Two people can use HubSpot’s CRM for free, with no end date. The moment a third person needs to edit deals, you start paying per seat, and the plan you pick decides whether that bill is $60 a month or closer to $300.
HubSpot’s free CRM covers up to 2 users and 1,000 contacts, and a third person who edits records needs a paid seat. Starter is $20 per seat billed monthly, Professional is $90 per seat a month billed annually plus a required one-time onboarding fee of $1,500 and Enterprise starts at $150 per seat plus $3,500 onboarding. Fluid CRM is $16 per seat a month.
Is HubSpot Free? What the Free CRM Includes
Yes, HubSpot’s CRM is free for up to two users and stays free. Its free CRM page puts the limits in one line: up to two users and 1,000 contacts, “100% free, with no expiration date.” No credit card is needed to start.
You will find other numbers quoted around the web, like unlimited users or a million contacts. Those are not what HubSpot’s own free CRM page says, so plan around 2 users and 1,000 contacts.
Inside those limits you get a real CRM. Free includes contact management, a deal pipeline, email tracking and templates, meeting scheduling, quotes, live chat and a reporting dashboard. HubSpot’s free tools come with one deal pipeline and no custom ones.
HubSpot sells access by seat type, and the type decides what a person can do and what they cost.
| Seat type | Comes with | Price per seat | What the person can do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free user | Free CRM | $0 | Edit contacts and deals, up to 2 users per account |
| View-only seat | Any paid plan | $0 | See records and reports without changing anything |
| Core Seat | Sales Hub Starter | $20 a month, billed monthly | Full access to the Starter tools |
| Sales Seat | Sales Hub Professional | $90 a month billed annually, $100 billed monthly | Full access to Professional, including forecasting |
| Sales Seat | Sales Hub Enterprise | From $150 a month | Full access to Enterprise, through HubSpot’s sales team |
That view-only row matters more than it looks. Once you are on a paid plan, a co-founder who only checks the pipeline on Fridays does not need a paid seat.
When HubSpot’s Free Plan Stops Working for a Team of 3 to 5
For a team of 3 to 5, the free plan does not fade out slowly. It stops at one of four specific limits, and each one has a price attached.
1. The third person who needs to edit deals
Free stops at two users. The day you hire a salesperson or bring in a partner who logs calls and moves deals, you need a paid seat for everyone who edits.
On Starter that is $20 per seat a month on monthly billing. Three seats come to $60 a month, and five come to $100.
2. Contact number 1,001
A thousand contacts sounds like plenty until you import one cold email list or a year of inbound inquiries. A team doing outbound can cross it in a single afternoon.
Keep the free account clean by importing only the people you are actively talking to. Everyone else can live in your email tool or a spreadsheet until they reply.
3. The second pipeline
The free CRM gives you one deal pipeline. That is fine when you sell one thing, and it breaks when you want new business in one place and renewals or partners in another.
Starter allows custom pipelines, up to 15 across the whole account. Professional raises that to 100.
4. The first custom workflow or sales forecast
Starter includes up to 50 workflows with restricted triggers and actions. Fully customizable workflows, up to 300, and HubSpot’s sales forecasting both start on Professional.
So the team that wants a forecast for the next quarter, or a workflow built exactly the way it sells, is choosing between free and $90 per seat plus a $1,500 onboarding fee, not between free and $20.
Which of these four has your team already hit this month? If the honest answer is the first one only, you need extra seats and nothing more. A simple CRM covers that at one price per seat, with no plan to upgrade into later.
HubSpot Sales Hub Plans, Prices and What Each One Gates
HubSpot charges per seat on every paid plan and adds a monthly allowance of HubSpot Credits, which pay for its AI agents and some automated features. Here is what each plan costs and what you get for it.
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Commitment | HubSpot Credits per month | One-time fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | None | None | None |
| Starter | Discounted for new customers | $20/seat/month | Monthly | 500 | None |
| Professional | $90/seat/month | $100/seat/month | Annual, even when paid monthly | 3,000 | $1,500 onboarding, required |
| Enterprise | From $150/seat/month | Through sales | Through sales | 5,000 | $3,500 onboarding, required |
HubSpot discounts Starter’s annual price for new customers. Treat $20 per seat as the list price, and read the current offer on HubSpot’s pricing page before you sign.
The Professional row hides the detail most small teams miss. The $100 monthly price still comes with an annual commitment, so paying monthly does not let you walk away in month three.
Credits reset every month and do not roll over. Extra credits cost $0.010 each, so a team that leans on HubSpot’s AI agents can add a usage bill on top of the seats.
| What you get | Starter | Professional | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Users who can edit | One per paid seat | One per paid seat | One per paid seat |
| Custom pipelines | Up to 15 | Up to 100 | Up to 350 |
| Workflows | Up to 50, restricted triggers and actions | Up to 300, fully customizable | Up to 1,000 |
| Sales forecasting | No | Yes | Yes, across team hierarchies |
| Dashboards | 10 | 30 | 75 |
| View-only seats | Free | Free | Free |
The jump from Starter to Professional is where HubSpot’s price stops looking small. It is also where a team gets the features it usually signed up to HubSpot for, and the $1,500 onboarding fee that comes with them.
