Does Plainsmith replace a full CRM?

The Console keeps customer records, quotes and payments alongside your jobs. It doesn’t offer custom sales pipelines, email campaigns or reports you build yourself. If those are what you need, keep a CRM built for them.

Can a small crew use it?

Yes. You can assign jobs to named crew members and give each person a view of their own day. They can send an on-my-way message, add a job note and mark work complete without seeing your financial information.

How should I compare the cost?

Compare what you need the subscription to cover. Plainsmith is $40 a month or $400 a year for the website and Console. Workflow tools and their setup are included. Your domain and any front-desk voice charges are separate. The website plan isn’t priced per seat.

What if I outgrow you?

You can export your records and move to another system. Your domain remains yours. To keep the website, buy its files for $499 less your plan credit and arrange your own hosting. Workflow tools stop when the plan ends; your Console remains free and read-only.

What is outside Plainsmith’s scope?

Dispatch and route optimization, payroll, inventory and accounting integration. We also don’t provide materials takeoff or a full field-service mobile app. Tell us which of those you need before you buy, so we can check whether Plainsmith fits.

Plainsmith vs HubSpot

HubSpot is a platform you operate. This is work that happens without you.

HubSpot's free CRM is good, and it assumes somebody sits down and uses it. If you are on a mower and the phone is the business, that assumption is the entire problem. Plainsmith is the other shape: fifteen prebuilt tools running on your business number, plus a website written and built for you. That is work that happens while you're on the job.

Where HubSpot wins, plainly

If any of these describe you, stop reading and go use HubSpot. It’s a better product than us at every one of them, and it’s free to start.

You have somebody at a desk. An office manager, a partner who does the books, anyone whose job includes opening a laptop. HubSpot rewards that person enormously, and we don’t replace them.
You sell over weeks, not days. Long consultative sales with several people involved, where the value is in remembering who said what in March. That’s what a CRM is for, and ours isn’t one.
You want to send campaigns. Newsletters, segmentation, open rates, A/B subject lines. We only collect the list; sending to it is somebody else’s product, and HubSpot is good at it.
You want to design your own reports. Attribution, forecasting, custom fields, pipelines you build yourself. With us you get how many people got in touch this month against last, and that is the end of it. Anything you want to slice yourself is HubSpot’s job, not ours.
You are growing past ten people. There’s a size where you need a system of record. When you reach it you’ll outgrow us, and we’d rather say so now than sell you something you leave in a year.

If you already run a CRM

Plenty of people land here already paying for Jobber, Housecall Pro or ServiceTitan, and the only thing they want from us is for the website to stop being a separate island. That we can do.

Every form on your site can post straight into your own Zapier or Make account. That drops the lead wherever you already keep them, the moment someone fills it in. The Zapier or Make account is yours — you create it, so its plan and its data stay in your hands — and we do the wiring and keep it working. Name the cost, since we name everyone else’s: Zapier’s free tier is 100 tasks a month and two-step Zaps, which is enough for a single lead handoff and not much more. Past that it is $19.99 a month billed annually, $29.99 monthly, for 750 tasks and multi-step Zaps (Zapier’s published prices, checked 21 August 2026). That is a bill you pay them, not us. Included with your plan, and it is the only integration we sell — one thing we can keep working beats five connectors that each break on their own schedule.

We do not write into your CRM ourselves, and we would rather not: the day their API changes, you want that to be somebody’s whole job, not a favor from your website guy.

Where it goes wrong for a one-to-ten person trade

It’s not that HubSpot is bad. It’s who has to operate it.

	HubSpot	Plainsmith
The missed call at 2pm	Logged, if the call was made through HubSpot. Nothing goes back to the caller unless somebody notices and acts.	A text goes straight back — “Hi, this is ⟨your business⟩ — sorry we missed your call, we couldn’t get to the phone. What can we help with?” — then your line offers two open slots from your calendar and books the one they press, while you’re still under the sink.
Texting from your business number	Not native. You add a third-party SMS app, connect it, and register yourself with the US carriers for A2P 10DLC, a form most owners abandon.	The whole point. Your texts send from your own phone, on your own number — there’s no rented app number in the middle, so the carrier registration never exists, and the number and every contact are yours outright.
Your website	HubSpot has a CMS. You still design and write it, or pay somebody who does.	Written and built for you from one questionnaire (ten to thirty minutes) — finished in 48 hours, live when you approve it — $40 a month.
Who has to log in	Somebody, regularly, or the data rots and the automation has nothing to fire on.	Nobody, on a normal day. The tools run on the phone traffic you already have; the console is for when you want it.
Your crew's morning	Not what it is for.	Each man gets his own run texted at 6 a.m., and his own link to mark jobs done from the driveway.
Setup	Free to start; hours to configure right, and it is configuration, not use.	A questionnaire. We do the setup and test it on your own line before it goes near a customer.
Price shape	Free for 2 users. Starter $7/seat/month (list $20). Then Professional — $1,300/month for 6 seats on the Customer Platform bundle, or $800/month billed annually for 3 on Marketing Hub alone (that one adds a mandatory $3,000 onboarding fee). Between them sits Sales Hub Professional at $90 a seat billed annually and $100 month-to-month, so three people is $400. HubSpot’s published prices, checked 21 August 2026.	Workflow tools are included in the $40 monthly or $400 annual plan, however many you switch on. Not per seat, and it doesn’t step.

