HubSpot is great for marketing-led SMEs but gets expensive fast. Sales Hub Pro is £85 per user per month. HubSpot Pricing (2025)
Sales Hub Professional: $90/seat/month (annual) or $100/seat/month (monthly). UK pricing approximately £85/seat/month.
www.hubspot.com 15 users is £15,000 a year. Marketing Hub Pro is £780 a month, which is £9,000 a year. Total £24,000 plus a year, and rising. Here is how to decide whether to integrate, replace, or keep paying.
Replacing HubSpot with custom software costs from £25,000 as a one-time build, compared to HubSpot Sales Hub Pro at £85 per user per month. A 15-person team pays £15,300 per year for HubSpot, so a bespoke replacement breaks even in under 2 years and you own the software with no per-seat charges.
HubSpot earned its reputation. This is what it genuinely does better than most alternatives.
Email sequences, lead nurturing, and drip campaigns work out of the box. The visual workflow builder is genuinely good for non-technical teams.
Templated sales sequences with open and click tracking. Your sales team can send personalised follow-ups without writing each email from scratch.
Dashboards across marketing and sales in one place. Pipeline reports, campaign attribution, and revenue tracking without building a data warehouse.
You can get a team live in days, not months. The onboarding is well documented and the template library means you start with something that works.
The cracks show when your team grows past 10 people or your process does not match HubSpot defaults.
Sales Hub Pro at £85 per user per month means 15 users costs £15,300 a year. Add a marketing team and the bill climbs fast. You pay full price for every seat, including people who only need to view contacts or update a deal stage.
Each Hub is sold separately. Sales Hub does not include marketing automation. Marketing Hub does not include deal tracking. Need both? You pay for both, and the costs stack on top of each other rather than bundling.
Custom workflows hit ceilings. You cannot build a workflow that branches the way your sales process actually branches. You end up with workarounds, custom properties, and fragile automation that breaks when HubSpot updates the platform.
Your contacts, deals, and history live in HubSpot. Exporting is possible but the relationships and custom fields do not always map cleanly. Stop paying and you lose access to the workflow automations you spent months building.
Most SMEs use 20 to 30 percent of HubSpot features. You pay for the other 70 to 80 percent because pricing is per seat, not per feature. A sales team that needs contact management and deal tracking subsidises the marketing automation modules they never open.
HubSpot raises prices regularly. The contact-based pricing model means every new lead you add to marketing pushes you into a higher tier. Your costs grow with your success, which is the wrong incentive for a growing business.
A typical UK SME with a sales team and a marketing function. This is what the bill actually looks like.
15 users at £85 per user per month. That is £1,275 a month before you add marketing.
£780 a month for 2,000 contacts. More contacts means a higher tier. Add another £200 a month for 5,000 contacts.
And rising. Add-ons, more contacts, and annual price increases push this higher every year. Over 3 years, that is £75,000 plus with nothing to show for it at the end.
Numbers reflect HubSpot pricing at time of writing. Your actual costs depend on user count and contact tier. Book a free call for a tailored calculation against your HubSpot bill.
Keep HubSpot. Add an AI layer that connects it to the rest of your business so you actually use what you pay for.
You use 70 percent or more of HubSpot features and your marketing automation genuinely drives revenue. The problem is not HubSpot itself, it is that HubSpot sits in a silo. Your sales data does not flow into Xero. Your marketing leads do not reach Sage. Your team manually copies data between systems because HubSpot does not connect to the tools your finance and operations teams use.
This is where an integration layer fixes the real problem without throwing away your HubSpot investment. We connect HubSpot to Xero, Sage, your stock system, and your reporting tools. Data flows automatically. Your finance team sees closed deals in real time. Your marketing team sees revenue attribution without manual exports. You keep the HubSpot features you actually use.
Build a CRM and marketing tool that works your way. Break-even in 12 to 18 months. Then the savings start.
