Is Plainsmith cheaper than HubSpot?

Not on subscription alone. HubSpot is free for two users and $7 per seat per month on Starter at the current promotional rate, which is less than Plainsmith’s $19 per month care plan for a single-person business. HubSpot Starter does not include a website or texting from your own business number with A2P 10DLC carrier registration, both of which Plainsmith provides. Plainsmith is not priced per seat, and HubSpot’s next tier above Starter is Professional at $1,300 per month.

No. There are no custom fields, no deal stages you design, and no reporting. What exists is a straight line — enquiry, quote, booked job, completed job with notes, invoice, review request — visible on one board.

Is Plainsmith or HubSpot better for a landscaping company with 1-3 crews?

Plainsmith, if the owner is in the field and takes the calls. Jobs are assigned to named crew members, each gets their own day-sheet texted to them in the morning rather than the whole board, and each has a scoped link to send an on-my-way, add a note and close a job. HubSpot has no equivalent for crew dispatch. HubSpot is the better choice if someone works at a desk, the sales cycle runs over weeks, or you need reporting and email marketing.

What does Plainsmith not do?

Route optimisation, timesheets, payroll, inventory, equipment tracking, estimating with materials takeoff, accounting sync with QuickBooks or Xero, and a mobile app. A business whose bottleneck is one of those is better served by a vertical field-service platform.

What happens if I outgrow Plainsmith?

You own the phone number, the carrier registration and every contact, and the website can be bought outright for $300 at any time. Nothing has to be renegotiated to leave.

Plainsmith vs HubSpot

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

HubSpot's free CRM is genuinely good and genuinely free — we will not pretend otherwise. It also 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.

Where HubSpot wins, plainly

If any of these describe you, stop reading and go and use HubSpot. It is a better product than us at all of them and it is 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 do not 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 is what a CRM is for and ours is not one.
You want to email a list. Newsletters, campaigns, segmentation, open rates. HubSpot's marketing tooling is a different sport from anything we do.
You want reporting. Dashboards, attribution, forecasting, custom fields, pipelines you design yourself. We have none of that and are not building it.
You are growing past ten people. There is a size where you need a system of record. When you reach it, you will outgrow us — and we would rather say so now than sell you something you leave in a year.

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

Not because HubSpot is bad. Because of 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.	They get a text from your own number within seconds, it asks what they need, offers two real openings from your calendar, and books one. You were under a 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. We file the carrier registration for you and you own the Twilio account and the number outright.
Your website	HubSpot has a CMS. You still design and write it, or pay somebody who does.	Written and built for you from ten minutes of questions, live in 48 hours, $10 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 six, and his own link to mark jobs done from the driveway.
Setup	Free to start; hours to configure properly, and it is configuration, not use.	A brief and a phone call. We do the setup and test it on your real line before it goes near a customer.
Price shape	Free for 2 users. Starter $7/seat/month (list $20). Then Professional at $1,300/month for 6 seats. There is nothing in between.	$149 for the first tool, $49 for each after, one $19/month plan covering all of them however many you have. Not per seat, and it does not step.

The honest version of 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 $19 care plan. If the monthly number is the thing you are optimising, they win that line and you should know it before you read another word.

Two things it does not include. First, a website: you are still buying that somewhere, and a builder runs $16 to $25 a month before anyone writes a word of it. 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. We fill that in for you.

Then there is the shape of the ladder. Starter is $7 a seat. The next rung is Professional at $1,300 a month, six seats, and additional seats at $45. There is nothing between $7 and $1,300. A three-crew landscaper who outgrows Starter is not offered a $60 plan — they are quoted thirteen hundred, and that is the conversation where a lot of small trades quietly stop upgrading and go back to a notebook.

Ours does not step. Sixteen tools, one $19 a month, 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 genuinely use HubSpot, it is the better buy at any of those prices. The honest question is not whether it is good software — it plainly is — but 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 and the chasing. You own your data on our side — the number, the contacts, every message — so exporting into HubSpot is yours to do whenever you want it.

Fair questions

Is Plainsmith a CRM?: No, and calling it one would be a lie you would discover in week two. There are no custom fields, no deal stages you design, no reporting. What exists is a straight line — enquiry, quote, booked job, completed job with notes, invoice, review request — visible on one board because that line is what a trade actually runs on.
I have 1–3 crews. Does that change the answer?: It makes it clearer. Crews are where HubSpot has nothing to say: jobs get assigned to named people, each one gets their own day texted to them in the morning rather than the whole board, and each has a stripped-down link where they can send an on-my-way, add a note and close the job — without seeing your money or anyone else's work.
HubSpot Starter is $7 a seat. Why would I pay you $19?: For a single seat and nothing else, you would not — and if the monthly line is what matters most, buy Starter. What $7 a seat does not buy is a website, texting from your own number, or the carrier registration that makes that texting legal in the US. Add a builder at $16 to $25 and an SMS app on top and the comparison moves. Add a second and third person and it moves again, because ours is not per seat. And when Starter runs out, the next rung is $1,300 a month.
What if I outgrow you?: Then you outgrow us, and you should go. You own the phone number, the carrier registration and every contact; the site can be bought outright for $300 whenever you like. We would rather be the thing that got you to the size where you needed HubSpot than the thing you resent paying for.
What does Plainsmith flatly not do?: Route optimisation, timesheets, payroll, inventory, equipment tracking, estimating with materials takeoff, accounting sync, and a mobile app. If your bottleneck is on that list, a vertical field-service platform will serve you better than either of us, and our $200 audit will tell you so in writing.

The short answer

Choose HubSpot if somebody will operate it. Choose us if the honest answer is that nobody will — because the work still needs doing, and it can either wait for a person or happen on its own.

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