HubSpot: Free Entry, Sticky CRM, and the Shift to AI Credits

HubSpot is the company every SaaS startup wants to copy when it comes to pricing — but most miss why it actually works. 

In this episode, Rob and Ulrik unpack the full arc of HubSpot's pricing strategy: the clever two-axis model that unlocked expansion revenue, the freemium CRM launch that took on Salesforce, and the bundle mechanics that turn complexity into a math game customers enjoy playing. Then they dig into where HubSpot is heading — AI credits, agent teams, and the shift from system of record to system of action.

For more information, catch us on https://www.willingnesstopay.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Pricing Page Unpacked. I'm Rob Litterst and I'm joined by Ulrich Lirkoff-Schmidt, pricing expert and CEO at Willingness2Pay. Each week we take a real company's pricing page and break it down the decisions behind it, the trade-offs, and what it tells us about how the company actually wants to grow. No slides, no scripts, just a real conversation between two friends who live and breathe pricing. Let's dig in. Ulrich, this one is near and dear to my heart. I am very excited about HubSpot. Um, primarily because I actually have like first-person experience actually selling this product. Like I sold HubSpot for four years. To be fair and to qualify this, it was back when it was only a marketing hub. So they've added quite a bit of uh new features and functionality since I stopped selling it. When I left, they had just launched HubSpot CRM. So now that's obviously like the kind of core of their business. Um but one thing that HubSpot did for me was really kind of like set this foundation that good pricing is an accelerant. After leaving HubSpot, I sold it a couple of companies that did not have a pricing model that really worked for them. And I saw firsthand how great it can be as a salesperson when you have a great product, a great story, and a great pricing strategy to really kind of match that and fit customers. Anything you want to add about HubSpot before I kind of go into some of their background?

