You've probably noticed that HubSpot can quickly become expensive. Fortunately, there are many ways to make sure you're paying the right price for the value you get out of it. In this article, we've put together our top 12 tips for saving money on your HubSpot bill.
Benefit from a decade of experience. Enjoy your reading!
First of all, when it comes to buying HubSpot, it's important to know that the price listed on hubspot.com is negotiable and that in most cases the price on your invoice should not be the one shown in the pricing section of the HubSpot website. There are several levers you can use to lower the price when negotiating. We cover these levers in this article.
HubSpot's pricing can be so complex for the uninitiated, that some people pay (or overpay) for Hubs they don't necessarily need.
Before paying for HubSpot, ask yourself whether the free Hubs can meet your needs. Whether for Marketing, Sales, Service, Content or Operations, the free Hubs are complete and easy to use. They can get you off to a good start in setting up your processes and strategies, and familiarize you with the HubSpot ecosystem before you pay for a more advanced suite of tools.
Alternatively, you can use the free Hubs to prioritize functions that are relevant to where your business is in its growth, without remaining ill-equipped in other functions.
For example, let's say you're in the situation where your company is already generating a lot of leads, but your sales team is struggling to process them all efficiently. Then you may need to purchase a paid version of Sales hub to score leads for prioritization and automatic assignment, as well as to equip your sales people to process leads more quickly with email templates, sequences, documents and product libraries.
This doesn't mean you can't use the free Marketing Hub to continue generating leads as you already do, but that these leads automatically register in HubSpot and your sales reps can see the marketing engagements on their contact record (interaction with emails, ads and website content). In this way, you centralize your teams' operations in a single platform, reducing the need for manual actions to relay leads from marketing to sales, and improving sales-marketing alignment within your organization.
In the same vein, if you have a lot of existing customers to manage, a paid version of Service Hub would certainly be useful, and your sales and marketing teams could work with the free or less expensive (e.g. Starter) tools of their own Hubs.
In short, the point is that you don't have to use all 5 Hubs in Pro or Enterprise versions, and you can equip all your teams with a common tool that facilitates communication and collaboration between departments, while calibrating your software investments according to your priorities and objectives. Ask yourself the following questions:
Depending on where your company is in its evolution, the answers to the above questions will vary, and you may not need a paid version of all Hubs. This is an interesting cost-saving opportunity, since a Hub paid for unnecessarily can represent up to several thousand dollars a year.
It's important to note that not all HubSpot users need a Sales or Service seat. In fact, a user can access CRM with a free seat if they don't need edit access, and a core seat will suffice if they don't require the paid automation and advanced features such as sequences, email templates, round-robin assignment, or the document library.
Therefore, you can have 5 paying Sales Hub or Service Hub users on your team and 10, 20, or 30 users accessing HubSpot every day without paying or by paying less with a core seat.
Knowing who needs to do what to determine which type of seat they require is key to saving a lot of money. The wrong approach here is to grant the same seat type to all users just to avoid delving into the details of what each seat does.
As with any growing public company, HubSpot's sales team has monthly, quarterly and annual targets to meet. So, if you want to have a better chance of success when negotiating, it's always best to discuss pricing with HubSpot representatives at the end of a month, quarter or year. If the objectives aren't met, they won't want to lose you, and you'll probably be in for a nice surprise.
The more Hubs you buy at once, the more likely you are to get an attractive percentage discount on your invoice. So, if you expect to need a first Hub in the first quarter, a second Hub in the second quarter and a third Hub in the third quarter, it could be cheaper to buy them all in the first quarter than to buy them one at a time without a discount.
Of course, the advice of a certified HubSpot partner like Auxilio can help you put in place a phased implementation plan to choose the right Hubs for your needs.
You can pay HubSpot monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annually. The longer the period between payments, the more you save. If you have a cash flow that allows you to pay for the coming year, it's definitely worth it. It's one of the negotiating levers that gives the highest percentage discount on the final bill.
The basic contract for using HubSpot is one month for Starter Hubs and one year for Pro and Enterprise Hubs. However, if you want to save a lot of money, you can sign a contract for a longer period (2, 3, 4 years).
