Your Workflows Are on the Meter Now: We Built One Twice

Mark spent Monday morning building a second version of an automation that already worked.

Same trigger, same client, same end result. A client we're moving off Salesforce goes live next month. Every service activation they handle, a price refresh for example, has to become a tracked piece of work kicked off from the company record. Version one runs on HubSpot Work. Testing it, Mark noticed it was using credits, even for the basic workflow. He hadn't expected that, and he'd been told it wouldn't. So that morning he built version two, which creates a project instead, and had both ready before the client session that day.

We still don't know which one they'll keep. I want to explain why we built two, because I think a lot of portals are going to be surprised by this in 2027.

The meter is on the workflow

Last month I wrote that HubSpot's new pricing is the best change in five years, and that you should read the credits section twice. Here is the line to read a third time. On the seats-and-credits model, HubSpot's credits page lists "all workflow actions except branches, delays, and go-to actions" among the features that use credits. HubSpot's pricing supplement puts one workflow action at 3 credits at the lowest volume tier. A workflow that sends an email is charged twice: once for the action, once for the send.

HubSpot's messaging put credits next to AI, and that's where plenty of buyers filed them. The workflow line puts ordinary automation on the same meter: lead routing, deal-stage notifications, task creation, the record update when a quote is signed. New customers in EMEA have been priced this way since 1 October. The US price list hasn't changed, and existing customers can't switch. HubSpot's terms do say it "may choose to move you to our then-current products", so if you're on legacy pricing, do the count anyway.

A per-record workflow is a line item

The service activation flow is the kind of thing nobody budgets for. It isn't a campaign and it doesn't send email. It's a small operational workflow that runs every time an activation is requested, and Mark expects a lot of them. On our standup he said that if it came to 20 credits each time, we'd have to do the math. The 20 was a guess, and that was the problem: four weeks from go-live, nobody on our side could say what one run costs.

So the second build bought us a choice we could price. It cost one morning. Compare that with finding the number on the first invoice, after the team has been trained on one version.

Now the uncomfortable part. We don't yet know exactly what Mark saw being charged. If it's the workflow action itself, the project version is metered the same way, and his morning bought us a different screen and nothing else. If it's something inside Work, the project version may be cheaper. HubSpot's Work setup page says rule-based actions inside a Work agent, like updating a table value or sending an email notification, don't use credits, which only makes the picture less obvious. We're meeting HubSpot this week to pin it down, and the client will choose with the per-run cost on the table.

What to do before your next go-live

Treat every per-record automation the way you already treat email volume. List the workflows that fire on a record event rather than on a campaign. Estimate runs per month from last year's deal and ticket counts. Find out what one run costs in your portal, and if nobody can tell you, pause the build until someone can. Then set a feature-level limit under Manage usage by feature (Account & Billing, HubSpot Credits), so you get an alert before you get an invoice.

Where a process will run thousands of times, consider building it two ways before you build the training. In our case the two versions share a trigger and differ only in the last step. What the client sees is different: Work shows the status on the right-hand side of the record, while a project means clicking in to find it. Mark has both ready, and we'll train the client on whichever one the per-run cost justifies.

It's the same logic as seats. A discount on the licence doesn't help if nobody counted the usage behind it. Credits at least show usage per feature on the billing screen. Use it. If you've priced a single workflow run in your own portal and the number surprised you either way, I'd like to hear 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.