SPEAKER_01 1:29

HubSpot is one of these companies that they have this sort of weird feel where they they sort of remain like mentally like a startup. Like everybody can see like they're actually quite big, right? So I think I think they they've grown to sort of a really decent size, but but they're still sort of almost like on team startup in a way, and it's not team enterprise. So that's sort of maybe just like a branding, branding thing with it. But I think also for that reason, they have become sort of the like the thing to emulate from a pricing point of view for many other startups. So it's like, okay, they're super successful, they're like a super startup, and the pricing is really awesome. So we want to price like HopSpot is a sentence that I've heard, I don't know, more times than I care to remember. So so I think they and they one of the things that they they've just managed to pull off is that they've actually managed to put a lot of complexity into their pricing. So we just talked about it just before when you mentioned that uh the scraping of their pricing pages is not an easy task because they actually have seven pricing pages in different sort of hubs, and each of these have multiple tabs and and so on and so forth. So usually what you'll see is that whenever you have this kind of complexity, the sales process breaks down. But they've always sort of managed to uh have really clear entry points with like cheap or free products that then become like this sort of PLD motion where sort of people go in, and then one of the things that I also hear from many is like, oh, it it's like it starts off small and suddenly you get like a big bill and you kind of just have to roll with it, right? So so so they've just nailed this motion where the complexity comes later in the process and not at the position point of the sale, but it's sort of the structure is there and is able to monetize customers in on multiple different sort of axes, whether it's uh how many people you have in the CM system or how much um activity you have on that database, or what kinds of functionality you want, and so on and so on and so on. So I think I think they've been able to sort of pull that off recently. So I think that's sort of historically why they are interesting. I think another thing is interesting, and that's sort of how they're actually shifting, I think, right now, and these sort of I think just Q1 2026 has actually like been meaningful for for sort of the pricing and monetization of Hotspot in terms of aging code and their whole sort of shift towards an genetic customer platform instead of just the serum system. Um so it's it's a it's just a really exciting company to follow. I think. Yeah, I th I think you're 100% right.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Yeah, and I think you hit on a lot of like really interesting stuff. So before we get into the actual pricing pages, um, a few details on HubSpot. So they're founded in 2006. Uh their founders are Brian Halligan and Darmash Shaw, who kind of famously met at MIT in grad school and basically like wrote the book on inbound marketing, like literally, they wrote a book called Inbound Marketing and it blew up. So HubSpot started as kind of like this new way to approach digital marketing. They realized that like all the old ways, all the cold outbound, everything like that was kind of dated, it was fading. And they created this tool to help with inbound marketing. And initially it was a marketing hub. And I've heard Dharmesh say some really interesting stuff here. Like I in one podcast, he was talking about how like HubSpot was a blend of like five to ten different products. And he was like, we never really wanted to be like the number one option in any of them. Like we we wanted to be like top three in all of them, but never the number one option any of them, because we felt like if we were the number one option in any of them, then we were putting too much investment into that. They really have always had this orientation towards being a bundle of a bunch of different tools, or like a suite of a bunch of different tools. And the analogy that we used to talk about at HubSpot on the sales floor was like, you know, before the iPhone, you had a dip, you had a digital camera, you had a calculator, you had a phone, you had all these things. But then with the iPhone, you put it all together. And it was a really helpful analogy, especially back in uh, you know, 2012. Um, but obviously that's elephant, that's escalated quite a bit. So now HubSpot has all of these different products within each of its hubs, but they also have six different hubs. They have a CRM, they have marketing, sales, service, content, operations, and you mentioned their AI investments. Their AI tools, Breeze, really kind of seem like the biggest um upside right now. They have 279,000 customers worldwide. Um, I think it's actually more than that, which is wild. It's a ton of customers. And a huge reason is because they go after SMBs. So that's really been kind of their bread and butter from the get-go. And the value proposition historically was always that they were a very affordable option. You know, you'd see them going up against Salesforce, and that would be the case. They would often be cheaper than Salesforce. These days that's kind of changing a little bit. We can talk about that later, but you know, they're new there are new CRMs that come out that end up um, I think, pricing out HubSpot, and you see that kind of all over LinkedIn. Um, from a revenue standpoint, they did 2.6 billion in 2024. Their guidance in 2025 is 3.1 billion. Um, so a very large company. They IPO'd in 2014. I was actually um part of that. Do I have it? Yeah, so I have a little champagne bottle in my back uh in the back of me right here that says HubSpot on it. That's from the IPO party. I kept that as a little keepsake. Um over 8,000 employees. And um, we'll get into the different products, but from kind of like a product perspective, we already talked about they're kind of like this very that they're a platform with a lot of breadth around marketing sales and um content, data, services. Um, from a pricing standpoint, it varies quite a bit by hub. They have a bunch of different ways that they'd price. Well, we could talk through really quick kind of some of the old ways, some of their older pricing and some of the big inflection points there. Um but then I think the really interesting thing that they're moving towards right now is credits with AI and more consumption-based pricing, which they've always had an element of consumption-based pricing and uh and packaging, but um it's it's really kind of under the spotlight now with AI. Um the big inflection point that I wanted to mention is back in the day. So this is their this is their pricing page from 2012. And this is uh archive.org, so web way back machine, uh, because we pricing SaaS wasn't around back then, so we couldn't, we couldn't track them back then. Um, but you'll see here that they they've always kind of priced on the number of contacts in your database. And as your as your level of contact scales, um, you pay more. And they had the these kind of like annual agreements for the number of contacts. And there's a great podcast on the challenges that they ran into with this pricing model. Basically, what happened is they were they were working with SMBs. SMBs obviously um churn more than enterprises, right? So smaller companies tend to churn through software more than larger companies. And so this kind of flat model that they had here, um, while it is usage-based, you're locking in this annual agreement. There's very little upside here for upgrades, and there's very little expansionary revenue here. And so they're running into this issue where their net revenue retention was just not at the point where they wanted it to be, and they needed a change. So I think it was Pat Greedy from Sequoia that like helped kind of steer their shift to two-axis pricing. And what they ended up doing is they ended up having this kind of base fee. This is like the historic HubSpot pricing page. I sold from this pricing page for about three years, and I know this thing cold. So, like the the basic pro in enterprise, essentially each plan had a base fee that included a certain number of contacts. You can see 200 for 100, 800 for 1,000, 2400 for 10,000. And then you see the variable cost for additional contacts. And so the beautiful thing about this pricing model is it allows for expansionary revenue as customers grow, but there's also this natural tipping point between each tier where it just becomes the right economic decision to upgrade. And so in the sales process, the way that this manifests itself is people would be on the line between basic and pro or pro and enterprise. And we could basically recommend they go up to a higher tier and kind of discount them down a little bit to make the price more feasible, but then basically have like a higher starting point for the following year than if they had started on the tier below that. And so it gave us a lot of kind of flexibility. We we had a very consultative and kind of evangelical sales process. And I think HubSpot still does today. And this really allowed us to kind of like coach customers through the right contact level based on their growth rate and based on their business. Um, you mentioned it, but is this is this the uh pricing page that you recall kind of like being the um the one that your clients have have wanted to replicate or this kind of three-part tariff model?