The price comparison

On subscription alone, HubSpot is cheaper than us and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Free covers two users. Starter is $7 a seat a month at the current promotional rate, list is $20, and for a one-man shop that is less than our $40. If the monthly number is the thing you are optimizing, they win that line and you should know it before you read another word.

Two things it doesn’t include. First, a website: you are still buying that somewhere, and a builder runs $17 to $29 a month, billed annually, before anyone writes a word of it (Wix and Squarespace’s published prices, checked 21 and 22 August 2026). Second, texting from your own number, which needs an SMS app on top and your own A2P 10DLC carrier registration: a carrier form that asks for your EIN, sample messages and an opt-in policy, and takes days to come back. Ours needs none of that: your texts leave from your own phone, on your own number. The carrier registration exists for businesses texting through rented application numbers. There is no rented number here, so there is nothing to file.

Then there is the shape of the ladder. That $7 is per person, per month. The next rung is Professional: $1,300 a month for six seats on the Customer Platform bundle, or $800 for three on Marketing Hub alone, billed annually ($890 month-to-month), and that one adds a mandatory $3,000 onboarding fee, so year one is $12,600. Between $7 and either of them sits Sales Hub Professional at $90 a seat, which is the rung most people actually move to. For a three-crew landscaper that is $400 a month, not thirteen hundred. It is still a CRM somebody has to run, and it is still the step from $21 a month to $400 for the same three people. That jump is where a lot of small trades quietly stop upgrading and go back to a notebook.

Ours does not step: fifteen tools, no monthly of their own, however many people you employ.

But the number is not really the argument. A CRM only returns anything if somebody keeps it current, and keeping it current is an hour a week a three-van shop does not have going spare. If you would use HubSpot, it is the better buy at any of those prices. The question is not whether it is good software, which it plainly is. It is who in your business has that hour, every week, on top of the actual work.

They are not mutually exclusive

Nothing stops you running both, and some businesses should. Keep HubSpot as the record of who your customers are and what you have quoted; let us handle the phone, the calendar, the quote follow-ups and the review requests. You own your data on our side — the number, the contacts, every message and appointment — so exporting into HubSpot is yours to do whenever you want it.

Fair questions

Does Plainsmith replace a full CRM?: The Console keeps customer records, quotes and payments alongside your jobs. It doesn’t offer custom sales pipelines, email campaigns or reports you build yourself. If those are what you need, keep a CRM built for them.
Can a small crew use it?: Yes. You can assign jobs to named crew members and give each person a view of their own day. They can send an on-my-way message, add a job note and mark work complete without seeing your financial information.
How should I compare the cost?: Compare what you need the subscription to cover. Plainsmith is $40 a month or $400 a year for the website and Console. Workflow tools and their setup are included. Your domain and any front-desk voice charges are separate. The website plan isn’t priced per seat.
What if I outgrow you?: You can export your records and move to another system. Your domain remains yours. To keep the website, buy its files for $499 less your plan credit and arrange your own hosting. Workflow tools stop when the plan ends; your Console remains free and read-only.
What is outside Plainsmith’s scope?: Dispatch and route optimization, payroll, inventory and accounting integration. We also don’t provide materials takeoff or a full field-service mobile app. Tell us which of those you need before you buy, so we can check whether Plainsmith fits.

The short answer

Choose HubSpot if somebody will operate it. Choose us if the answer is that nobody will. The work still needs doing whether or not anyone sits down.

Watch the tools run › See what the plan covers

Already have a website somewhere?

Wherever it lives, paste the address into the switch page. We’ll use the services, hours and contact details we find to start your questionnaire, and you answer the rest. The old site stays up until the new one is live.

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