Why Companies Are Quietly Leaving HubSpot in 2026

Nobody tweets “I left HubSpot.”

Search the exact phrase on X and you get zero results. Same for “leaving HubSpot.” The loud, public breakup that usually accompanies a platform exodus? It hasn’t happened.

But the financial data tells a different story. HubSpot’s revenue growth has decelerated for three consecutive years, dropping from 25% to 19%, even as the company layers on new fees and raises prices across every tier. ¹ Source 1 Yahoo Finance, HUBS financials: Revenue grew 25.4% in 2023, 21.1% in 2024, and 19.2% in 2025. Net income swung from -$164.5M (2023) to $45.9M (2025). × Practitioners are recommending competitors in industry threads. AI-native CRM startups have raised $85M in a single year. Entire companies are being built just to solve the HubSpot exit path.

This isn’t a protest. It’s a drift.

The financial signature of harvest mode

When a SaaS vendor’s revenue growth decelerates while profitability improves, there’s a name for it: harvest mode. The company is extracting more value from its existing customer base instead of growing the base itself.

HubSpot’s numbers fit the pattern precisely.

The company posted its first-ever annual profit in 2025: $45.9M net income, a swing of over $200M from the $164.5M loss just two years earlier.¹ That turnaround didn’t come from explosive customer growth. It came from cost cuts and higher prices.

Look at the new cost layers stacked on top of existing subscriptions. HubSpot Credits charge $9 per 1,000 for consumption-based usage. An AEO add-on runs $50 per month. Mandatory onboarding fees hit $3,000 at the Professional tier and $7,000 for Enterprise. ² Source 2 hubspot.com/pricing, accessed June 2026. × These aren’t optional features for power users. They’re levied on the way in.

The 65% discount HubSpot is currently promoting on Starter plans tells its own story. Heavy discounting at the entry level while raising prices at the top? That’s a company fighting for new logos while squeezing the customers who can’t easily leave.

Anyone who has worked inside SaaS long enough recognizes the pattern. Oracle did this in the 2000s. SAP did it in the 2010s. The playbook is always the same: once growth slows, the revenue has to come from somewhere. It comes from the installed base.

Why is HubSpot so much more expensive than the alternatives?

The gap between HubSpot’s pricing and the rest of the market isn’t marginal. It’s a multiple.

For a 10-person team on a Professional-tier plan, the annual costs line up like this:

HubSpot is two to five times more expensive than every alternative at comparable feature tiers. ³ Source 3 Compiled from vendor pricing pages, all accessed June 2026. ×

The price gap has a psychological dimension. HubSpot’s free tier is still useful, and their Starter plan at $7 per seat feels reasonable. But the jump from Starter to Professional is roughly a 100x cost increase ($7 per seat per month to $800 per month base). That cliff is where growing companies hit the wall.

Even HubSpot’s defenders, when you find them online, only endorse the free tier. Browse the X threads and Hacker News discussions. The pattern is consistent: “HubSpot free is great,” followed by silence about the paid plans, or active recommendations to look elsewhere.

PCMag’s December 2024 review gave HubSpot CRM a 4.0 out of 5 but named Zoho CRM as Editors’ Choice, noting that “HubSpot’s paid plans aren’t especially affordable.” ⁵ Source 5 PCMag, HubSpot CRM review, December 2024. × A review publication known for generous ratings, telling readers to look elsewhere.

The quiet drift: what practitioners are actually saying

None of this shows up in a revenue report.

We ran sentiment analysis across X and Hacker News. ⁶ Source 6 X/Twitter search via API, June 2026. 20 high-signal tweets analyzed. × When practitioners do speak up about HubSpot, the complaints are narrow and specific rather than sweeping declarations of departure. Pricing architecture draws the most heat. “Look at the price jump between starter and professional”. Developer experience surfaces the same irritation: “Has anyone else built integrations for HubSpot and just been completely fed up with their terrible developer experience?” asked one engineer, comparing it unfavorably to Salesforce of all things. Marketing operators describe alternatives as “cheaper, prettier, and faster than HubSpot Starter.” A former user put it plainly: “I was using HubSpot as well but made the switch, was getting insanely expensive.”