SPEAKER_01 10:36

No, so I think actually, so I think this is even sort of older than that, right? So I think it's more the way I started Hopscot wasn't that painful. It didn't feel like a big decision, but today I'm paying a lot of money for it. And I don't really know how that happened. So I think that's pretty much how people want to like, I want that with make sense, right? So I think I think here what what we're doing, we're saying, hey, so so I think I think a few things just like worth mentioning as sort of a like like a little detail to geek out on is that that Hospital is using um is using discounts as a feature. So I call that a commercial feature. So the smart content and the email marketing and the A-B testing, all these things is what are called functional features. And that makes a lot of sense. Then you would have service features, which is like, hey, customer customer support, all these kinds of things. And then you can actually have things like uh commercial features, which is like, well, do you have like the opportunity for like different payment plans, but also something where suddenly some things become cheaper to buy in volume. So they have the contacts and they're selling them in in equal size chunks. So it's 1k, 1k, 1k for each of the plants, but then the price point drops. And this makes it very easy for the for the customer to compare the prices across the plants for these extra contacts. And then it's like, okay, so at the basic, it's uh a hundred for a thousand extra contacts. And then at the enterprise, we're we've we've sliced that to ten. So like we are now getting a 90% discount. And that obviously means that I can then sort of do a little bit of math or my sales rep can help me do the math, and then I can sort of figure out that, oh, at this point it's just cheaper for me to be in the enterprise. And then it helps scales better. So what it does is that you can imagine that if you just had a hundred K $100 per 1K contacts at scale, that price would be impossibly high, right? So if I have 10 million contacts, I'm not gonna pay you uh a million bucks extra for that. Like it's I just write. I'm so big, I want a discount, right? So what happens is that this the unit price you have, it it actually doesn't scale linearly in the market. So usually what happens is that it gets suppressed. So it's like more like a flattening curve. It doesn't sort of flatten out completely, but like the incremented value of the millionth contract is way less than the first ones, right? So this is what what normally gets built in with sort of like structural discounts. And this is just another way of doing it where actually we says, hey, you can actually buy the volume, but you have to upgrade to a higher tier to get it. So the discounting becomes a feature of the tier. And so people will then say, okay, so now I need to sort of log in for 2400 a month to the enterprise plan, but then my one million contracts only cost me 100K, right? And not a million, which would be the basic. So so and the the good thing about this is that it's it creates a little math game that the customers win. So they're like, ah, I figured it out. Yeah. Not considering whether a hundred K a month is like a good price or not, right? Because certainly like the whole like this the little math game makes you sort of only work with the pieces that's on the board. And then once you structure those, you're like, okay, I solved the puzzle. Like so do that one. As as opposed to backing away and say, hey, do I want to buy houseboat for this as opposed to like some other system, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Right, right. It makes it kind of fun. And it like yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

So it's it's a really smart way to do it. And sort of and if you execute it, so so I think I think what what works here also is that it's quite simple, like three plans, it works like this, and you know, and then like the little math game sort of works in your favor. I think like that's just an awesome little detail.

