HubSpot cuts Free plan email sends from 2,000 to 300, shifts Starter onto shared Credits
By Rob Litterst, Co-founder, PricingSaaS
Published Last updated
HubSpot’s pricing page · Change detected
What changed
In the feature comparison table, HubSpot cut the Free plan's email marketing allowance from 2,000 to 300 emails per calendar month. On the Starter plan, the email-sending metric changed from a contact-tier-scaled limit ("5x marketing contact tier email send limit/month") to consuming shared HubSpot Credits instead of a dedicated cap.
Why it matters
Moving email volume onto shared Credits gives HubSpot one lever to tighten later instead of several separate caps, and it nudges 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.
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.