HubSpot free plan limits: the numbers, and which one you hit first
Every hard limit on HubSpot's free tier, taken from the official catalog — plus which ones actually stop an agency, and the one the onboarding spends for you.
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HubSpot’s free CRM is genuinely free and genuinely permanent. It’s also a funnel, and the interesting question isn’t what it includes — it’s which limit you hit first, and whether that’s the one you can live with.
Here are the numbers, and what each actually means once real work is running through the account.
The limits
Taken from HubSpot’s official product catalog. Verify before you plan around any of them — these do change.
| Free tier | |
|---|---|
| Users | 2 |
| Contacts | 1,000 |
| Deal pipelines | 1 |
| Custom properties | 10 total |
| Marketing email sends | 2,000 per calendar month |
| Email templates | 3 |
| Active CRM segments | 10 (plus 1,000 static) |
| Landing pages | 30 |
| Personal meeting links | 1 |
| Shared inboxes | 1 |
| Connected ad accounts | 3 |
| HubSpot branding | Present and not removable |
Which one stops you first
The pricing page leads with contacts. For an agency, contacts are almost never the problem — 1,000 is a lot of real people when your client count is in the dozens.
These are the ones that bite, roughly in the order they arrive.
1. One deal pipeline
This is the first real wall, and for an agency it arrives fast.
One pipeline means every client, every prospect and every renewal shares a single board with one set of stages. If you run new business and delivery as different processes — most agencies do — you can’t separate them. If you manage pipelines on behalf of clients, you can’t give each client their own.
The paid Starter tier takes it to two. Two is better than one; it is not “as many as you need.”
2. Ten custom properties
Ten sounds like plenty until you see how it’s spent.
When I set up an account through the AI onboarding, it created four custom deal properties before I had touched anything — campaign objective, media type, campaign start date, campaign budget. Useful fields, and close to what I’d have built myself. But that’s 40% of the allowance gone, and the number is shown nowhere in the flow.
If you plan to track anything specific to how you work — retainer type, account manager, contract end date — count carefully before you start. And check what the setup already spent on your behalf.
3. Two users
Two is you plus one. A freelancer with a VA fits. An agency with three people does not, and there’s no half-step: adding a third person means moving to a paid seat.
4. Two thousand email sends per month
This one is misread more than any other, because it’s counted per send, not per contact.
A campaign to 500 contacts with three follow-ups is 2,000 sends. That’s the entire month, in one sequence, to a list most agencies would call small.
If email is central to what you do, treat the free tier as a trial rather than a home.
5. Branding you can’t remove
Every form, landing page, meeting link and marketing email carries HubSpot branding on the free plan, and there is no setting to turn it off.
For internal use, irrelevant. For anything a client sees with your name on it, this is the limit that decides for you — regardless of how much room you have left on the others.
Which free-tier wall hits you first?
Four questions. Nothing is collected or sent anywhere.
| If this is true | The wall you hit |
|---|---|
| Clients see your forms or emails | Branding — not removable on free |
| You need a 2nd pipeline | 1 deal pipeline |
| A 3rd person needs a login | 2 users |
| You send over 2,000 emails/month | 2,000 sends, counted per send |
| None of the above | 10 custom properties — 4 already spent |
What the free tier is genuinely good for
Read the list above as a shape, not a scoreboard, and a use case appears:
One or two people, running their own pipeline, using it as a system of record. Contacts, companies, deals, notes, tasks. In that mode the free tier is not a crippled demo — it’s a real CRM with a real database, and 1,000 contacts will last a long time.
Where it stops working is the moment it becomes client-facing or team-facing. Branding, seats, and the single pipeline all point the same direction: it’s built for you to organise yourself, not to run an agency’s operations.
What upgrading actually buys
The entry paid tier is Starter, at $7 per seat per month. It moves the pipeline count from one to two.
That is worth knowing before you assume upgrading solves the pipeline problem. If your reason for paying is “I need to separate clients,” two pipelines may not be the answer either — check the tier that actually gives you the number you need, and price that, not the entry tier.
Before you commit
Whatever tier you land on, do this first: run the setup with fake data, then open the properties list and count what’s already been created for you. On a free account you’re working against ten, and you may already have spent four of them without being told.
The related question of whether HubSpot is the right CRM for an agency at all — including what the setup reveals about who it’s really built for — is covered in choosing a CRM for a marketing agency.