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Totally. And I think they've kind of replicated this across a lot of their new hubs. Um, so let's go to their more recent pricing. You you mentioned a few things that I think um are really interesting about HubSpot too. You you mentioned that they always kind of give away some value for free. They have kind of like a free entry point, and that has kind of like taken a few different iterations and and like a few different forms for HubSpot. Like back in the day before they had multiple hubs, they had this free marketing grader that people, it was basically like one of the first micro apps that I think gained a ton of steam. And what would happen is people would come to the HubSpot website, they would plug in their domain, and they would immediately click submit and get this score on their digital marketing out of a hundred. So it would say, you know, you get a 76 because your social media tags aren't right and your SEO isn't great and whatever, whatever. Like there are all these recommendations that came with it. And then the call to action from that was get in touch with our team to learn more. And so we would, from the sales side, we would schedule these calls called inbound marketing assessments, where we would basically help companies understand where they had opportunity. And if there was kind of like mutual alignment, it would lead to a sales conversation. It was, it was a great way to kind of like get companies into our funnel by giving away free value. When they launched the CRM, the whole freemium thing kind of took on a new nature. They gave away the CRM for free back in 2015. And I think like part of the reason they did that is because of just how dominant Salesforce was in the market. And they realized if we're going to capture any of this market, we need to just get basically be as generous as possible to get into the game, and then we'll figure out how to monetize later. And so when they first launched the free CRM, there were a few paid add-ons that came with it around kind of like sales enablement, um, sales rep productivity, stuff like that. There was a um, there's an add-on called like Sidekick that would give you all of this like additional data on like um on your prospects, when they were opening your emails, all that sort of stuff. So they've always kind of had this way of getting people in the door for free and giving them value for free and then monetizing from there. And now that takes on like a completely different form with where they're at today. I mean, for for any of their hub, their hubs, there's a way to get started for free. They have free tools on the pricing page. And so they still use this kind of freemium experience. Um but the biggest thing that I think is worth talking about today. So, so two things. Um, first, they have a lot of hubs now, and their pricing page now is it is a lot to navigate. It is a like they have a lot going on. And one thing that they do that I think is pretty cool is they have this create a bundle functionality on their pricing page. So you can go in and look at each hub individually, determine which plan you want to go on, um, basically customize like based on your team, how many seats you need, all that good stuff. And you'll get an automatic bundle discount depending on how many hubs you select. Um, so that I think is pretty interesting. The other thing that they have going on right now is they they have new AI tools and they have this AI product called Breeze that they are pricing with credits. And I think like you mentioned Darmesh's recent announcement of becoming an agentic customer platform. And I do think that like they're very excited about Breeze and credits and making that their kind of primary revenue model to a certain degree. And I think it's one of those where they started small and they're kind of they must have kind of like a tiger team who's really kind of like pushing this internally. And it's the type of thing where they're kind of like pressure testing this, and I think it's gonna get a lot more velocity and weight across their customer base over time. But I'll stop there. Any any thoughts or feedback on their kind of more recent pricing?

