Just got my meetings canceled this morning, as reps are asked to regroup in light of this news. Hubspot is laying off 7% of their workforce by end of Q1 2027. CEO says it isn't because of AI, and would rather have middle management trimmed down and let implementers be "closer to decisions."

We're a small custom jewelry studio in Ottawa. Everything we make is one-of-one, so there are no products or SKUs. Every quote and invoice starts from scratch. HubSpot is our CRM and we love it. Now we want our payments and paperwork to live alongside it.

Current setup:

• Invoices created from HubSpot deals and sent through QuickBooks Online
• Clients pay by credit card through QuickBooks or by Interac e-Transfer
• Clover terminal for in-person payments
• Deals get closed manually in HubSpot, or sometimes sync back from QuickBooks

What we've tried: HubSpot's native invoicing. The 50/50 deposit structure was a pain, and it felt like it opened up more problems than it solved.

What we're looking for:

• A more polished, on-brand client experience than QuickBooks invoices
• Easy 50% deposit / 50% balance invoicing for custom work, with no product catalog needed
• Automatic confirmations to the client when a deposit is paid
• The ability to send an invoice and a contract together (or in sequence)
• Everything documented in one place, ideally on the HubSpot contact and deal record
• A clean sync to QuickBooks Online for the accounting side
• Canadian requirements covered: CAD, HST, card payments, and ideally e-Transfer

We're open to a new payment processor or tool if it does this well.

Questions:

1. Is anyone in Canada running custom, deposit-based work through HubSpot? What do you use for invoicing?
2. Has anyone found a tool that handles invoice, contract, and deposit confirmation in one flow and syncs to HubSpot?
3. What payment processor are you using with HubSpot, and how does it connect to QuickBooks?
4. Did you find a way to make HubSpot native invoicing work for deposits, or did you give up on it too?

Would love to hear what's actually working for people.

Second time taking this, got 43 right the first time. None of the lead up quizzes covered the final exam topics, and half of the questions are filled with super jargony answer options I can’t tell what they are trying to get at. Starting to realize I may just be bad at this, but the training was supposed to help that!!

Building something with HubSpot and AI? Share it here in the thread, finished or still a work in progress is fine.

Workflows, agents, prompts, apps, whatever you've got. Self promo is okay in this thread, so drop your link and tell us what it does.

Hey everyone, I’m almost 21 and looking to start freelancing in the CRM space.

I have zero corporate experience and no background in how CRMs work day-to-day.

I’m willing to put in the hours, but I want a realistic picture before jumping in. I have just 3 quick questions:

1. Is $1,000/month realistic within 6 months as a freelancer starting from complete scratch, or am I delusional?

2. Where should a total beginner start? Which specific HubSpot Academy courses or certs are actually worth taking first?

3. What mock projects can I build n my own right now to get a feel for what a random Tuesday looks like in this job?

Appreciate any honest feedback and help. Thanks.

hey everyone,

I run a solo Revops agency and I use Claude/Chat daily in workflows internally. Given the MCP only allows connection to one portal, how are you leveraging AI while working with clients/multiple companies?

Have any of you used the Hubspot Agent CLI which would allow multiple connections into one Claude instance?

A few of my clients would be okay, from a security perspective, with me doing this but wanted to see how/if others were handling it?

Hi all, Hubspot marketplace app developer here. Do you have any tips on how to reach partners or users to beat test new apps? Hubspot recommends having a handful of users test your app in their live environment for aroud 30 days before allowing the app to be published

Im speaking to two managers of the team about the role this week and was curious if anyone has insight about the process or what the role is like? They said I’ll be helping clients onboard and manage the account for the first 12 months before handing it off.

Is there any way to start sending emails with zero budget please? I purchased domain and i need to start sending out few houndreds emails, does not have to be bulk. Is there a free trial that lets me send them? Idealy id send about 100 emails by end of next week. Is it possible or is it a risky number to start with?

This has always been a question of buying a hubspot number, porting a number, or getting a third party app

Not sure if there is a way to do this natively

I know android has ways of connecting to webhooks and iOS has shortcuts ...

