HubSpot Credits: Plan Seats and Usage

What do you pay for under HubSpot's new pricing model?

Three things, and you can steer each one separately. The edition sets which features your account has, seats decide who on your team can use them, and HubSpot Credits pay for the work the platform carries out on its own. Your bill therefore depends more on what runs in your portal and less on how large your database is.

HubSpot describes the model in its Flexible Seats-and-Credits Pricing catalog supplement, which also lists limits, packs and the rate sheet. You choose Starter, Professional or Enterprise, and each account has exactly one edition—mixed-edition subscriptions are not supported. The free tools stay available as a free edition with up to two users and are included in every paid edition.

Our view: the bill now follows how you operate, not how big your database has grown. Teams that know which workflows run and how many emails go out each month can plan more precisely than under the old model, where one extra batch of contacts could push you into the next tier.

When the model applies to your contract is something to confirm with HubSpot or your partner. The catalog notes that HubSpot may move accounts on legacy subscriptions to its then-current products, and that accounts on an earlier version of seats-and-credits pricing may see different packaging and limits in the portal.

GTM Seat or Ops Seat: who on your team needs which?

Anyone who works directly with customers needs full access. People who build automation, maintain reports and manage permissions in the background can often work with the lower-priced option. In Professional the two seats start at €100 and €50 per month, so it pays to review every role before you order seats.

Full access is called a GTM Seat. It opens the marketing, sales and service tools, plus Breeze Assistant and the Smart CRM, and it includes everything an Ops Seat can do. The Ops Seat gives access to selected automation, reporting and governance features; the catalog describes it as best for operations users who support customer-facing teams. Every account needs at least one GTM Seat, and Starter has no Ops Seat.

A typical split looks like this:

• GTM Seat: everyone who sends campaigns to customers, works deals or answers tickets.
• Ops Seat: marketing ops and RevOps people who build workflows, maintain reports and manage permissions without talking to customers themselves.

One detail helps with the split: HubSpot's Knowledge Base article for the seat-based model states that only users with a paid seat can use HubSpot Credits. Free users and view-only users do not trigger any usage.

Which features use HubSpot Credits, and which don't?

Credits are used wherever HubSpot does work for you. In practice that means emails HubSpot sends, executed workflow actions and AI agents. Once you know which of these run in your portal and how often, you can estimate your monthly usage before the first invoice arrives.

Every feature has a fixed rate in HubSpot's Credits Rate Sheet. For email and workflows the rate drops as volume grows; for agents, every completed task counts. According to the catalog, an additional credit costs €0.010.

According to HubSpot's Knowledge Base on using HubSpot Credits, one-to-one emails your team sends from a connected or hosted inbox use no credits. In workflows, branches, delays and go-to actions are free; every other action uses credits. Using a Data Studio dataset in a report uses none either, and calling minutes and custom events only draw on credits once you exceed their included capacity.

Beta features may start using credits later, and HubSpot can adjust rates. The Knowledge Base says HubSpot aims to give 30 days' notice. Treat the figures above as a snapshot from October 1, 2026, and plan with the current rate sheet.

Why you no longer need to prune marketing contacts

Because they no longer cost extra under seats-and-credits pricing. In the old model, every contact flagged as a marketing contact raised the bill, which is exactly why downgrading contacts paid off. Now marketing contacts count toward the record capacity of your edition, and cost only arises when you actually send them something.

Record capacity covers all applicable object types in an account, so companies, deals and tickets count as well. Starter includes 25,000 records, Professional 250,000 and Enterprise 15 million. If you need more, Starter and Professional add the Basic Records Limit Increase at €5 per month per 1,000 records. Enterprise adds the Scaled Records Limit Increase at €100 per month per 1 million records, up to a maximum of 50 million per account.

In practice, the contacts you would have deleted to save money can stay in the CRM—segment them cleanly instead. Keep an eye on record capacity, because every object type counts toward it. If your contract still runs on the old model, our guide to HubSpot marketing contacts on Enterprise still applies.

How do email and workflow volume affect HubSpot Credits?

The more you send and automate, the fewer credits each email or action costs, because HubSpot tiers its rates by volume. An email sent from a workflow counts twice, though: once for the send and once for the workflow action. If you plan nurture sequences, count both together.

