How Does HubSpot Work? Objects, Pipelines and Cost
HubSpot is a database with tools bolted to it. Once you see it that way, the product stops being confusing and the pricing starts making sense. Records go in, the tools read them, and the expensive tiers are the ones allowed to act on them automatically. Here is the whole machine, in the order you would actually build it, with every price checked against HubSpot’s own pages this week.
HubSpot is a database, and everything else reads from it
Strip the branding off and HubSpot is one database. You put people, businesses and jobs into it as records. HubSpot links those records to each other and hangs a timeline off each one holding every email, call, meeting and note. Then the sales tools, the marketing tools and the service tools all read that same set of records.
That is the trick. One database, several front ends. It is why a marketing email can know which deal a person is attached to, and why a support ticket can show you what that customer paid.
Understanding this also explains the bill. The database itself is close to free. HubSpot’s pricing page lists the free tools at $0 a month for up to two users with no credit card. What HubSpot charges for is permission to act on the database automatically, and that permission arrives in one large step rather than a gentle slope.
Contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and the links between them
HubSpot calls the record types objects. Its deduplication documentation lists contacts, companies, deals, tickets, products, admin-activated objects such as appointments, and custom objects.
For a small local business you only ever touch four:
- Contacts. A person. Email address is the required field on import.
- Companies. A business. Matched on domain name.
- Deals. A job or sale with money attached, sitting at a stage in a pipeline.
- Tickets. A support request or a problem to fix.
Each record is a bag of properties, and records associate with each other. One company holds many contacts. One contact sits on several deals. Associations are what make the timeline useful, because a note left on a deal can surface next to the person it concerns.
Deduplication runs on those identifiers. HubSpot deduplicates contacts by email address and companies by domain name automatically. Record ID lets you deduplicate the rest by hand, including deals, tickets, products and custom objects, and you can include a Record ID column in an import file to do it in bulk.
Get the email addresses clean before you import anything. Every automation you build later, ours included, keys off that field.
How work actually moves through HubSpot
A deal pipeline is a row of stages that a job passes through. The default Sales Pipeline ships with seven stages, running from Appointment scheduled at 20 percent probability up to Closed won at 100 percent, with Closed lost at 0 percent.
Those probabilities are not decoration. HubSpot multiplies the total value in each stage by that stage’s probability to produce the weighted amount shown in board view. Drag a deal forward and your forecast moves. That is the entire reporting mechanism in one sentence.
How many custom pipelines you get depends on what you pay. Under HubSpot’s Simplified Pipeline Limits beta the caps are:
| Tier | Custom pipelines |
|---|---|
| Free tools | 0 |
| Starter | 15 |
| Professional | 100 |
| Enterprise | 350 |
That limit is a shared pool across all objects and excludes the default pipelines. Zero custom pipelines on free is less punishing than it sounds, because the default pipeline is already there and most small businesses never need a second one.
The stage to remember is Closed won. It is the only moment in HubSpot where the software knows for certain that a customer got what they paid for. Hold that thought.
Automation starts at Professional, not at Starter
This is the part that surprises people who have already paid for Starter and gone looking for the automation.
Workflows, HubSpot’s automation engine, are not available on Starter. HubSpot’s own documentation lists them for Professional and Enterprise across Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Data Hub, Smart CRM and Revenue Hub. The minimum tier across every product is Professional.
When you do have workflows, enrollment can be filter-based, event-based, schedule-based or webhook-based, and the actions available depend on your subscription. You need Edit permissions for workflows or Super Admin permissions to build one, plus Publish permissions to turn it on.
Sequences sit behind a similar wall. Sending emails through sequences requires a Sales Hub or Service Hub Professional or Enterprise subscription, and a connected individual work email. A user on a Professional seat can send up to 500 emails a day through it, and an Enterprise seat up to 1,000.
So the honest shape of the product is this. Free and Starter give you a place to keep everything and a decent view of it. Professional gives you a machine that does things on its own. The gap between those two is where the money is.