Nobody announces when they’re leaving. What practitioners are doing instead is recommending alternatives without mentioning HubSpot by name at all.

One marketing operations leader called competitors “cheaper, prettier, and faster than HubSpot Starter” when recommending what his peers should use. A former HubSpot user on Hacker News described it simply: “I was using HubSpot as well but made the switch, was getting insanely expensive.” No drama, no manifesto. Just a factual description of a decision already made.

Hacker News tells the same story. The complaints are almost never about features or bugs. It’s the pricing architecture. “Look at the price jump between starter and professional” shows up in nearly every thread where HubSpot comes up. The developer community piles on: HubSpot’s API experience has fallen behind competitors. “Has anyone else built integrations for HubSpot and just been completely fed up with their terrible developer experience?” asked one developer, comparing it unfavorably to Salesforce, of all things.

The capital is flowing to the replacements

Follow the funding and the picture sharpens.

Attio raised $85M in 12 months, with a $52M Series B in August 2025 following a $33M round in August 2024. ⁴ Source 4 Attio blog, Series B announcement. × Their product cadence since then has been aggressive, with AI baked into everything from contact enrichment to workflow automation. They don’t position as “modern CRM” anymore. They position as “AI-native CRM,” a direct shot at HubSpot’s bolt-on Breeze AI.

Twenty CRM, a Y Combinator S23 company, is taking a different approach: open-source and free to self-host. Their pitch is “Build your Enterprise CRM at AI Speed,” targeting technical teams who want complete ownership of their customer data. The framing matters. It’s not “cheaper CRM.” It’s “CRM as infrastructure you own.”

The competitive conversation has left price behind entirely. Practitioners aren’t asking “which CRM costs less?” anymore. They’re asking which one treats AI as foundational rather than bolted on. That’s a question no incumbent can answer easily, because it usually means rebuilding the product from scratch.

Maybe the sharpest signal: startups are being built to solve the exit path itself. One founder described “years watching teams duct-tape Airtable to HubSpot” as the motivation for building a migration tool. When the difficulty of leaving your platform becomes a market opportunity for other companies, something structural has changed.

The wild card: AI is making CRM optional for some workflows

This one is still early, but worth watching.

A viral post on X described replacing “HubSpot + Salesforce thinking with 12 AI prompts,” claiming to save over $100,000 in annual stack cost. It racked up 200+ reposts. Another practitioner described building “a fully functional CRM for a recruiting firm in under an hour. No Salesforce. No HubSpot. No monthly cost,” using Google Sheets and AI.

Nobody’s running a 200-person sales org on a spreadsheet and some prompts. Not yet, anyway. But these signals mean something the CRM industry hasn’t had to face before: for certain workflows, the AI layer is making the CRM layer optional. If an AI agent can handle lead qualification and pipeline reporting, the traditional CRM becomes a database with an expensive interface.

The “AI replaces the thinking layer” narrative is still fringe. But it’s the kind of fringe that moves fast when the underlying technology keeps improving at the current pace.

What the drift means for your stack decision

We’re not telling you to leave HubSpot. We’ve already published that evaluation framework, and the answer depends on your specific situation. Companies under 20 people with straightforward needs and a sub-$25,000 annual spend may still find it’s the right call.

What the data does show: a market shift is underway, and it’s moving faster than vendor lock-in would suggest. Revenue growth decelerating while prices climb and $85M pours into AI-native replacements. The picture is consistent.

Your competitors may already be paying a fraction of what you pay for CRM. They’re just not talking about it.

If you want to go deeper: The Five Locks framework maps the mechanisms that make switching feel hard. Our line-by-line cost breakdown covers what mid-market companies actually pay. And the story behind Lynton’s own departure after 16 years as a HubSpot partner is here, if you want the insider version.

The data suggests this particular drift has a long way to run.