set up Gravity Forms to replace all of the clunky HubSpot forms on the client’s website. This allowed them to have visibly shorter forms, to make them easier to fill in, while also getting all of the detailed info they needed on a case-by-case basis. Using Gravity Forms also gave me a lot more flexibility to design their forms in a way that better suited their brand than the limited HubSpot design options.

A free CRM and project management tool rolled into one:

We integrated everything with Notion as both a CRM and a project management tool. I set up a few connected databases for client records, project info, and task management. The cool thing about using Notion for this is that you can build almost anything you want and can create relationships between them, so all of the data is connected/filterable/reportable where it needs to be. We integrated the Notion API with Gravity Forms so clients were automatically added to Notion with tags and status updates triggered by form submissions.

Intuitive automations:

I moved my client to Kit, an email marketing tool with powerful automations included in their cheaper plans. The Kit interface is less cluttered, and the automation setup was intuitive for a small team. They had no issues quickly creating workflows for newsletter subscribers, training/workshop events, and, for interested leads, sales and onboarding for their productised service—a remote mentoring subscription.

We also added Make, automation connection software, with a free plan that covered all of their needs to update sales and attendance info in the Notion database whenever a user made a purchase or attended an online event. It was a really simple and affordable way to keep CRM data in Notion as a reliable single source of truth.

We’ve discussed maybe leveraging the Kit API to register behavioural data in Notion, things like how many emails a client has opened, how many links clicked, just how much they are engaging with content to help create some custom engagement analytics that can be tracked in Notion. This would be a big win for one thing that HubSpot does really well, but it still isn’t a business priority, so is on the back burner. The bonus in not building this in now is that they aren’t paying for this functionality until they need to use it.

Simpler email marketing:

Kit is super easy to use and very intuitive to get started. Like other email platforms, you can create templates and add your branding. Dynamic personalization (the ability to speak to individual clients by name within a mass email send)

Appointment booking made simple:

The client wasn’t using HubSpot’s appointment booking functionality anyway, so we kept them on Calendly, which they were already familiar with and suited their needs perfectly. This reinforced that they were paying for features they didn’t even use.

The Results:

For a similar upfront investment, we built my client a solution that integrates seamlessly with their website (their biggest digital asset), is infinitely more customizable, powerful, and cost-effective long-term. Plus, they’re not locked into HubSpot’s ecosystem or its ongoing premium pricing structure, saving them tens of thousands of dollars and delivering genuine ROI.

• Flexibility: They could change individual components without overhauling everything
• Cost Savings: Thousands of dollars monthly returned to core business activities
• Enhanced Functionality: Access to specialized tools more powerful than HubSpot’s generic offerings
• Reduced Stress: Day-to-day operations became more relaxed and manageable

Why multiple specialized tools can be a win for expertise businesses

I know, this is a controversial statement. Most software advisers will tell you to use all-in-one tools for the simplicity. I get that, but the truth is, the simplicity isn’t there; those tools are actually quite complex and much more expensive. Better separate tools, with low ongoing costs and occasional tech help when you need it is a far more sustainable approach for cost-conscious small businesses who crave genuine simplicity.

Superior customization

When your authority is everything, your brand value matters. HubSpot branding is incredibly limited both for its low-functionality forms, its email builder, and across its CMS and website features (which I haven’t even touched on here, but that’s really a whole other thing you just don’t want to go near!).

Cost-effective marketing automation

Simple email marketing tools like Kit offer workflow automations as standard (albeit email-focused, but that’s what most small businesses want) for very affordable monthly rates. You get the same functionality without the enterprise-level price tag.

Scalable CRM solutions

The sales functionality of the HubSpot CRM is ideal for high-sales-volume businesses that require extensive automation and have separate large sales and marketing teams. But that’s not a business like mine (Studio Clvr), or any of the small, specialised expertise businesses that I work with.

In my experience, the sort of project-based work done by most small, expertise businesses needs a more personal, high-touch sales pipeline anyway, and a low-touch, highly automated sales system is generally overkill in a way that turns those high-touch clients off. Everyone who knows me knows that automations are my jam, but not when they dehumanise what a client expects to be a personal interaction.

A simple (but surprisingly powerful) tool like Notion can serve as a free/low cost Pro plan CRM, or you could choose low-cost alternatives like Fern (for a great ethical choice with loads of customer experience expertise baked in for a low monthly fee) or Monday (a better-known option). You’re still saving substantial money every month while getting a robust mix of tools designed for your actual needs.

The real-world advantage:

My Melbourne client’s experience perfectly illustrates the advantages of a multi-tool approach. This is the pattern I see repeatedly: businesses paying premium prices for CRM features they don’t use, while the specialized tools they actually prefer cost a fraction of the price.

Their setup—WordPress + Gravity Forms + Kit + Notion—offers incredible flexibility. Any component can easily be swapped out if a better technology emerges. This enables the business to remain agile and resilient, taking advantage of new technologies without reinventing the entire system.

Strategy should drive software choices, not the other way around

Here’s what I’ve learned: strategy should always be more important than software. By choosing tools that excel in their specific domains and connecting them thoughtfully, you create a more powerful, cost-effective, and adaptable business system. When your business grows or your needs change, you don’t want to be locked into a monolithic system that may not meet your needs.

The beauty of a modular approach is adaptability. When you use multiple specialized tools, changing any single component doesn’t disrupt your entire system. This is particularly crucial for small businesses that don’t have dedicated IT staff or time for extensive team training.

Small businesses need to stay nimble. They need systems that grow with them, not platforms that force them into predetermined workflows that may not match their unique processes.

Task-specific tools are inherently more intuitive. Your team can accomplish their jobs more effectively because each tool is designed to excel at one thing, rather than being mediocre at everything.

When you’re not locked into one platform, you can:

• Upgrade individual components as you grow
• Switch tools without losing your entire system
• Choose best-in-class solutions for each function, specific to what your business needs
• Maintain budget flexibility
• Invest the budget you’ve saved on software in more impactful marketing activities like a copywriter, designer, or strategic consultant. Or put it back into other business functions that may need the cash.

“Systems run the business and people run the systems.”

— Michael Gerber, author of The eMyth 

The key is choosing systems that empower your people rather than constraining them.

Making the smart choice

Here’s the thing. The perfect CRM does not exist. Believe me, I’ve tried a lot of them. And between all the colleagues in my network we’ve tried every CRM out there. Every six months or so, someone in my business networking group asks other experts which CRM is best for their business’s specific needs. No CRM is perfect for every use case. The reality? There is no single tool that can do everything you need it to do. HubSpot is one of the best all-in-one CRMs out there, but it’s expensive and overly cumbersome for most small service-based businesses.

Before investing in HubSpot, ask yourself:

• Do I need enterprise-level sales features?
• Can I achieve my goals more easily with more specialized, affordable tools?
• Will my team actually use all of HubSpot’s features?
• What could I do with the A$34,200/US$20,000 I’d save over three years?

HubSpot isn’t inherently bad—and if we were talking enterprise businesses with large teams, I’d be all for it. It’s just overkill for most small project-based businesses. Like buying a huge 4WD with a snorkel on the side when you actually need a city hatchback, you’ll pay for functionality you don’t need (seriously, are you ever gonna use that snorkel?) while missing the specific features you actually want (to be able to park it in a cramped city street!).

A curated selection of purpose-built tools offers more power, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness than an all-in-one behemoth for small businesses thinking strategically about their tech stack and the value of their business investments.

Your business deserves tools that work as hard as you do, and that don’t eat up your entire marketing budget.