How to set HubSpot up, in the order that works
HubSpot documents its own setup path, and it is worth following rather than clicking around. The steps run: create your account, secure it with two-factor authentication or single sign-on, invite your team and set their permissions, customise account defaults such as time zone, language, currency and data privacy settings, connect your apps, manage your AI settings, then review your subscription.
Two of those steps carry most of the weight.
Importing your existing records
Email is the required property when importing contacts. If a person has more than one address, add an Additional email addresses column with the secondary ones. Include a Record ID column when you want to deduplicate against records already in the account. Import limits apply over a rolling 24 hour period rather than resetting at a set time of day, so a very large migration is a job you start early rather than at five o’clock.
Connecting your inbox
Connecting an individual work email is available on all products and plans, free included. Supported providers are Gmail and Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 Outlook, Microsoft Exchange on-premises from 2010 SP2 upward, and other providers over IMAP. Once connected you can send one-to-one email from the CRM, log replies against records, run sequences if your tier allows it, and install the HubSpot Sales extension in your inbox.
A few accounts will not connect: Gmail accounts on Google’s Advanced Protection Program, Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes, Amazon SES and Amazon WorkMail, and anything using ActiveSync. Users on View-Only seats cannot connect a personal email at all.
Do the import and the inbox first. Everything else in HubSpot is easier to judge once real data is sitting in it.
What HubSpot costs once it is running
Prices below are from HubSpot’s pricing pages, checked this week. Note that HubSpot is currently running a new-customer promotion on Starter, so the list price and the price you will be quoted differ.
| Plan | Price | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Free tools | $0/mo | Up to 2 users, no credit card |
| Starter Customer Platform | $20/mo per seat list | Promo: $7 per seat paid annually up front, or $10 per seat monthly. New customers, limited time. |
| Sales Hub Professional | $100/mo per seat, $90 annually | $1,500 one-time onboarding fee, required |
| Marketing Hub Professional | $890/mo list, $800 promotional | 3 core seats, 2,000 marketing contacts, $3,000 onboarding |
| Customer Platform Professional | From $1,300/mo | 6 seats, extra core seats from $45/mo |
| Sales Hub Enterprise | $150/mo per seat | $3,500 one-time onboarding fee |
| Customer Platform Enterprise | From $4,700/mo | 8 seats, extra core seats from $75/mo |
Two things to watch. Professional and Enterprise onboarding fees are one-time but required, so the first invoice is much larger than the monthly figure suggests. And HubSpot Credits, which the newer plans meter certain actions against, cost $9.00 per 1,000 when paid annually or $0.010 per credit pay-as-you-go, and they reset monthly with no rollover.
Marketing Hub also charges by marketing contact tier. Once you move up a tier you cannot move back down until your contract renews.
Nothing in HubSpot asks the customer for a Google review
Work back through everything above. The database knows who the customer is. The pipeline knows the exact moment the job closed. The connected inbox knows how to send them an email. Every ingredient is sitting there.
And no tier, from free to the $4,700 a month Enterprise bundle, sends the review request. Not one. You can build a workflow that emails a customer at Closed won, but only from Professional upward, and you still have to write it, aim it at the right Google link, decide the follow-up schedule and maintain the whole thing yourself.
That is a strange thing to be missing, because for a local business the Google review is the part of the job that generates the next job. The invoice gets paid and the proof disappears.
This is the one job Trophy Jar does. It watches your HubSpot deals, and when one hits the stage you choose, it asks that customer for a Google review. Text or email, your pick. Follow-ups if they go quiet. It works on the free CRM, so you do not need to reach Professional to get automation for this one thing.
Let HubSpot close the deal. Let us get the review.
Trophy Jar connects to HubSpot and fires on the deal stage you name, usually Closed won. Your customer gets a short message with a direct link to your Google review page, from your own dedicated local number if you choose text, and a follow-up if they go quiet. You do not write the workflow. You do not need Professional. It runs on the free CRM. Pricing is $9 a month for the first two months and then $29 on Launch, or $19 a month for the first two months and then $49 on Growth. Launch includes 100 texts a month, Growth includes 1,000, and we handle 10DLC registration end to end for US businesses. Thirteen native integrations, no contract, cancel whenever.