HubSpot's New Pricing Is the Best Change in Five Years.

One salesperson. Two seats. Over $250 a month.

That is a client of ours today, on HubSpot's current pricing. The rep needs a Sales seat to sell and a Revenue seat to touch CPQ. One person, one job, two licences. On 1 October HubSpot switched on a new pricing model for all new business across EMEA, and under it that person is one GTM Seat at €100 a month on Professional. Full access to the edition. Done.

If you run a portal in the US, read this anyway. My expectation is that the model reaches you, and EMEA is where HubSpot is learning what breaks. I will share what has changed, the good new and what to look out for.

What changed

A new customer makes three decisions, in order. Edition: one per portal, Starter, Professional or Enterprise, with record limits of 25,000, 250,000 and 15 million, and no separate marketing contacts charge. Seats: a GTM Seat for anyone who talks to customers €20 (starter), €100 (Pro) and €175 (Enterprise) a month by edition and you get full access to all hubs in the edition; an Ops Seat for the people who build automation, reporting and integrations (€15, €50, €50) that can see quotes, marketing email and sequences but cannot create, send or enrol; and a view-only seat. No seat minimums. Every Super Admin needs a GTM Seat. Credits: 5,000, 10,000 or 15,000 a month by edition, reset monthly, no rollover. Email sends, qualifying workflow actions, AI agents, accepted quotes and Data Studio syncs draw on them. Branches, delays and one-to-one sales email do not.

Above the allowance you commit to credits for a discount, pay as you go at list, or buy a capacity pack: a flat monthly fee for a set volume of sends or workflow actions, and usage inside the pack never touches credits. Existing customers, EMEA included, stay on legacy pricing and cannot switch.

The best pricing change HubSpot has made in five years

Start with the seat. Under the old model, buying HubSpot meant assembling products and editions into a licence before anyone could quote it, and the salesperson above is what that produced: a product catalogue, priced per person. The new model prices access by what a person does and meters what the system does. That is the right shape, and it is the thing that most needed fixing.

Here are some questions we expect. Read as caveats, most of them hold. "It feels more expensive": there is no base platform fee, so a new portal pays for seats and capacity and sees value on day one. "We need budget certainty": committed seats plus committed credits plus packs is a more legible baseline than a stack of hubs ever was, provided you size the packs at signature. "We've been burned by usage billing": caps at portal, feature and activity level, alerts, a pause button, no automatic upgrades. The cap stops the bill. It does not restart the campaign that paused mid-flight, so treat the cap as the backstop and the pack as the plan.

Read the credits section twice

Now the objection HubSpot's answer does not settle: "We're not using AI yet." The scripted reply is that credits are not only for AI, email and workflows run through them too, and the included allowance gives you room to try AI without buying anything. True. And that is exactly the problem for a mid-market portal.

The included allowance on Professional is 10,000 credits. By my arithmetic from HubSpot's own pack pricing, a marketing email send is 15 credits, so the allowance covers around 666 sends a month before a single workflow fires or an agent runs. A workflow action that sends an email is charged for both the action and the send. The two highest-volume things most portals do are the two things now metered, and that metering is where every mid-market bill will be decided. The included number on the quote is not what you will pay. The pack you size is.

So concede the seat. Then do the sum: last year's marketing sends and workflow executions by month, workflow actions split into those that send email and those that do not, and the pack sized before you see the quote. In the US on legacy pricing? Do the same count now. The portals that know their numbers will negotiate. The ones that do not will discover them on the first invoice.

The underrated feature is the seasonal pack

HubSpot's answer to "our needs are seasonal" is the best thing in the model and the least discussed: size the pack to the normal month and let pay-as-you-go absorb the spike, no contract change needed. Anyone who runs an annual event or a quarter-end push should build the pack around the ten ordinary months and let the two loud ones run at list. That is a better deal than any hub bundle gave you, and it only works if you know which ten months those are.

If you have modelled this for your own portal and got a different answer, I want to see it.

This came out of a client project. The story behind it, and what to check in your own portal, goes to subscribers on Thursdays. Get Thursday's note.