HubSpot cuts Free plan email sends from 2,000 to 300, shifts Starter onto shared Credits
In the feature comparison table, HubSpot cut the Free plan's email marketing allowance from 2,000 to 300 emails per calendar month.
HubSpot’s pricing page · Change Detected
WHY IT MATTERS
Moving email volume onto shared Credits gives HubSpot one lever to tighten later instead of several separate caps, and it nudges Free and Starter users to think about email sends the way AI tools have trained users to think about credits: a budget that competes with other actions. Watch whether HubSpot extends Credits-based metering to other Starter features it previously capped on their own fixed limits.
BY THE NUMBERS
- Free plan email sends cut from 2,000 to 300 per month
- 3 HubSpot pricing changes in the last 90 days; the last was 35 days ago
- Starter's email metric now draws on the Credits system HubSpot built on Oct 3, 2025
- Credits & usage billing touched 243 changes across 175 companies in the last 180 days
THEIR RATIONALE
HubSpot doesn't frame the change publicly, but it folds Starter's email allowance into the same Credits pool it built out on Oct 3, 2025 with a flat 500-credit allocation, rather than keeping a separate, contact-tier-scaled limit. It lands 35 days after HubSpot's previous pricing-page change (Sep 18, 2026), inside the company's roughly 59-day average gap between changes.
THE SIGNAL
The cut to the Free plan's email cap, from 2,000 to 300, is the number that jumps out, but folding Starter's email sends into shared Credits is the bigger structural move: it ties a core free feature to the same consumable pool as other paid actions instead of giving it its own dedicated limit. That's the direction most of the market is already moving — credits-based metering touched 243 pricing changes across 175 companies in the last 180 days, 12.1% of everything Pulse tracked in that window, more than any other usage-billing pattern.
IN CONTEXT
HubSpot has made 3 pricing changes in the last 90 days, most recently capping Sales Hub Starter automation at 50 workflows and raising its pipeline limit to 15 just 35 days before this one. This move pushes Starter's email metric onto the shared-credits system HubSpot built on Oct 3, 2025 with a flat 500-credit allocation, while the Free plan's email allowance falls from 2,000 to 300 a month. Credits-based metering is now the most common lever SaaS vendors pull to retool usage limits, touching 243 changes across 175 companies in the last 180 days, including Lumaai's new Kling 4.0 API pricing and Leadloft's swap to a 300-credit allowance. Tying email volume to that pool is a bigger shift than the headline cut alone suggests.