The free CRM is genuinely free, and the Starter tier is genuinely cheap. That is the part of HubSpot that works exactly as advertised. Then a feature you assumed was included, like reporting, like sequences, like custom properties past a certain count, lives in Professional. Marketing Hub Professional starts at $890 a month for 2,000 contacts. Cross the contact threshold and the price climbs. Add the team and the seats add up.
Then Sales Hub Professional stacks on top, because the sales team needs the workflow tools that the marketing tier does not include. Then Service Hub, because the support team has its own pipeline. Then Operations Hub, because the data sync your salesperson described is actually a separate product. Then Content Hub, because the CMS lives somewhere else. By the time everything is on, you are paying enterprise money for a stack that was sold to you as an SMB platform.
Then the workflow you actually want needs a custom property, a custom object, or an integration that does not exist in the marketplace. That means a HubSpot Solutions Partner at $200 to $250 an hour. Every. Single. Change. The platform that promised "no developer needed" turns out to need a developer the moment your business stops being generic.
"We started at $50 a month. We are now at $1,800 a month and we still need three add-ons we do not have."
The HubSpot AI assistant, the one that was supposed to make your team faster, does not actually know your business. It does not know your matters, your projects, your customers, your tone, or your decision patterns. It is a generic GPT wrapper sitting on top of a generic CRM. When you ask to export your data and walk away, the answer is "eventually, in CSV."