How much does HubSpot Professional cost, and what is between it and Starter?

HubSpot Starter is $7 per seat per month at the current promotional rate ($20 list). The next tier, Professional, starts at $1,300 per month including six seats, with additional Core seats at $45 per month. There is no tier between them, so a small business that outgrows Starter has no intermediate option.

Is there a cheaper alternative to HubSpot Professional for a small trade business?

For a 1-10 person service business whose need is automated follow-up and phone handling rather than marketing and reporting, prebuilt workflow tools cost far less: Plainsmith charges $149 for the first tool, $49 for each additional, and a single $19 per month plan covering all of them regardless of headcount. It is not a CRM and has no reporting, custom fields or email marketing — businesses that genuinely need those should buy Professional.

Can I keep my HubSpot data if I switch?

Yes. Nothing needs to be migrated. Many businesses keep HubSpot's free tier as their contact record and run workflow tools alongside it on their own business phone number.

If you have just been quoted Professional

$7 a seat. Then $1,300 a month. Nothing in between.

You outgrew Starter, asked what was next, and got a number with a comma in it. You are not being ripped off — that tier is built for a marketing team, and you are three people and a van. The problem is the ladder has no middle rung, and you have been standing on the gap.

The ladder, as it actually is

Free

Two users. A real CRM, genuinely useful, and the reason most people start here.

$7/seat

Starter

Currently discounted from $20. Cheap, and for a lot of small businesses it is enough for a while.

The gap

There is no tier here. Nothing at $60, nothing at $150, nothing at $400. If Starter stops being enough, the next thing anyone can sell you is eighteen times the price.

$1,300/mo

Professional

Six seats included, $45 a month for each one after. Automation, reporting, custom objects — a serious platform for a serious marketing function.

$4,700/mo

Enterprise

Eight seats. Not a conversation a three-van shop is having.

That is $15,600 a year to solve a problem that, for most 1–10 person trades, is four or five specific leaks: the call nobody answered, the quote nobody chased, the slot nobody filled, the invoice nobody sent, the customer nobody rang back.

Before you sign, work out which it is

Professional is the right buy for some businesses at your size. It is worth ten minutes to know which one you are, because these two answers point in opposite directions.

You need the platform. Somebody in the business runs marketing. You send campaigns, you want attribution, you have a pipeline with stages you designed, several people work the same leads, and you can name what a report would change. Buy Professional. It is expensive because it is a lot, and you will use it.
You hit a wall on one thing. You wanted automated follow-up, or texting, or more seats than Starter allows — and Professional is simply the only door out of Starter. That is not a platform problem. That is one job, priced as if it were forty.

What the middle rung looks like here

Sixteen prebuilt tools on your own business number: missed-call text-back that books the job, quote and invoice follow-up on a cadence, a calendar built from your real working hours that your website can book into, per-person crew day-sheets, review chasing, win-back, waitlist filling. $149 for the first tool, $49 for each one after, and one $19/month plan covering all of them however many people you employ. Not per seat.

Three tools and the care plan is $247 to start and $19 a month — against $15,600 a year. If you also need the website, that is $10 a month and it is written and built for you inside 48 hours.

And you keep HubSpot Free if you want it. The two are not mutually exclusive — plenty of businesses should run the free CRM as their record of who is who, and let the tools handle the phone.

Watch a tool run › Price it up

Fair questions

Is this just a cheaper HubSpot?: No, and that would be a bad thing to be. There is no reporting, no custom fields, no email marketing, no deal stages you design. If what you need is a CRM, a cheap imitation of one is the worst possible purchase. This is the narrow version: the handful of jobs that leak money in a trade, done without anybody logging in.
Can I keep the HubSpot data I have?: Yes — it is yours and it stays yours. Nothing here asks you to migrate anything. If you drop to the free tier you keep your contacts, and the tools run alongside on your phone number.
What if I need Professional in a year?: Then buy it in a year, having spent $19 a month rather than $1,300 in the meantime. You own your number, your carrier registration and every contact, so nothing here has to be unwound first.
Why should I believe the $19 does not become $1,300 later?: Because the plan does not have tiers to climb. Every additional tool is $49 once and the care plan stays $19 however many you own and however many people work for you. If we ever change that, the site you can buy outright for $300 and the phone number in your own Twilio account are both yours to walk away with.