HubSpot marketing contacts pricing: How to avoid the €10k/Month trap

It starts innocently enough. You sign the contract for HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional. The base price is around €880/month, covering your first 2,000 marketing contacts. It feels manageable. It feels fair.

Six months later, you open an invoice and nearly choke.

The bill isn't €880. It’s €3,200. And next month, it’s projected to hit €4,500.

You didn't upgrade your tier. You didn't buy new seats. You just... grew.

This is the "Marketing Contact Trap." It is the single most common reason mid-market companies overspend on HubSpot. The good news? It is entirely avoidable if you understand the mechanics of the pricing model.

Here is the radically transparent breakdown of what HubSpot actually costs in 2026, and how to stop your database from eating your budget.

The quick answer:

For most mid-market B2B companies, HubSpot Marketing Hub costs between €1,000 and €4,000 per month.

The variance is rarely due to software features; it is almost always driven by contact volume. HubSpot charges you based on how many people you can email, not how many you do email. If you manage your database lazily, you will pay a premium. If you manage it proactively, you can host 100,000 contacts but only pay for the 5,000 active ones.

The Core Concept: Marketing vs. Non-Marketing Contacts

Before 2020, HubSpot charged for every email address in your database. It didn't matter if it was a bounce, a frantic "unsubscribe," or a cold lead you hadn't touched in three years—you paid for it.

Today, HubSpot splits contacts into two buckets. This is your biggest lever for cost control.

1. Marketing contacts (Contact you pay for)

These are people you can target with marketing emails and ads.

• Can you send them a newsletter? Yes.
• Can you put them in an automated nurture workflow? Yes.
• Do they count toward your bill? Yes.

2. Non-marketing contacts (Free up to 15 Million)

These are records in your CRM that you cannot market to, but you can still store, track, and engage with via one-to-one sales emails.

• Can you send them a newsletter? No.
• Can Sales send them a tracked 1:1 email? Yes.
• Do they count toward your bill? No. They are free.

The Golden Rule: You should only ever pay for contacts who are currently valuable to marketing. Everyone else should be non-marketing.

How the pricing escalation works 

HubSpot sells marketing contacts in "bundles" or tiers. The price per contact goes down as you buy more, but the total cost goes up significantly.

Note: Prices are approximate estimates based on standard 2025-2026 Euro pricing.

Marketing Hub Professional

• Included: 2,000 marketing contacts.
• The Cost of Growth: Roughly €225 per month for every additional 5,000 contacts.

Marketing Hub Enterprise

• Included: 10,000 marketing contacts.
• The Cost of Growth: Roughly €100 per month for every additional 10,000 contacts.

The auto-upgrade trap

Here is the catch: HubSpot upgrades you automatically, but it never downgrades you automatically.

If you have 7,000 contacts and you import a list of 50 people, pushing you to 7,050, you instantly trigger the next pricing tier. Your bill jumps by €225/month immediately. If you delete those 50 people the next day, your bill does not go back down until you manually adjust your tier at renewal or specifically request a downgrade (which takes effect the next billing cycle).

3 Mistakes that blow up your bill

We audit HubSpot portals for mid-market companies across the UK and Europe. We see the same three money-burning mistakes every time.

1. The "Select All" Import

You come back from a trade show with a list of 2,000 attendees. You upload the CSV. HubSpot asks: "Set these contacts as Marketing Contacts?"

You click "Yes" because you might want to email them someday.

Result: You just increased your monthly burn rate, even though 80% of those leads might never open an email.

2. The Sleeping Sync

You integrate Salesforce, Eventbrite, or Typeform. You set up a two-way sync. Every lead, customer, vendor, and partner from the last 10 years floods into HubSpot. By default, many integrations tag these as "Marketing Contacts."

Result: You are paying to market to your accounts payable vendors and customers who churned in 2019.

3. Hoarding bounces and unsubscribes

HubSpot automatically stops sending to hard bounces and unsubscribes to protect your deliverability. However, it does not automatically downgrade them to Non-Marketing status.

Result: You are paying premium rates for contacts that you literally cannot email.

The fix: 4 strategies to optimise costs

You can slash your HubSpot bill by 30-50% by implementing these operational rules.

1. Default to "Non-Marketing"

Change your system settings so that new contacts (from imports or integrations) default to Non-Marketing. Only flip the switch to "Marketing" when a contact takes a high-intent action (downloads a white paper, requests a demo) or when you explicitly add them to a campaign.

2. The "Sunset" workflow

Create an automated workflow that monitors engagement.

• Trigger: If a contact hasn't opened an email, visited the website, or clicked a link in 180 days...
• Action: Set "Marketing Contact Status" to Non-Marketing.

This keeps your paid database fresh and strictly focused on engaged leads.

3. The hard bounce purge

Build a simple list of all contacts where Email Hard Bounce Reason is known or Unsubscribed from all email is True.

Bulk edit these contacts to Non-Marketing. Run this monthly.

4. Lifecycle stage filtering

Why are you paying to market to your competitors or your own employees?

Use the "Domain" or "Job Title" fields to identify irrelevant contacts.

• Email domain contains "competitordomain.com" -> Set to Non-Marketing.
• Lifecycle Stage = "Evangelist" or "Partner" -> Set to Non-Marketing (Sales can still talk to them!).

The cost comparison: Lazy vs. smart management

Let’s look at a typical mid-sized B2B company with a total database of 22,000 contacts.

Note: Calculations based on standard Professional tier pricing increments.

By simply categorising dormant leads and bounces as "Non-Marketing," this company saves enough money to hire a freelancer or pay for a robust data enrichment tool.

ROI Calculation: Is the cleanup worth It?

Is it worth paying a RevOps specialist or spending internal hours to fix this?

$$\text{Annual Savings} = (\text{Current Monthly Cost} - \text{Optimised Monthly Cost}) \times 12$$

If your database has 50,000 contacts but only 10,000 are engaged:

• Current Cost (50k active): ~€3,000/month
• Optimised Cost (10k active): ~€1,240/month
• Annual Savings: €21,120

Verdict: Yes. Spending 10 hours cleaning your data will pay for itself in one month.

Next step: Stop the bleeding

Don't wait for your next renewal to look at this. The savings are monthly and immediate upon your next billing cycle.

Would you like a free "Marketing Contact Audit"?

We can look at your portal, identify exactly how many contacts are burning budget without adding value, and give you the specific workflow settings to fix it.