SPEAKER_01 18:40

I think it's so so what what you're mentioning is actually sort of interesting, is like the the journey that they're on, which I think is I think one of the reasons that that I would sort of keep betting on Hawkbot is that it's still quite founder-led, and they have shown that they're willing to make these sort of fundamental shifts from hey, we're marketing automation to we're a CRM system. So that is L is like a big shift, and now they're like, hey, the CRM system is like not the central piece anymore. Now, like with the agency customer platform, it's almost like back to marketing automation. But now on with AI. Um so so but but the idea I think is that a serum system is something that humans tend to log into. But I think you know there's they're sort of seeing that like that's gonna be like less the case. Like so we're gonna have much more sort of automation running in and out of it. So the serum system sort of becomes like the database, and now we need to and we need to like no now. It's sort of all the things that we can power from that that makes sense. And I noticed a thing also, uh, I saw Jason Lemkin uh write on uh on LinkedIn the other day that hey, um we are like our serums, and he didn't mention which serum system he was using, but he said it just got a lot stickier because now we're actually hooking up 20 AI agents into the CRM system, and that just makes it so much harder to switch away from because now we need to sort of retrain all of the agents if we had to shift the CRM system. So I think and that I think that observation was and uh valuable to note also because I know we're gonna have this conversation today around Hospital that hey, maybe I think I think actually that's the insight right now, that they're saying, hey, if we like this CRM system is gonna be both in a in a way like less useful because it's gonna be any everything around it that creates the value, but it's also gonna be way more sticky and harder to replace. So so I think I think with the way that they're like repositioning the product um as whatever the AI customer-centric platform, it's almost like it's like just like this is like language that ChatGBT came up with. Like, so we're gonna we're just gonna come up with something that has AI customer and platform in it, and then what isn't a CM system? I think that's interesting. And then with the credits, I think that is following the herd a little bit in the sense that, okay, so we're gonna price for usage, and also there's a cost element, and we don't know how this is gonna develop, so we better like not lose our shirt. Um, but also I think from a household point of view, like let's lean into this and test out how it works. And then we're gonna figure out how we're actually going to use this to sort of effectively monetize um as we go along. I think that's sort of roughly where I see this going. But but I think from a positioning point of view and like a product insight and roadmap point of view, it makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Yeah. I I love I love the insight from Jason Lumpkin too. I I've heard like Kyle Poyer has this kind of catchphrase, he talks about like going from system of record to system of action. Where I think that action is being able to kind of like plug into tools like Claude. And you know, if you have open Claude, Agents running or whatever it might be and being able to fetch data and being like accessible and and able to work with those platforms. And then HubSpot obviously is going to have its own agents working for you. I think Darmesh just made an announcement that they have his whole platform, agent AI, that I assume is going to be completely baked into HubSpot if it's not already, has this new concept of agent teams that will do a bunch of different things for you. He called out a few examples on the sales side and said that they're building out more of these agent teams for different hubs. And so if you're if you're not only kind of like a system of record where all this stuff lives, but you're building this layer of workflows on top of it, I think that becomes infinitely more powerful. I also think that justifies the shift to a different pricing model where I think they've they've looked at credits and whether they stick to credits long term or they um or they use it as a bridge to something else. Um I think it makes sense to kind of like shift the pricing model for for work getting done rather than just having kind of access to this data. Um which leads me to my next question. What what do you think about AI credits in the world of CRM and marketing and HubSpot? Um like how how do you I I I guess I'm just I'm I'm curious, like on a few levels. Like, first of all, do you think credits make sense for a company like HubSpot? Second of all, I'm curious, like I they have a big sales team and a big customer success team. And my my initial observation is just like I think switching customers' orientation from like seats to credits is it's gonna take some work and some coaching. It's it's something that's gonna like you you're gonna need to make it really clear to CFOs at your customers like how this scales and how it works. So I'm curious to get your take on that and and kind of like how you see that transition playing out for HubSpot and what you think the smartest way for them to do it would be.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

