HubSpot now sells its platform on seats and credits. The UK pricing page lists a Starter seat at £7 a month under a limited-time 65% offer, and every paid edition includes a monthly allowance of credits. Read quickly, it looks like a low and simple price: pay for the people who use it, and spend credits on the work the platform does for you.

The catch is that a credit is a unit of usage, and usage is hard to forecast before you have run the platform for a few months. This article works through HubSpot's published rate sheet, prices a busy month and a heavy month on a 10-seat Starter plan, and sets the result beside Zoho One. In our heavy example, £70 of seats becomes about £3,900 once credits are counted. We are a Zoho partner, so we have a view. Every figure comes from the vendors' own pages, checked on 7 October 2026, so you can test it yourself.

HubSpot and Zoho One pricing side by side

HubSpot publishes its credit rate in euros and dollars, so a sterling quote may differ slightly. Where a figure below is in euros, that is how HubSpot publishes it.

How HubSpot's seats and credits model works

HubSpot's catalogue supplement for flexible seats-and-credits pricing sets out the rules. These are the parts that move your bill.

Seats and the ten-user ceiling

Starter allows a maximum of 10 paid seats. Beyond that you move to Professional, where HubSpot's UK pricing page lists plans from £81 a month with additional seats at £81 each, or Enterprise from £155 a month with seats at £155 each. A Professional seat costs more than eleven times the promotional Starter seat. HubSpot also divides Professional and Enterprise seats into Core and Front Office types, so check which type each user needs, and allow for the mandatory onboarding fee.

What a credit buys

HubSpot's rate sheet sets the number of credits each action uses. At €0.010 a credit, the main items cost:

Per-unit rates fall with volume. Emails drop to 5 credits from the 10,001st send in a month, 2 credits from the 55,001st and 0.5 from the 100,001st. Workflow actions drop to 2, then 0.5, then 0.1. Even so, Starter's 5,000 included credits cover about 333 marketing emails at the first tier.

Packs, pay-as-you-go and spend limits

You can buy extra credits in capacity packs of 1,000 credits a month for €10, or pay as you go at €0.010 a credit, invoiced monthly in increments of 10 credits. Under this model, usage beyond a pack is charged at the pay-as-you-go rate, and pay-as-you-go returns to your original limit at each monthly reset. Agents Packs sell 2,500, 40,000 or 150,000 credits for €25, €400 or €1,500, which is the same €0.010 per credit at every size.

Professional and Enterprise customers can also buy email sends packs, from €200 for 2,000 sends to €1,000 for 10,000, and workflow action packs from €150 for 500,000 actions. Starter customers cannot. HubSpot also lets you set credit limits per feature, which is your main control over a spike.

A busy month on Starter

Take a 10-seat Starter team paying £70 a month at the promotional seat price. The first three rows are a busy month: it emails 2,000 contacts weekly, runs automation and uses two AI agents. The last row is a heavy month. Starter includes 5,000 credits.

We have applied the volume tiers cumulatively across the month, which is our reading of the rate sheet. The agent rows assume your edition includes those agents, so confirm that before you plan around them. Even allowing for the euro to sterling conversion, the heavy month is more than fifty times the £70 seat bill. Each step up to Professional or Enterprise adds 5,000 credits, which trims only €50 from each figure. On Professional or Enterprise, four 2,000-send email packs would cover the first row for €800.

Would a higher tier be cheaper?

Professional adds 5,000 included credits and lets you buy email and workflow packs, which cost less per unit than credits. The catch is the seat price. Ten Professional seats at the £81 listed on HubSpot's UK page cost £810 a month, against £70 on Starter. Here are the same four months with seats and usage both priced, at an approximate £0.88 to the euro.

Professional figures use the cheapest route: email packs, the workflow action pack, and credits only for agent use beyond the 10,000 included. They exclude the mandatory one-off onboarding fee. If your quote uses the lower Core seat that HubSpot lists from €60, Professional comes out level to about £100 cheaper in the three busier rows, and about £150 dearer in the email-only row, again before onboarding. Volume is what changes the answer. On £81 seats, Professional only clearly wins at roughly 48,000 workflow actions or 63,000 marketing emails a month. At this size, moving up is a features decision more than a cost saving.

How that compares with Zoho One

Zoho One's licence already includes email sending and CRM workflows, so each Zoho figure below is the whole monthly bill for 10 people, not an extra on top. The HubSpot figures are seats plus credits. Zoho One costs £37 per employee on all-employee pricing or £80 per user on flexible pricing.

Each Zoho figure is the whole monthly bill for the activity shown, not an extra on top. Zoho's plan details page lists Zoho Campaigns email sending as unlimited, with 5,000 contacts per licence, and lists no per-action charge for CRM workflows. The two agent rows add AI usage, which is free within Zoho's monthly token allowance and extra beyond it, and we have not priced a Zoho equivalent of HubSpot's customer and data agents. Zoho Flow runs on a monthly task allowance and stops if it runs out. This compares cost for the same activity, not the same feature list. At low volume HubSpot Starter is far cheaper. On these assumptions it passes Zoho One's all-employee cost at roughly 2,600 marketing emails a month.

Four places the credit bill grows

Credits are used by ordinary work, not only by AI. These four examples use the rate sheet above, each measured against Starter's 5,000 included credits.

How to work out your own monthly cost

You can estimate this before you buy. Work through four steps and keep the result next to the quote.

What this means for UK and Irish businesses

HubSpot's seats and credits model suits a small team with modest usage that wants a low entry price, and its published rate sheet and spend limits let you cost it properly. The risk is a team that signs up on the seat price and then switches on email, automation and agents. Those are where credits go, and the bill follows usage, not headcount. Moving to a higher edition does not remove the metering, and at 10 seats it can cost more.

Zoho One costs more per head at the start, and it has its own rules. All-employee pricing needs a licence for every employee on payroll, so it works out cheaper overall only when more than about 46% of your staff need access (£37 divided by £80). For a business of 40 people, flexible pricing is cheaper if fewer than 19 people need a licence. Zoho also meters AI: Zia Agents run within a free monthly token allowance and then draw on prepaid credits. Its apps carry their own allowances too, so check your email and automation volumes against Zoho's plan details page. Its pricing FAQ says there are no long-term contracts, and that the price is the same whether you buy direct or through a partner.

As a Zoho partner we are not neutral, so check every figure here against the vendors' pages. If you want a second pair of eyes on a HubSpot quote, or a costed comparison for your own volumes, we are happy to have that conversation without the sales pressure.

How we checked: HubSpot's UK pricing page, its flexible seats-and-credits catalogue supplement and its US Marketing Hub page, and Zoho's UK pricing page, pricing FAQ, plan details, Zia Agents and Zoho MCP pages, all on 7 October 2026. HubSpot runs more than one pricing model, so your quote may not match the figures here. Prices change, so confirm before you buy.

• Zoho One
• Zoho Partner UK
• HubSpot Pricing
• HubSpot Credits
• Usage-Based Pricing
• Zia Agents
• Zoho MCP
• CRM Costs
• AI
• Software Pricing