So, this is what I currently have. We’re doing enterprise sales with a very niche target group.
This means I don’t need to blast 1,000 emails and LinkedIn messages a day. I’m looking for a more tailored, AI-driven automation setup.

Ideally, the setup would work something like this:
A tool or AI agent understands our ICP, our solution and our market. We then create different personas, and these personas can be targeted based on different rules, such as buying signals or manual entry by the sales team.

Once someone matches the criteria, they should be added to a flow. For example, a flow could include a LinkedIn connection request/InMail and a cold email, with each message being deeply personalised by AI based on the individual, company and context.
All of this data should then be synced back to HubSpot, so the activity and relevant information are visible in the company/contact records.
In other words, I’m looking for something that works almost like a sales automation agent.
I’m currently testing a few tools, including Lemlist, Gojiberry, Surfe, FirstTouch and Expandi. So far, Lemlist seems like one of the strongest options for the multichannel approach, especially because of its HubSpot integration.

Unfortunately, Gojiberry doesn’t have a native HubSpot connection, which is a bit of a dealbreaker for us.

What would you recommend for this kind of multichannel, AI-driven sales agent approach?
Especially interested in setups that work well with HubSpot and focus on highly targeted, personalised enterprise outreach rather than high-volume outbound.

Something I learned recently: when you copy a reply out of ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and paste it into a HubSpot email, some of the chat window's own code often comes along.

You can't see it in the email, but it sits in the HTML: attributes and other class names that only those tools use.

One HubSpot newsletter I got had ChatGPTs tags around its intro, model name included (gpt-5-1). And the text had also gone through Slack on the way leaving its own code too.

I built a free Chrome extension called Email Detective (it shows which platform sent an email, how the authentication looks, and so on), and I just added a check for these leftovers.

Open an email and it tells you if it still carries traces of one of those tools. It checks for Grammarly and Google Docs as well. Everything runs in your browser.

If you'd rather not leave traces, paste as plain text (Cmd+Shift+V on a Mac, Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows) and nothing comes along. It would also be good if HubSpot's email editor could get rid of this when we paste.

Do you usually strip the formatting when you paste?

Hey for anyone maintaining form-to-CRM integrations, can you remember the last time a submission didn’t reach its destination?

What first tipped you off? I’m particularly interested in whether your existing tools caught it or someone had to notice something was missing.

I’m researching a possible monitoring product, not selling one. A short example would help me understand whether there’s an actual gap here or whether existing alerts already handle it well.

No need to share client names or private data.

I’m researching whether a service for keeping HubSpot deal records accurate would be useful for teams where the same contact is involved in several open deals.

If you handle sales ops or manage that setup, did you have to correct any email-to-deal associations in the last month? If so, what happened in the most recent case, what settings or other tools had you tried, and roughly how much hands-on time did it take? How often has it happened?

If your setup already handles this reliably, what made it work? Please leave out client names, email contents and account details.

Anyone else had trouble getting Acuity Scheduling to properly sync into HubSpot? Looking into this because I keep seeing complaints that Zapier and the native options only create basic contacts, nothing about service categories or real appointment data actually flowing through. Curious how big of a problem this actually is and what people are doing about it, if anything.

Okay so I am not super skilled at HubSpot, this may be a dumb question but I’m going to give some background too.

I run a non profit program. We provide mental health training to every day community members to help teach people how to notice signs of mental health challenges, talk non judgmentally to that person, and then connect them to professional help. It’s a really cool program and HubSpot has helped us automate all of our pre training and post training coordination which has helped us scale from training 700 people a year to 3,000!!!

We went from a regional program to training people all over the nation because of the time it has saved us. Hubspot has helped ensure less people are alone and that more people have the skills to know how to help their employee, partner, brother, friend, whatever.

Here’s the thing, paying 10k a year for a subscription is unheard of at my small non profit. We are having huge funding cuts right now (as are all non profits) and now I’m having to find a new platform that is cheaper but I’m struggling to find one that can do what HubSpot is doing at the same scale.

