Marek Zmysłowski Blog

After years with HubSpot, we’ve decided to leave the platform. Partly because of pricing, but mostly because of how we were treated once we tried to optimize our setup.

Like many growing companies, we ended up overprovisioned: too many paid seats, inflated marketing contact tiers, modules we barely used, and a “premium” support structure that never proactively advised us how to reduce costs while our needs changed.

Interestingly, the system was very efficient at automatically increasing our costs when usage briefly crossed certain thresholds.

Reducing those costs later? Suddenly impossible because of “internal policy.” That asymmetry tells you everything about the business model.

What disappointed me most was not even the contract rigidity itself. Enterprise SaaS is full of lock-in mechanics. We all know that.

It was the human layer around it. At no point did customer success feel like actual customer success. The conversations felt procedural, defensive, and optimized around protecting short-term revenue instead of building long-term trust.

Which is ironic, because we are entering an AI era where software delivery costs are collapsing, CRM functionality is rapidly commoditizing, and large account-management structures are becoming increasingly difficult to justify economically.

The future belongs to companies that continuously earn the relationship every month through value and flexibility — not through switching costs and contractual gravity.

That’s the real reason we’re leaving. Not anger. Just a growing realization that this model belongs more to the previous SaaS decade than the next one.