The double charge is spelled out in HubSpot's Knowledge Base on using HubSpot Credits. The emails that use credits include marketing, transactional and automated emails, as well as automated meeting reminders and survey emails. For a first estimate, two lines are enough:

Monthly email credits = number of sends × credits per send for your volume tier

Monthly workflow credits = executed actions excluding branches, delays and go-to actions × credits per action for your volume tier

The volume tiers are in the rate sheet; your actual usage per feature shows up in the portal later. On Professional and Enterprise you can also make email and workflow volume predictable with capacity packs. Whatever a pack covers uses no credits, and only the volume above the pack draws on them.

How to keep HubSpot Credits spend under control

With limits on three levels and notifications before your allowance runs out. You decide how many credits the whole account may use each month, cap individual features, and pause any feature at any time. That keeps spend predictable, even once AI agents join the mix.

You find every setting under Account & Billing in the HubSpot Credits tab. The three levels build on each other:

1. Account limit: the ceiling for all features combined, labeled "Maximum monthly credits" in the portal.
2. Feature limit: a ceiling for a single tool such as the prospecting agent. It does not reserve credits and cannot exceed the account limit.
3. Action limit: a separate cap for individual actions, currently available for intent only.

Once you buy additional credits, HubSpot sets the account limit to 50% above your total monthly credits. HubSpot's Knowledge Base walks through an Enterprise example: 15,000 included credits plus 151,000 purchased credits give you 166,000 credits per month, and the default account limit becomes 249,000. When the account reaches that limit, every credit-based feature pauses until the next reset. A feature limit does not change this; it only caps how much of that total a single tool may take. Along the way, Super Admins and billing contacts get notified at 75%, 85% and 90% usage, and again once the limit is exceeded. Under "Manage usage by feature" you see how many credits each feature has used and can pause each one individually. Historical usage shows consumption over any period you choose, which helps you plan seasonal peaks such as a busy event season ahead of time.

Our view: limits belong in the portal before the first agent runs. Giving an agent a budget from day one is easier than reining it in later, and your spend stays predictable from the start.

What happens when your HubSpot Credits run out?

It depends on whether you have bought additional credits. With only the credits included in your edition, credit-based features pause until next month or until you buy more. With additional credits in place, they keep running, and HubSpot bills the overage afterwards at the Pay-as-You-Go rate.

Pay-as-You-Go costs €0.010 per credit according to the catalog and is invoiced monthly in arrears, in increments of ten credits. On your reset date the account returns to its original limit instead of staying at the higher tier. Only Super Admins and Billing Admins can change the overage setting. The older seat-based model also offers auto-upgrade to the next capacity pack; there, according to the Knowledge Base, Pay-as-You-Go is the default for purchases on or after September 16, 2026.

When is a capacity pack or marketing pack worth it?

As soon as your email and workflow volume is similar from month to month. A pack buys a fixed amount at a monthly price, and whatever it covers uses no credits. If your volume swings widely, Pay-as-You-Go keeps you more flexible, because a purchased pack can only be canceled or downgraded at the end of your term.

A marketing pack bundles sends, workflow actions and credits into one monthly price. It fits when your team needs all three on a regular basis; if you mainly need one of them, the single capacity pack is the more precise choice. For your total HubSpot cost, what counts in the end is the full picture across seats, packs and usage—and that picture can shift a lot. Our Workist case study, "-200k Annual Costs with HubSpot instead of Salesforce", shows how far. If you are moving from Salesforce yourself, our page on Salesforce to HubSpot migration walks through the process. To see what your current stack costs, run it through our SaaS savings calculator.

Checklist: how to prepare your portal for seats and credits

Clean up what will use credits later, then set roles and limits. Each step below makes your portal easier to run and lowers usage without dropping a single campaign. Ideally, go through the list together with whoever builds and maintains your workflows.

1. Find workflows with no clear purpose and switch them off, so they stop executing actions.
2. Budget workflow emails twice: once as a send and once as a workflow action.
3. Split sends to your entire database into segments, so each group only gets what is relevant to it.
4. Keep the contacts you would have deleted to save money, and segment them properly.
5. Focus nurturing on the leads that actually need it.
6. Assign the right seat to every role: a GTM Seat for customer-facing work, an Ops Seat for automation and reporting.
7. Set your account limit and feature limits before the first AI agents go live.
8. Decide who is Super Admin or Billing Admin and therefore receives the usage notifications.

Why we build workflows last in an implementation is covered in our piece on HubSpot implementation build order. Why marketing teams ship faster on HubSpot is the subject of Marketo vs HubSpot Marketing Hub. And what we set up in the CRM as a HubSpot Diamond Partner is on our HubSpot consulting page.