And yet, buried in the numbers is a more interesting story:
HubSpot is quietly rewriting how SaaS gets paid for in the AI era, and it’s doing it on the backs of the smallest, least protected players in the economy—small and midsize businesses.
The headlines are about “AI‑first strategy” and “embedded agents.” The subtext is about survival: of SMBs trying not to get crushed by Big Tech, and of a maturing SaaS company searching for growth in a world where the old seat‑based model is running out of road.
This is not neutral, wire‑service software coverage. This is about power—who holds it, who rents it, and who ends up paying for it.
The Plateau: Strong Growth, Weak Monetization
Let’s start with the scoreboard.
- Total revenue: $809.5M, up 21% as reported, 18% in constant currency.
- Customers: 278,880, up 17%.
- Average subscription revenue per customer (ASRPC): $11,578, up just 3%.
- Q4 guidance: 18% as‑reported growth, but a step down to 16% in constant currency.
Those numbers scream a very particular story: HubSpot is fantastic at adding small customers. It is not yet fantastic at making significantly more money from each of them.
Analysts have called this out plainly: underlying business momentum is decelerating, and customer monetization is “marginal.” Customer count up 17%; revenue per customer up 3%.
If all you had was that, you’d say HubSpot is a very good, somewhat commoditized SaaS machine. But that’s where AI and pricing come in—and why this quarter matters.
The Pivot: From Seats To “AI Credits”
On the earnings call and in investor materials, HubSpot laid out a new economic engine:
- Seats are still there—the familiar per‑user licenses.
- On top of seats, a universal, usage‑based credits system now meters AI and automation: customer agent activity, data hub syncs, prospecting agents, and other AI‑powered actions.
This is not just a mild tweak. It’s the core of the AI pivot:
Make it easier and cheaper for SMBs to get onto the platform.
Move the real monetization to how much AI work flows through it.
The move is already live:
- HubSpot has introduced this credit system across AI agents and data features.
- Management is explicit: credits are a core growth lever for “durable monetization” going forward.
In other words: the “pricing pivot” is less about cutting prices and more about changing the axis along which HubSpot extracts value.
Seats are the cover charge. AI usage is the toll road.
AI As A Force Multiplier — And A Lock‑In Machine
To understand the market shift, you have to zoom in on what HubSpot is embedding:
- Embedded AI in every hub: from AI‑assisted email to AI meeting support, to agents that prospect, summarize, and analyze.
- Data Hub and Data Agent: a way to pull disparate customer data into one place so AI can act on it.
- Connectors to major LLMs: ChatGPT connectors activated by over 47,000 customers; 55% of them on HubSpot’s higher‑tier Pro Plus.
The pitch is seductive, and not wrong: automate the rote work so humans can focus on strategy and relationships. HubSpot cites examples like:
- Customers using embedded AI features in Marketing Hub seeing higher click‑through rates.
- Sales Hub users winning ~10% more deals.
- Prospecting Agent activations nearly doubling, now engaging over a million prospects.Motley Fool
For a small business, that’s real. AI isn’t some abstract “future of work” slide; it’s:
Do I have time to follow up with 200 leads this week, or does an agent do the first pass for me?
But the more AI becomes the nervous system of your go‑to‑market machine, the stickier the platform becomes:
- 43% of Pro Plus ARR now includes three core hubs; 39% own four or more.
- Large deals ($5,000+ in monthly recurring revenue) are up 35% year over year, pulling HubSpot further upmarket.
That’s not just “customer success.” It’s gravitational pull.
Once your marketing, sales, service, data, and AI all live in one system, the cost—financial, operational, emotional—of leaving that system skyrockets.
AI raises the switching costs. It also raises the democratic stakes. When a few platforms become the de facto AI infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of small firms globally, that’s not just a product story; it’s a structural one.
The SMB Lens: Democratizing Or Re‑Centralizing Power?
HubSpot’s story, at first glance, is exactly what you’d want from a progressive tech ecosystem:
- It sells to SMBs, not just Fortune 500 behemoths.
- Almost half of its revenue (49%) is international, with as‑reported international growth hitting 25%.Yahoo Finance / GuruFocus
- It’s trying to be the one system where a small firm, or a nonprofit, or a scrappy startup can get modern, AI‑driven go‑to‑market capabilities without wiring up six different vendors.