What HubSpot Costs for 3, 5 and 10 Seats
Below is what year one of HubSpot costs on each plan. The Professional and Enterprise totals include the one-time onboarding fee, $1,500 on Professional and $3,500 on Enterprise, which you pay once when you buy.
| Plan and billing | 3 seats, year one | 5 seats, year one | 10 seats, year one | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Not available | Not available | Not available | Free stops at 2 users |
| Starter, billed monthly ($20) | $720 | $1,200 | $2,400 | No onboarding fee |
| Professional, billed annually ($90) | $4,740 | $6,900 | $12,300 | Includes the $1,500 onboarding fee |
| Professional, billed monthly ($100) | $5,100 | $7,500 | $13,500 | Includes the $1,500 onboarding fee |
| Enterprise, from $150 | $8,900 | $12,500 | $21,500 | Includes the $3,500 onboarding fee |
| Fluid CRM, billed annually ($144 per seat a year) | $432 | $720 | $1,440 | No onboarding fee |
| Fluid CRM, billed monthly ($16) | $576 | $960 | $1,920 | No onboarding fee |
From year two the onboarding fee drops away, so Professional on annual billing costs $3,240, $5,400 and $10,800 a year for 3, 5 and 10 seats.
For a team of five, moving from Starter to Professional takes the yearly seat bill from $1,200 to $5,400, and the $1,500 onboarding fee makes year one $6,900. That is $4,200 a year in seats for forecasting and fully customizable workflows, so it pays to know who on the team will build and maintain them.
At 10 seats the same step is $8,400 a year, plus the $1,500 fee in year one. Somebody has to own that setup, or the team pays Professional prices to use Starter features.
If you are comparing tools on the same seat math, our Pipedrive pricing and Attio pricing breakdowns use the same 3 and 5 seat approach. For 21 CRMs in one table, see our guide to how much a CRM costs.
What Sales Hub Professional Includes That Small Teams Skip
Sales Hub Professional is built for a sales org with a manager and a person who owns the CRM. A team of 3 to 5 gets 300 workflows, 100 pipelines, 30 dashboards and 3,000 monthly credits for AI agents, and usually opens a handful of them.
HubSpot also sells Marketing, Service and Content hubs on the same platform. A small sales team buying Sales Hub does not pay for those and does not need them.
Andy, a freelance web designer who had a HubSpot account before us, described the CRMs he had tried as “over complicated and packed with features for companies with thousands of staff and customers.” Before switching to us he had gone back to pen and paper or Excel.
Earlier I ran Fenixtal, an outbound agency, and the calls we booked landed in a lot of other people’s CRMs. The leads that died in our clients’ pipelines were rarely lost to a missing feature. They died in a CRM nobody had opened that week.
That is the job we built Fluid CRM for. It is one plan at $16 per seat a month or $144 per seat a year, with unlimited pipelines, follow-up reminders, lead capture forms, 8 in-app automations, revenue forecasting, the API and webhooks all included.
Kon T., a CEO who uses Fluid CRM across several small projects, wrote on G2 that our founder “clearly pays attention to real-world usability rather than just adding features for the sake of it.” That is the trade a small team makes when it skips Professional.
Fluid CRM has no free plan, only a 7-day trial, so a two-person team happy on HubSpot Free pays nothing to stay where it is. It also logs email by BCC and has no two-way inbox sync.
If you want more options beyond these two, our guide to HubSpot alternatives for small business covers them. For a verdict by team type rather than by price, read is HubSpot worth it. If Salesforce is the other name on your shortlist, HubSpot vs Salesforce compares what each charges for a forecast.
HubSpot Pricing FAQs
HubSpot’s free CRM costs nothing for one or two users. A paid Sales Hub Starter seat is $20 a month billed monthly, and Professional is $90 a month billed annually or $100 billed monthly on an annual commitment, plus a required one-time onboarding fee of $1,500.
No. The free CRM allows up to two users, so a third person who needs to edit records needs a paid seat. On Starter, three seats cost $60 a month on monthly billing.
No. Starter has no onboarding fee. Professional requires a one-time onboarding fee of $1,500 and Enterprise one of $3,500, both paid when you buy.
No. On paid Sales Hub plans, view-only seats cost nothing. They let a person see records and reports without editing them, which suits a manager or partner who only reviews the pipeline.
Yes, with a catch on Professional. Starter can be paid monthly with a monthly commitment. Professional can be paid monthly at $100 per seat, but it still requires an annual commitment.
Which HubSpot Plan a Team of 3 to 5 Should Pick
Pick by the limit you actually hit, not by the plan with the most features.
- Stay on Free if only two people edit deals and you have fewer than 1,000 contacts.
- Take Starter if your only problem is the third or fourth person. Budget $20 per seat a month and add view-only seats for anyone who just looks.
- Take Professional only if someone on the team will build workflows and forecasts and keep them current. Budget $90 per seat a month on annual billing, plus $1,500 for onboarding in year one.
- Skip Enterprise at this size. It is priced and sold for companies with a sales operations team.
If what you need is a pipeline, reminders and seats for everyone, a simple CRM like Fluid CRM keeps that at one price per seat with nothing to upgrade later.
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