Is HubSpot free? What it actually costs in 2026

What the free tier actually includes

• —1,000 contacts
• —Up to 2 users
• —HubSpot branding on customer-facing features

Where the wall is

The third user, or contact 1,001. HubSpot's paid tiers are priced per seat and step up sharply — Starter is affordable, Professional is a different budget.

After that: Starter from $7 a seat a month on promotion, $20 a seat a month at the regular rate. Professional and Enterprise are priced per hub on their own pages.

Can you self-host HubSpot? No — cloud only

HubSpot is hosted only. EspoCRM, Twenty CRM and Mautic (for the marketing half) are the self-hosted options compared here.

When paying is still the right call

Stay if the free CRM is doing the job — it genuinely is free, unlimited on users, and better than most paid tools at that price. Stay if one team runs sales and marketing together and the value is the two halves sharing one contact record, because that integration is the actual product and no self-hosted stack reproduces it without glue. And stay if you have no operations capacity: every alternative below trades licence cost for someone's time, and if that someone does not exist the migration will stall half-finished, which is worse than the bill.

What you are locked into

Contacts, companies and deals export cleanly as CSV. Almost nothing else does. Workflows, sequences, lifecycle-stage logic, email templates, custom report definitions and dashboards have no portable format, so the migration cost is rebuilding the automation rather than moving the records. Landing pages and forms built in HubSpot's CMS stay behind entirely.

If you would rather not pay: EspoCRM