So so I think I think the thing here is, right? So so if they do around free billing of revenue, right? And they have 300,000 customers, their average customer size is 10k. Yeah. Right. So that means that like there's not a lot of CFO involved. Like it's like someone has the responsibility for the finance, but most of their customers is like guy with business. And like, like, we're gonna try to figure it out, right? So for Salesforce, they do 40 billion, right? And then like big enterprise contracts negotiated, what's the difference? So it's like that, I think that's like the pushback is gonna be harder at that kind of price level, right? But but with an ACV of let's say 10K, you're gonna have some scrutiny, but it's also one of these where you're gonna get there incrementally, right? You're gonna start at whatever hundred bucks a month, and then suddenly, whoa, right, now it's a thousand bucks a month, and then oh, now it's five thousand a month. And of course, they're gonna have some of their larger accounts who are gonna try and control this, but most of it, I think, is gonna be operators that are gonna like scramble a little bit and try and figure out how it's gonna work. So I think what HubSbud will have to do well in order for this to work, because I think so far they've been able to sort of pull off that, okay, so it started by being free and suddenly they pay a lot of money, and you know, what are you gonna do? But what's interesting is as far as I've listened, is that nobody actually got really infuriated about that. Like everybody's like, oh yeah, okay, the value is there, and you know, like it's a it just grew on me. And like, what are you gonna do? So nobody really got, yeah, so yeah, infuriated or pissed off. And I think obviously when you have a new pricing model, like your credit system or modality involved, suddenly you can piss customers off if it's if it's not transparent enough, if it's super unpredictable, and suddenly I get a bill that, you know, it's a huge bill, and apparently you've given me huge value, but like I don't have the money on my bank account. Like it's like if there's a disconnect between like if if all the AI2s suddenly mean that business is booming and I'm making money hands or fists and I'm growing real fast, if Housebud then starts to charge me a lot of money, even though it's like a bit of a black box, I'm not gonna take my foot off the gas. I'm just gonna say, all right, what are you gonna do? And you know, so they got me, right? And then you're gonna continue. But if the opposite happens, if I have a lot of like agentic stuff going on, my business is not growing, and suddenly I have a big bill, I think that's where the disconnect happens, right? So yeah, there's one of these where if the product doesn't work as intended, which there can be a million things that go wrong, suddenly people are gonna blame the pricing model. Right? Yeah. So it's our shift into that. And if you look at the credits here, it's actually not totally clear what I can buy with a credit, how many credits I spend per what, and so forth, right? So we have a little link, and so if we just had to be like, okay, so feature custom agent, handle in one conversation, text-based channels, 100 credits. What does that mean? Right. And just handle one conversation. Is that any conversation for any length? What if it kind of stops, and then suddenly the customer re-engages? Is that two conversations or one? Right. What if it gets language is like and so on, right? So it's just yeah, at any and this is that sort of one of the issues that you have with systems like this is that even if you make like a nice overview page like this, it can seem like, oh, now the customer is informed, but then they get the invoice and they're like, I don't, I don't see the connect, right? Right. So I I usually sort of work with sort of saying, okay, so if they've mapped the value correctly, now they need to sort of measure it. And that sort of has like three fundamental steps that is involved in building trust with the customer when you do something like this. And that is first that you measure it real time with traceability and without ambiguity. Right. So this is an action. We agree that that's an action. You just did the action, it instantly sort of appears in your dashboard, and I can track which action actually cost me what credit. As opposed to at the end of the month, I'm going to get you an email and it says, you just spend 7,000 credits, have a nice day. You're like, I have no connection to what I did and this number, right? Right. The next thing is the forecasting ability. So that is, okay, so if I'm this is all the activity I have and I have like like hindsight visibility. Now I need to also be able to sort of predict how is it going to work in the future. So it's like, okay, so you have these credits, you're like four months into the year, you're going to run out of credits soon. Like at the given rate. Like this is what's going to happen. If you translate that to money, that's even better. So you're like, hey, your your your budget is going to go, you know, over by this many dollars. That's a really good foresight. And then the final thing you need is controls. So that is who can approve more credits, who can actually like, who can who can do these actions? Is it like everybody in the organization just have like a free line to the company credit card through the Hopspot credits? Or is it like only Mike and Sarah who can approve more credits, who can assign roles to who gets to spend credits, whatever it is. So this measurement, predictability, and control is usually sort of the like three-step process from a structural point of view of how you can make customers sort of trust you when you roll something like this out. Yeah. And everybody is struggling with it right now, as per like March 2026. Like some some more than others, but but and I would sort of assume that HubSpot is not the worst, but but I don't think I've seen anyone being like the best. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 29:38

Yeah. I also do, yeah, I totally agree with everything that you just said. I I I also think that they're doing a pretty good job of like credits are very much like a a small piece right now, right? And I I think they've always done a really good job of making sure that their value metrics are aligned with their customers. Like on the marketing side, it's always been contacts, which makes a ton of sense. Like as you build your database, you should pay more. On the sales side, it's always been seats. Or I think it it wasn't seats initially, but it it eventually became seats. And I do think like CRMs are one of those tools where like seats actually does make sense. Um and now they have credits, right? And credits is making up kind of like a smaller, a smaller portion of the puzzle. Um, so yeah, I I think you're right. We're still in the infancy. I have a lot of confidence in um in Sam Lee and and his team over there on the on the pricing side. Yeah. Um they have really smart people. And yeah, and and they're thinking through this, I think.

