When is HubSpot worth paying for?
When a few people sell for a living. That's when tracked emails, sequences, pipelines and forecasts on one contact record start paying for the seats, because the team stops working from spreadsheets and inboxes. If you're a handful of people who mainly need contacts, deals and tasks in one place, HubSpot's free plan (up to two users; check HubSpot's pricing page) or a self-hosted CRM like Twenty is usually enough.
Signs you're ready
- More than one person follows up leads, and you can't see who's talking to whom.
- You want to know which ads turned into sales, not just form fills.
- Marketing and sales argue about what counts as a good lead.
What you're paying for
Paid Sales Hub plans are priced per seat (HubSpot's Sales Hub pricing page, October 2026). Sequences and forecasting sit on the Professional tier and above, so check which tier you need before you buy.
What we do
We set up forms that keep each lead's source, a deal pipeline whose stages mean the same thing to marketing and sales, email journeys and a weekly dashboard, in your own portal. We run Twenty ourselves, so we'll tell you if you don't need HubSpot yet.
The tools in this answer
HubSpotThe CRM we set up for clients with a sales team. Forms, email, deals and reports sit on one contact record, and every lead keeps the ad it came from.
Twenty CRMOur CRM and task board, on our own server with no per-user fees. Leads from our contact and landing-page forms and our Meta lead forms land in it as a person and a deal, with the campaign they came from attached.CRM
Also worth asking
Other answers about the same tools.
How do you plan and track client work?
We split each job into tasks, each with an owner and a date, on the task board in our CRM (Twenty). Code changes are tracked in GitHub as pull requests, and plans, notes and reports live in Google Docs and Sheets.
You don't need to log in to any of it. We keep you posted by email, on scheduled calls and in reports.
Can a self-hosted CRM like Twenty replace paid CRM seats?
For a small team, yes. We run Twenty, an open-source CRM, on our own server with no per-user licence. It holds people, companies, opportunities and tasks, syncs with Gmail and Calendar, and takes in forms through n8n.
It's not the right answer for everyone, though. We wouldn't claim it replaces HubSpot or Salesforce for a large sales team.
Is Twenty CRM free and open source?
Mostly, yes. Most of Twenty's code is under the AGPL, and you can run it on your own server with no charge for each user. What you pay for is the server (ours is €17.49 a month before VAT, on Hetzner) and the time to keep it updated and backed up.
A few extras need Twenty's paid Organization plan (check Twenty's pricing page), such as single sign-on, record-level permissions and audit logs.
Will setting up HubSpot email break our other email?
It shouldn't, as long as your SPF record is edited and not replaced. To send as you, HubSpot needs two DKIM records and its own line added to your SPF record. If someone swaps the whole SPF record for a HubSpot-only one, your other senders (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, your booking or shop tools) start failing checks, and their email lands in junk or bounces.
We add HubSpot next to what's already there and check the live records afterwards.
Can you work with our existing Salesforce?
Yes. We don't replace it or rebuild your org. We make sure each lead keeps the ad it came from on the way in, and match the pipeline back to your ad spend.
Where HubSpot sits in front, the click ID and UTM tags go into HubSpot, then across to Salesforce, so reports can say which ads reached the pipeline.
Still have questions?Talk to us
Bring your numbers.
We'll tell you if the spend makes sense.
- A 15-minute callYour goals, your challenges, and whether we're the right fit.
- A 1-hour discovery callWe dig into your numbers. Worth a hundred emails.
- A concrete planAds, a custom build or both, as a one-off project or ongoing.