In a world where Big Tech often treats small businesses as data exhaust, this matters. Lowering the barrier to real, productive AI for the “long tail” is, in principle, a win for economic inclusion.
But look a little harder.
First, pricing complexity is itself a form of power. Moving from simple seats to hybrid seat + usage models makes it harder for a two‑person marketing team in Nairobi or Kraków to forecast what they’ll pay if their AI usage spikes. The incentives are not symmetrical: HubSpot wants more usage; the customer wants predictable cost.
Second, the AI layer centralizes decision‑making. If the platform’s agents are recommending which leads to prioritize, which customers to nudge, which messages to send, then a lot of small‑scale economic choices are being quietly shaped by one vendor’s models, trained on data the customer doesn’t fully control.
Third, exit ramps get narrower. The more those AI agents are tuned on your historical data, the more your workflows are wired into the platform’s automations, the harder it is to move to an open‑source alternative or a local competitor. You’re not just moving data; you’re trying to move behavior.
From a democratic‑norms perspective, this is the textbook setup for soft lock‑in:
no outright monopoly, but a landscape where small institutions are functionally dependent on a system they don’t govern.
Regulators have learned the hard way, in search and social, what happens when they notice this late.
Wall Street’s Hand On The Scale
There’s also the market context. HubSpot is not making these choices in a vacuum.
- Full‑year 2025 revenue guidance: $3.113–$3.115B, ~19% as‑reported growth.
- Non‑GAAP operating income expected around $574–$575M, an 18% margin.
- To hit that, Q4 non‑GAAP operating margin has to jump to 22%.
That back‑loaded margin target is aggressive. One independent analysis calls it out as an execution risk and ties it to a broader pattern: revenue growth is decelerating while the company is leaning into share repurchases—$375M in Q3 alone.
So HubSpot is being pushed, implicitly, to do three things at once:
- Keep adding lots of small customers.
- Extract more value from each via AI and usage, without triggering revolt.
- Expand margins fast enough to keep its multiple from compressing.
That’s the real backdrop of the “AI pricing pivot”: not just innovation, but constraint.
When you’re in that box, the temptation is to make your platform indispensable—and then slowly turn the monetization dial. That’s not inherently evil. It’s just the logic of late‑stage SaaS.
The question is: who absorbs the risk?
Right now, it’s small businesses that don’t have the bargaining power or legal firepower to push back if the toll keeps rising.
The Market Shift: From SaaS As Tool To SaaS As Institution
HubSpot’s quarter is part of a broader shift in software economics:
- From tools to platforms to institutions. When a system houses your customer data, your revenue workflows, and now your AI agents, it’s no longer a “product.” It’s institutional infrastructure.
- From seats to hybrid pricing. Nearly every serious SaaS company in AI‑exposed categories will land where HubSpot is landing: fixed access fees plus metered automation.
- From optional AI to ambient AI. You won’t “turn on AI.” It will just quietly be there—writing emails, routing leads, generating reports—while the invoice reflects how deeply you’ve let it into your business.
The optimistic read: this enables a global tier of businesses that can punch above their weight, compete across borders, and serve customers better with small teams.
The sober read: we’re recreating the same structural imbalances we saw in social media and cloud—just with more polite language and better dashboards.
Where This Goes Next
HubSpot’s AI pricing pivot and SMB land‑grab are telling us where the next fights will be:
- Data portability and AI portability. Small businesses should not be functionally trapped inside any single AI platform. Regulators and industry groups should be thinking in terms of “AI interoperability” standards now, not after consolidation hardens.
- Transparent, predictable pricing. If AI usage is the new meter, then forecastable, consumer‑protection‑style rules for pricing matter as much for a ten‑person firm as for a household utility bill.
- Stronger governance of AI in business tooling. If one platform is quietly deciding which leads thousands of companies call back, that’s a governance problem, not just a UX problem.
HubSpot is not the villain of this story. In many ways, it’s the canary. Its numbers show a SaaS market that is growing, but not fast enough to sustain the dream of infinite, seat‑driven expansion. Its strategy shows the industry’s new consensus: AI is the only credible path to higher value per customer.
Whether that becomes a story of shared productivity gains or just another chapter in quiet concentration of economic power will depend less on the next INBOUND product keynote and more on how seriously policymakers, standards bodies, and yes, customers themselves treat platforms like HubSpot as critical institutions—not just “apps.”
For now, the message from Cambridge is clear:
AI is here, it’s cheap to start, and the meter is running.