If you're about to implement a Pro or Enterprise solution, it's definitely worth it, since you don't change CRM platforms every year. Usually, a company invests so much in this kind of project that you keep the same tools for several years, so you might as well save!
The HubSpot for Startups program is the best way to save on HubSpot rates.
Indeed, if your company is a startup that meets the following criteria:
You can benefit from the following discounts:
| Year | Discount % |
| 1 | 75% |
| 2 | 50% |
| 3 and the following | 25% |
If your company has raised more than 2 million in financing, but you are at most in the Series A stage of your financing, you are eligible for the following discounts:
| Year | Discount % |
| 1 | 50% |
| 2 and the following | 25% |
You'd like to benefit from this discount, but your accelerator, incubator or venture capitalist isn't HubSpot for Startups Partner? No problem! The organization can apply to become one and then you'll be able to benefit from the discount.
See the complete list of HubSpot for Startups Partner here
It's important to keep your contact database clean in HubSpot CRM to reduce the costs associated with the number of contacts. In fact, Marketing Hub's pricing is based on the number of contacts in your database. If you don't regularly clean up your contacts, you run the risk of paying for inactive or obsolete contacts, which represents a significant cost. It's therefore essential to implement a strategy for cleaning up your contacts, by deleting those that are no longer relevant or don't meet your qualification criteria, merging duplicates or changing their status to "non-marketing contact". This will enable you to optimize your use of HubSpot CRM and reduce your costs.
Read our guide to cleaning up your HubSpot CRM
If you are a Marketing Hub customer, or are considering becoming one, correctly assessing your number of "marketing contacts" will have a significant impact on your HubSpot invoice.
There's no need for all your contacts to be "marketing contacts".
Just ask yourself:
Who are the contacts we want to send e-mails to or retarget on ads networks?
Think in terms of inclusion and exclusion criteria:
| Inclusion criteria | Exclusion criteria |
| Contact is a Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Opportunity or Customer | Contact is unsubscribed from our mailing lists |
| Contact is subscribed to one of our mailing lists | Contact has "Hard bounce" |
| Contact has visited our website in the last 30 days | etc. |
| etc. |
Then you can set up a workflow in HubSpot to automatically identify the status of contacts as "Marketing" or "Non-marketing" based on these criteria.
Working with a certified HubSpot partner like Auxilio can help you get a better ROI from your HubSpot adventure. Here are the 4 main reasons.
Compared to HubSpot representatives who only think about their commission and won't take the time to make a detailed analysis of your situation to recommend the right products, a HubSpot partner like Auxilio can help you make a complete diganostic of your situation before buying HubSpot and advise you on Hub versions (Free, Starter, Pro, Enterprise), the number of paid seats, the number of "marketing contacts" and the extensions you really need.
At Auxilio, this diagnosis is the first step in our work process:
The best part is that this step can be financed up to 90% by one of the many subsidy programs available in Quebec and Canada.
Hubs Pro and Enterprise are subject to an initial set-up fee, which can be credited if you work with a HubSpot partner. Rather than being coached in a generic way by HubSpot employees, you will be coached by expert consultants who will seek to understand the uniqueness of your context and business model.
In the course of your life, you'll buy a CRM once or twice at most. We've been buying and trading with HubSpot several times a month for over 10 years. Let us share our experience with you. We'll be happy to tell you what's a good deal, and what's not, so you can ask the HubSpot representative for a little more flexibility.
In the same vein, you'll only implement HubSpot once in your life. We've had the good fortune and pleasure of helping dozens of companies do just that for over a decade. Avoid the mistakes we've already made, and save time and money by taking advantage of our proven implementation process. It won't save you money directly on your bill, but it will help you achieve a positive ROI more quickly, and justify your budgets for optimizing HubSpot in subsequent phases.
Thank you for reading these 12 tips, based on our years of experience working with HubSpot. We hope they'll help you save on HubSpot costs. Don't hesitate to contact us if you'd like expert HubSpot advice on your HubSpot bill. We'll be happy to help you save.