HubSpot's price list has four axes. One of them is a fee nobody mentions.
HubSpot figures verified against hubspot.com/pricing and legal.hubspot.com — their contractual Product & Services Catalog — on 17 July 2026. Annual billing, list price, no discount.
HubSpot is a much larger product than Blob and we're not going to pretend otherwise. It has ticketing, knowledge bases, lead scoring, A/B testing and a 2,000-app marketplace. If you need those, buy HubSpot.
What HubSpot also has is a pricing model with four simultaneous axes — per seat, per marketing contact, per AI credit, and a mandatory one-time onboarding fee of between $1,500 and $17,000 depending on tier. That last one is stated plainly on HubSpot's own pricing pages and omitted from almost every comparison article you'll read.
A five-person team on Sales Hub Professional pays $6,900 in year one. On Customer Platform Professional, $25,600. The same team on Blob pays $1,535, with no onboarding fee and no contact-overage billing.
HubSpot's free and Starter tiers are genuinely good and genuinely cheap. The question is what happens when you outgrow them.
HubSpot's pricing pages describe it as "the required, one-time… Onboarding". It is not optional and it is not negotiable at list price.
| Product | Professional | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing Hub | $3,000 | $7,000 |
| Sales Hub | $1,500 | $3,500 |
| Service Hub | $1,500 | $3,500 |
| Customer Platform | $10,000 | $17,000 |
Customer Platform Professional onboarding is $10,000 — more than the software's first seven months. Starter tiers require none. Blob has no onboarding fee at any tier.
| HubSpot Customer Platform Starter | $1,200 |
| Blob Medium Blob | $1,535 |
| HubSpot Sales Hub Pro — software $5,400 + onboarding $1,500 | $6,900 |
| Blob Medium Blob | $1,535 |
HubSpot Starter is cheaper than Blob and we'd be lying to say otherwise. It's also a deliberately limited product — no automations, no sequences, no e-signatures, capped everything. It exists to get you onto the ladder.
| Marketing Hub Professional — software $10,680 + onboarding $3,000 | $13,680 |
| Sales Hub Enterprise — software $9,000 + onboarding $3,500 | $12,500 |
| Customer Platform Professional — software $15,600 + onboarding $10,000 | $25,600 |
| Customer Platform Enterprise — software $56,400 + onboarding $17,000 | $73,400 |
| Blob Medium Blob — five users, everything included | $1,535 |
HubSpot bills on marketing contacts as well as seats, and the overage behaviour is unusual enough to quote directly. From HubSpot's own documentation:
"If you exceed your marketing contacts tier at any time, you will be billed immediately… your contact tier pricing cannot be downgraded until your contract renewal date." And: "Contact tier upgrades occur automatically and cannot be prevented once the limit is exceeded."
HubSpot's own worked example: a list at 998 contacts on a 1,000 tier, add five, and 1,003 contacts triggers the 2,000 tier — billed for the remaining eleven and a half months. Three contacts over the line costs you a year of the next tier.
Contacts also cost roughly five times more on Professional than Enterprise at the first paid band, which is the mechanism that moves teams up. At around 50,000 contacts, Professional contact fees alone run to about $2,400 a month.
Blob's plans have contact caps too. They just don't bill you automatically for crossing one.
Connect Stripe or Paddle read-only and every contact shows lifetime value, payment history, subscription state and churn risk, with MRR and ARR across the base.
Claude, Cursor or any MCP-compatible agent reads and acts on your CRM directly. Token-authenticated, per-tenant scoped, fully audited.
Agencies get every client in a physically separate database file, switchable from one login. HubSpot's answer is a separate portal per client.
Per workspace. Not per seat, not per marketing contact, not per AI credit, and no onboarding fee.
| Blob | HubSpot | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per workspace | Per seat, per marketing contact, per AI credit, plus onboarding |
| Mandatory onboarding fee | None | $1,500 – $17,000 one-off |
| Contact overage | No automatic upgrade | Billed immediately, no downgrade until renewal |
| E-signatures & quotes | Every plan | Revenue Hub, +$85/seat/mo |
| Bulk email campaigns | Every plan | Marketing Hub, from $800/mo at Pro |
| Booking pages | Every plan, round-robin | Sales Hub Pro and up |
| Workflow automations | Every plan | Professional and up |
| Audit log | Every plan | Enterprise |
| Stripe billing intelligence | Yes | Not available |
| MCP connector for AI agents | Yes | Not available |
| Isolated client workspaces | Yes | Not available |
This is a longer list than on our other comparison pages, because HubSpot is a genuinely bigger product.
Ticketing with SLAs, a knowledge base, a customer portal. Blob has none of it. If you need a help desk, HubSpot has one and we don't.
Calculated properties with a real formula language, rollup properties, and labelled associations — typed relationships like "billing contact" or "decision maker". Blob has a flat label taxonomy by comparison.
Lead scoring, A/B testing, multi-step branching workflows with delay-until-event. Blob's automations are single-trigger, single-action.
A custom report builder across multiple data sources with real joins. Blob has fixed report cards. This is the widest capability gap between the two products.
Over 2,000 apps. Blob has a REST API, webhooks, Zapier, Make.com and MCP.
HubSpot's free tier and Starter tier are cheaper than Blob. If Starter covers what you need, it's the better buy.
Against HubSpot's paid tiers, dramatically. A five-person team on Sales Hub Professional pays $6,900 in year one including the mandatory $1,500 onboarding fee; the same team on Blob pays $1,535. On Customer Platform Professional it's $25,600 against $1,535. HubSpot's Starter tier at $1,200 a year for five people is genuinely cheaper than Blob, but it is a deliberately limited product.
HubSpot charges a mandatory one-time onboarding fee on Professional and Enterprise tiers: $1,500 for Sales Hub Professional, $3,000 for Marketing Hub Professional, $3,500 for Sales or Service Hub Enterprise, and $10,000 for Customer Platform Professional. It is stated on HubSpot's own pricing pages as required and confirmed in their legal catalog, but most comparison articles omit it entirely. Blob has no onboarding fee.
You are billed immediately for the next tier, and HubSpot's documentation states the increase cannot be prevented once the limit is exceeded and cannot be downgraded until your contract renewal date. HubSpot's own worked example describes 1,003 contacts triggering the 2,000-contact tier for the remaining eleven and a half months of a contract. Blob's plans have contact caps but no automatic upgrade billing.
A great deal. HubSpot has ticketing with SLAs, a knowledge base and customer portal, calculated and rollup properties, labelled associations, lead scoring, A/B testing, multi-step branching workflows, a full custom report builder and an app marketplace with over 2,000 apps. Blob has none of those. HubSpot is a far larger product.
Yes, via CSV. Blob's eight-tab import wizard covers contacts, organisations, deals, activities, notes, lead sources, custom fields and templates. A native HubSpot API importer is on the roadmap; the Pipedrive one already exists and covers 17 entity types.
HubSpot pricing, onboarding fees and contact-tier terms verified against hubspot.com/pricing and legal.hubspot.com on 17 July 2026. HubSpot repackages regularly — if a figure here is out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.
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