SPEAKER_01 30:34

Kind of I just know Sam Lee uh posting, so he commented on one of my LinkedIn posts uh the other week where he he was noting the the the change that the clay just pulled off. I I've talked a lot to the clay team internally over the last couple of months. So so so I know that he's also looking at how they are dealing with it. And one of the things that that I've been trying to tell people that that have been using credits is that for a while, and we see actually sort of one example of here, is that credits for whatever reason have been just like another way of doing user-based pricing. So it's like, hey, we're gonna like count whenever something happens, like an event, and then it costs you some credits. Or we're actually seeing here like line two, prospecting agent, is actually an example of something else, which is like a little bit like it's a license that's built into the system. So the first one, like handle a conversation, text-based channel, 100 credits. So that can happen once or a million times or whatever. Like, who knows we're we're gonna look at it when it's done. But the prospecting agent actually monitors one contact, which is a recurring item inside of your system. So you're saying, hey, I have a thousand contracts, I'm gonna monitor all of them. That's presumably gonna be 100,000 credits during one building period, so every month. It's just gonna, and then it just renews. So it actually functions like a standard license, like a fixed fee, that license inside of the credit system. So actually, the credit system becomes this meta structure within which you can build all the other pricing models that you use to build. You can have user-based pricing, like the first one. Well, licenses like the second one, the prospecting agent, and it actually holds all of them. So what we see is that companies usually start credits in like larger companies, like Salesforce, the example that we talked about, did this as well. Like they started like in the corner of their pricing model, and then when it works, now they start to just like absorb larger parts of their pricing sheets. So, like, hey, now this product or this service also is covered with credits, and then instantly they tend to sort of grow into most other things. So it is like if you can like petri dish it over in the corner, like figure out how it works, like get the team used to get all this, like the internal tooling, all these things ready, and then you can just start to sort of have it take over more and more of your pricing. I think that's not a that's not a bad idea.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

Every episode at the very end, we give our kind of rough Wall Street grade on um on not necessarily as like a Wall Street analyst, but we use the same framework. Is HubSpot's pricing strategy a buy, a hold, or a sell?

SPEAKER_01 33:08

I think it's a buy. So from the fundamental, like like high-level packaging approach, like we're a like AI customer-centric platform with a CRM system. I think that's a strong buy. We covered like Lemkin's uh comment around CRM system as being way more sticky when all the agents are trained on the data inside of them. Um so that in itself, I think is a is a huge win for Hobspot to just like have leaned so hard into that direction. And then already being um, you know, really experimenting with the credits, um, I think like they're gonna figure it out for sure. Like, and then like I think they're gonna have a little bit like a grace period because within let us let's say when was the first time I heard it? Five months ago, six months ago, so like September, October 25 was the first time where I heard people saying, Oh, customers hate credits. Like it it starts to become like okay. Good thing, suddenly it's like everybody knows where credits are. That wasn't the case like three years ago. Now everybody does, and now customers hate it because a lot of them are executed poorly, right? So I think I think but but as as nobody's executing them well, I think HubSpot gets to just be like just a part of the class for a little bit and sort of figure it out. So even though they might not execute it perfectly right now, it doesn't matter because nobody is, right? Yeah. So so um as long as they can sort of grow out of it, um, I think with that CRM system sort of database structure with all the agency around and the means to monetize it, I think they're gonna be in a good place.

SPEAKER_00 34:47

I agree. I I also think the big thing about HubSpot that we I we talk about this all the time, just having like a culture of iteration on pricing. And like they've been doing this for a decade. Like they they are very, very clued into the power of pricing, the importance of pricing, when to shift pricing, when to like change strategies. I I think the HubSpot team has been thinking about this um really strategically for a long time. And so I have a lot of confidence that they're gonna figure this out and um I'd call it a buy as well. Awesome. That's it for this episode of Pricing Page Unpacked. If this was useful, subscribe to the podcast and join the discussion on the pricing SaaS community, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Remember, your pricing page isn't just a page, it's a strategy statement. And see you on the next Unpack.