Companies are leaving HubSpot in 2026 because prices keep climbing while momentum fades: revenue growth fell from 25.4% to 19.2% in two years (Yahoo Finance, June 2026), even as $3,000–$7,000 mandatory onboarding fees landed on top. Nobody tweets the exit — the phrase “I left HubSpot” returns zero results on X.
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.
Has HubSpot revenue growth slowed down?
Yes, HubSpot’s revenue growth decelerated from 25.4% in 2023 to 19.2% in 2025, even while introducing new fees and price increases (Yahoo Finance, June 2026). This signals “harvest mode”—extracting more value from existing customers rather than growing the base.
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.
| Year | Revenue | YoY Growth |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | $2.17B | 25.4% |
| 2024 | $2.63B | 21.1% |
| 2025 | $3.13B | 19.2% |
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.
New cost layers now sit on top of the base subscription, and several are charged the moment you sign on rather than reserved for power users:
- Consumption credits for usage-based features, billed at $9 per 1,000.
- An AEO add-on — paying extra to be findable in AI search — at $50 per month.
- Mandatory onboarding fees of $3,000 at the Professional tier and $7,000 at Enterprise. 2 Source 2 hubspot.com/pricing, accessed June 2026. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of structuring content so AI assistants cite it.
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.
How much does HubSpot cost compared to Monday CRM or Attio?
HubSpot is two to five times more expensive than comparable alternatives. For a 10-person Pro team, HubSpot costs over $16,380 for Marketing Hub alone, while Attio costs $8,280, Folk costs $5,760, and Monday CRM costs $3,360 (Vendor Pricing, June 2026).
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:
| Platform | Annual Cost (10 users, Pro tier) |
|---|---|
| HubSpot Marketing Hub | $16,380 (year 1, incl. onboarding) |
| HubSpot Sales Hub | $10,800 |
| Attio | $8,280 |
| Folk | $5,760 |
| Freshsales | $4,680 |
| Monday CRM | $3,360 |
| Twenty (self-hosted) | $0 |
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.
See what the multiple is for your stack — the TCO calculator takes 90 seconds.
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.
HubSpot’s free tier is the product. Everything after it is the extraction.
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.
When practitioners do speak up about HubSpot, they don’t announce departures — they complain about specifics. We ran sentiment analysis across X and Hacker News, and the gripes cluster into three themes: 6 Source 6 X/Twitter search via API, June 2026. 20 high-signal tweets analyzed.
- 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.
- Cost versus alternatives comes up constantly: marketing operators describe rivals as “cheaper, prettier, and faster than HubSpot Starter,” and a former user put it plainly — “I was using HubSpot as well but made the switch, was getting insanely expensive.”
The tell is what practitioners do instead of announcing a departure: they recommend alternatives without mentioning HubSpot by name at all. The decision is already made by the time it surfaces — no drama, no manifesto, just a peer quietly pointing somewhere else.
Hacker News tells the same story. The complaints there are almost never about features or bugs; they’re about the pricing cliff between Starter and Professional, which shows up in nearly every thread where HubSpot comes up. The developer community piles on with a second, narrower grievance: HubSpot’s integration and API experience has fallen behind competitors, with engineers comparing it unfavorably to Salesforce, of all things.
Which AI-native CRM platforms are replacing HubSpot?
Attio and Twenty CRM are emerging as top HubSpot replacements. Attio raised $85M in 12 months (Attio, August 2025) to build an AI-native CRM, while Twenty CRM offers an open-source alternative. Practitioners are abandoning legacy pricing for platforms that treat AI as foundational.
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 Breeze AI, the AI layer HubSpot has bolted onto its existing product.
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.
We’re publishing the full analysis of what companies actually pay for HubSpot. Get the report before anyone else.
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.
The research is free. So is the diagnosis — 60 seconds →