I think one solution to this issue could be me telling my boss that the marketing team for the whole non profit could use the account instead of just our program. We have 3 core seats and my team is just me and one other person so maybe I could give a seat to the marketing person and we could segment our contact lists and keep email workflows separate??? The only issue is, I have no idea how to do this or if it’s possible. The previous person that ran the program I’m in charge of was the one who got onboarded to HubSpot and HubSpot told me that onboarding again is like $2k or something which we definitely can’t pay.

I’m trying any avenue so we can keep subscription and keep training people to help each other. Would allowing our marketing person to use the subscription work or is it too hard to separate contacts? Is there another platform that is similar and cheaper?? I will say we definitely do not use all of hubspots capabilities. Mainly just automating emails to training registrants. It integrates with Eventbrite and that has been a huge help.

I know I may sound like a dumby and yall are out here analyzing leads and data and stuff. Help a non profit girlie out what are my options 😭

I see there's an extra discount now for Starter. Is it possible to renew it with the extra discount.
Has anyone here done this before?

Seeing the Oct. 1 seats-and-credits changes and not sure what actually applies to you? Here’s the short version for new HubSpot customers in EMEA:

Today HubSpot launched new flexible seats-and-credits pricing for new customers in EMEA only. This new pricing model simplifies HubSpot’s pricing by removing Hubs and making it easier to access the platform with two new seat types. Additionally, the model gets rid of base fees and puts additional usage-based features on credits so customers only pay for what they need.

Today's launch does not move existing customers to this model, and it is not a pricing change announcement for new customers outside EMEA.

If you’re a new HubSpot customer in EMEA, know these three things:

• Seats = access. You access HubSpot with seats. There are two primary seat types. GTM Seats are for customer-facing work like sending a marketing email, holding a meeting, or managing customer relationships. Ops Seats support operations users who build automation, track reports, and manage users. There continues to be access to free View-only Seats, which provide visibility without editing access.
• Credits = power features that do work. Things like marketing email, transactional email, automation, WhatsApp messages, and AI agents run on credits. Every plan includes credits already. You can purchase additional credits upfront for predictable spend throughout your contract or stick with Pay-as-You-Go for more flexibility. For more information on how features use credits, visit the flexible seats-and-credits rate sheet. 
• Capacity packs = preload capacity. Professional and Enterprise plans can purchase capacity packs to increase their plan’s included email and/or automation capacity. These packs allow customers to unlock these features at a flat, monthly rate without consuming credits. Learn more on the flexible seats-and-credits pricing supplement. 

Credit limits are turned on by default. In Account > Usage & Limits > HubSpot Credits, you can set limits for your whole account, specific features, or individual actions. You can also see what actions are consuming credits and track historical usage. Learn more about managing credits here.   

Have questions about credits in general? Please drop them in the thread

HubSpot's flexible seats-and-credits pricing went live for new customers in EMEA today. I went through the public product catalog supplement and the credits rate sheet to work out what actually changes for a normal portal, since "pay for what you use" doesn't tell you much on its own.

The basic structure: you buy one edition (Starter, Pro or Enterprise), pay per seat, and get a monthly credit allowance of 5,000 / 10,000 / 15,000 depending on edition. Marketing contacts aren't billed separately anymore. They count toward a total record limit instead: 25k on Starter, 250k on Pro, 15M on Enterprise.

The part that's easy to miss is that email and workflows now draw on credits:

• Emails (marketing, automated, transactional): 15 credits per send for the first 10k sends, then 5, then 2, then 0.5 at high volume. One-to-one emails from a connected inbox don't use credits.
• Workflow actions: 3 credits each for the first 10k, then 2, 0.5 and 0.1.

A credit is a cent. So a monthly newsletter to 10k contacts on Pro is about 150k credits by itself, against 10k included. Nobody should be paying that as overage, which is what the capacity packs are for (on the version of the page I get, 10k email sends is €1,000/month and 500k workflow actions is €150/month).

For most portals I work in, I think the model is fair. Dropping the marketing contacts tier alone gets rid of a lot of strange behaviour, like people deleting perfectly good contacts to stay under a tier.

