HubSpot Too Expensive? Build the Same Automations in Make for $9/Month

The HubSpot Trap

HubSpot is very good at one thing: making you feel like you need HubSpot.

The onboarding is smooth. The integrations work out of the box. The dashboard looks impressive in a quarterly review. Then the renewal comes.

HubSpot Professional runs $800/month billed annually. Marketing Hub plus Sales Hub together can hit $1,600 or more. For a small agency or SMB with 2-3 salespeople, that's a real number.

The problem is most companies actually use about 3 features out of the 50 HubSpot sells you on. Deal stage triggers. Lead follow-up sequences. Some contact scoring.

Those three are rebuilable in Make over a weekend. Combined cost: $9/month on Make's basic plan, plus whatever CRM you move to.

Here's how.

What You're Actually Using in HubSpot

Before rebuilding anything, open your HubSpot workflow list and write down what's there.

Most companies in this situation have some version of:

1. Deal stage triggers: when a deal moves to "Proposal Sent", send a follow-up email 3 days later if no reply
2. Lead follow-up sequences: new inbound lead gets 3 touchpoints over 7 days
3. Contact scoring: leads from certain sources or with certain behaviors get flagged as high priority

If you're also relying heavily on HubSpot's reporting and multiple people look at it daily, that's harder to replace. The automations are easy. Recreating the reporting takes more work and usually looks worse at first.

Be honest with yourself before you start migrating.

Rebuilding Deal Stage Triggers in Make

The trigger is a webhook from your CRM. If you're moving to Pipedrive (probably the most common HubSpot alternative at this price point), Pipedrive fires webhooks on every deal stage change.

The Make scenario:

1. Webhook receives deal stage change event
2. Filter: only continue if new stage = "Proposal Sent"
3. Google Sheets: check if a follow-up is already scheduled for this deal ID
4. If not: add a row with send_date = today + 3 days
5. Separate scenario runs every morning: looks for rows where send_date = today, sends the email via Gmail, marks as sent

More steps than the HubSpot equivalent. That's true. But you own the logic entirely. When HubSpot raises prices or changes their workflow limits, this doesn't move.

Build time the first time: about 4 hours.

Rebuilding Lead Follow-Up Sequences

This is usually the main thing people are paying HubSpot for. New lead comes in, they need a 3-touch sequence over a week without anyone manually tracking it.

In Make with Gmail:

1. Trigger: new row added to a Google Sheet (your form tool of choice dumps submissions there) or a direct webhook from your form tool
2. Add the contact to a "sequences" tracker sheet with a timestamp per touchpoint
3. Daily scenario: look for contacts where touchpoint_1_due = today AND touchpoint_1_sent = false
4. Send email via Gmail, mark touchpoint_1_sent = true
5. Repeat the same logic for touchpoints 2 and 3

Personalization works the same way. Make has full access to the contact data. Name, company, what service they enquired about, all of it.

What you lose compared to HubSpot: reply detection. HubSpot stops the sequence when a contact replies. In Make, you need to either check replies manually or build detection via Gmail's API (doable, adds a couple hours). For most small teams, watching your inbox manually is fine anyway.

Rebuilding Contact Scoring

HubSpot's scoring is basically: assign points to properties and behaviors, flag contacts above a threshold.

In Make plus Google Sheets:

• Source = paid ad: 20 points
• Opened 2 or more emails: 15 points
• Visited pricing page: 30 points
• Job title contains "owner" or "founder": 25 points

Every time a relevant event fires, a Make scenario updates the score in your CRM. The scoring formula lives in Google Sheets. The triggers live in Make scenarios.

Build time: 2-3 hours.

What HubSpot Actually Does Better

This matters. Don't migrate and then miss things you didn't think about.

Native integrations. HubSpot has 1,000+ integrations that work well. Make has integrations too but some are shallower or require more configuration.

Reporting. HubSpot's dashboards are genuinely good. Rebuilding that in Looker Studio or Google Sheets takes real time and looks rougher at first.

The contact timeline. Every email, call, deal note in one view per contact is useful. Most CRMs have this, HubSpot's version is cleaner.

Support. HubSpot has real support with fast response times. Make's support works but slower.

If your whole sales team lives in HubSpot every day and uses the reporting, the migration cost in time and adjustment period might not be worth the savings. Run the math honestly.

The Migration Checklist

Before you cancel anything:

1. Export all contacts as CSV (Contacts > Import/Export > Export All)
2. Export all companies
3. Export all deals
4. Copy out your email sequence templates manually, HubSpot doesn't export these cleanly
5. Screenshot every existing workflow with all conditions and actions visible
6. List every connected integration and write down exactly what each one does
7. Set up your new CRM, import contacts, and run it in parallel for 2 weeks before cancelling

The data export is straightforward. The part people forget is documenting what their workflows actually do. Six months after you built something in HubSpot you might not remember why a specific condition is there. Screenshot it.

The 2-week parallel run matters. Something will behave differently. Better to catch it before you've cancelled.

The Actual Numbers

	HubSpot Pro	Make + Pipedrive Starter
Monthly cost	$800	$9 + $25 = $34
Setup time	1-2 days	2-4 days
Maintenance	Low	Low once built
Reporting	Good	Acceptable
Native integrations	Excellent	Good
Support	Good	Slower

For a company doing under $2M revenue where those 3 automations are the core of what you're using, the savings are real. For a 10-person company where HubSpot is embedded across sales, marketing, and support, the migration friction is higher.

There's no universal answer. But most small businesses who complain about the HubSpot bill are in the first category.

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If you want us to build this for you, book a free workflow audit at airtective.com