You use less than 30 percent of HubSpot features. Your sales process is non-standard and you have spent months bending it to fit HubSpot defaults. Your team complains about the interface. You are paying £24,000 a year and rising for a platform that fights your workflow instead of supporting it.
This is where replacing HubSpot with custom software makes financial sense. A bespoke build costs £25,000 to £60,000 depending on scope. Against £24,000 a year in HubSpot fees, break-even is 12 to 18 months. After that, you own the software outright with no per-seat fees and no licence increases. The savings compound every year.
Same 15-person SME, £24,660/year on HubSpot. Here is what each path looks like over 3 years.
3 years of subscriptions at £24,660/year, plus price increases. You own nothing. Stop paying and you lose access to your data, workflows, and automation.
£74,000 HubSpot subscriptions over 3 years plus a one-time £6,000 integration build. You keep HubSpot and add the missing connections. Lower upfront cost, but you keep paying HubSpot forever.
£42,000 one-time build plus £8,000 maintenance over 3 years. You own the software outright. No per-seat fees, no licence increases. Break-even at 12 to 18 months, then savings compound.
Numbers are illustrative for a 15-person UK SME spending £24,660/year on HubSpot. Your actual costs depend on scope and current spend. Book a free call for a tailored calculation.
Three questions that tell you which option fits your situation.
If you use 70 percent or more of HubSpot features and marketing automation is your core need, keep it and look at Option A. If you use less than 30 percent, you are subsidising features you never touch. Option B is the better financial call.
If your sales process fits HubSpot defaults, integration makes sense. If you have spent months bending your process to fit HubSpot, or your team works around the platform, replacement pays for itself in productivity alone.
Below £10,000 a year, keep HubSpot. The build cost does not justify itself. Above £20,000 a year, replacement breaks even in 12 to 18 months and saves £15,000 to £30,000 a year after that.
Not sure which way to go? Use our Build vs Buy calculator to get a clear recommendation based on your software spend, integration needs, and how well your current tools fit your workflow. It takes 2 minutes and you do not need an email to see your results.
The questions UK SMEs ask before replacing HubSpot with custom software.
A custom build to replace HubSpot typically costs between £25,000 and £60,000 depending on scope. A Sales Hub replacement starts at £25,000. Replacing both Sales Hub and Marketing Hub with a unified platform ranges from £40,000 to £60,000. Break-even is 12 to 18 months when you compare it to the £24,000+ per year most UK SMEs spend on HubSpot. After break-even, the savings compound every year because there are no per-seat fees and no licence increases.
Yes. Email sequences, deal tracking, contact management, reporting dashboards, marketing automation, lead scoring, and workflow automation can all be built into custom software. The difference is it gets built around your actual sales and marketing process, not a template. You get the features you use and none of the ones you do not. HubSpot does this well out of the box, but you pay for 100% of the platform to use 30% of the features.
8 to 14 weeks for a Sales Hub replacement, 14 to 20 weeks if you are replacing both Sales Hub and Marketing Hub. Data export from HubSpot is straightforward via their API. We extract contacts, companies, deals, emails, and notes, then map them to your new schema. Your HubSpot account stays running until you are confident in the new system, so there is no gap in operations.
If marketing automation is your core need and you use 70% or more of HubSpot features, keep it. The platform earns its keep. If you use less than 30% of the features and your sales process is non-standard, replace it. You are paying a premium for capabilities you never touch. The middle ground is Option A on this page: keep HubSpot and add an AI integration layer to connect it with Xero, Sage, and your other tools. That gets you more value without a full rebuild.
Yes. Source code, database, infrastructure, everything. No per-seat fees, no licence costs, no vendor lock-in. If you want to change something, your team can do it, we can do it, or any developer can do it. You own the software the same way you own a building you bought, not the way you rent an office.
Book a free 30-minute discovery call. We will look at your HubSpot bill, your feature usage, and your sales process, and tell you honestly whether replacement, integration, or keeping HubSpot makes the most financial sense for your business right now.