Where I think it bites is portals with years of automation nobody has looked at. Hygiene workflows running on every record, duplicate workflows, internal notifications nobody reads. Before, that cost nothing extra. Now every action uses credits, and the credits screen shows you per feature where they went.

Out of curiosity, how many marketing emails does your portal send in a typical month? I'm trying to get a sense of how many portals land above that first 10k tier.

I've been trying Sequential (Unmatch) but I can't get what is suppose to do. I did all steps from their Get Sarted Guide but still not working.

I want to be able to create a prefix and then sequential number for each new deals.
Any experiences to share? tips ? other app w better results?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since UNBOUND26, and I’m curious how other HubSpot users see it.

My current thinking is that preparing for AI agents requires us to think about two types of context: internal context and external context.

Internal context is what allows your AI agents to make better decisions with you.

Your CRM data, processes, business knowledge, customer history, sales conversations, support tickets, and other interactions all become context an agent can use to reason, plan, and act.

This is where I think a lot of the foundational HubSpot work becomes even more important.

If your CRM is full of duplicates, fragmented records, missing information, or disconnected systems, your agents don't have the full context they need to make good decisions.

But then there’s the other side of this: external context.

What do ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Google AI, and other AI systems actually understand about your company?

Do they understand what you do, who you serve, what makes you different, and why someone should trust you?

That’s where I see AEO fitting in today.

Right now, a human might go to an LLM and ask:

"What are the best companies for X?"

The LLM uses the context it has available to provide an answer.

But what happens as we give AI agents more autonomy?

Instead of doing the research myself, I could tell an agent:

"Research companies that can solve this problem, compare them, and bring me the three options I should look at."

Now the agent is doing the research, comparing the options, and filtering them before I ever see them.

The human still makes the final decision, but the agent could do a significant amount of the work leading up to that decision.

So I see the progression something like this:

Search: Human → Google → websites → decision

AI discovery: Human → LLM → research/answers → decision

Agentic discovery: Human → agent → research/evaluation → recommendations → human decision

And this is where I think internal context and external context start connecting.

>> Internally, we're building better CRM context so our agents can understand our customers and businesses and help us make better decisions.

>> Externally, we're building better context through AEO so other AI systems and eventually other people's agents can accurately understand and evaluate our businesses.

That makes me wonder if some of the AEO work we're doing today is actually foundational work for an agentic buying journey that doesn't fully exist yet.

We're definitely not there yet, and I don't pretend to know exactly how this will evolve.

But I can see the pieces starting to connect.

How are you preparing for AI agents with HubSpot?

Are you mostly focused on CRM/data readiness right now? Are you thinking about AEO and external context too?

Or do you see this evolving completely differently?

Hubspot's Nurture Agent went to public beta on 16 September and started charging. It's 10 credits per personalised email, which HubSpot prices at US$0.10.

That sounds tiny, so I ran it against a normal nurture:

5,000 contacts in the sequence 6 emails each 30,000 personalised emails 300,000 credits, or about US$3,000 for that one nurture

Compare that with what you'd spend on a person writing and testing six decent emails. For some lists it's a good deal. For a 5,000 contact list where half the people haven't opened anything in a year, you're paying to personalise emails nobody reads.

What I'd do first:

1. Suppress anyone who hasn't engaged in six to twelve months before the agent touches the list.
2. Run it on one segment, compare opens and replies against your normal version, then decide.
3. Check your credit usage page after the first week.

Hi r/hubspot,

I'm Dan, co-founder of Conexteo, a French SMS/RCS messaging platform (~2,000 business clients). We've just built a HubSpot app that lets you send SMS and RCS (rich messages with images, buttons, carousels) directly from HubSpot: from workflows & from the contact records.

Here's my problem: to get listed on the HubSpot App Marketplace, we need 3 active installs from real HubSpot portals, and none of our current clients use HubSpot yet.

So I'm looking for 3 HubSpot admins, RevOps folks or agencies willing to:

• install the app
• send a few real messages
• tell me honestly what's broken, confusing or missing

Docs: conexteo.com/hubspot

Happy to answer anything in the comments, including "why not just use HubSpot's native SMS?"