Contacts & companies database
The CRM bills by marketing-contact tier, so two-way syncs and stale records inflate the bill while changes take weeks to apply.
What people actually say
✕Adding a single contact above your tier instantly bumps you to the next 1,000-contact tier and adds roughly €225/month, and HubSpot upgrades automatically but never downgrades automatically.
Source: Avidly Agency, HubSpot pricing guide ↗✕Two-way syncs with Salesforce, Eventbrite, Typeform flood HubSpot with leads, vendors and churned customers that integrations tag as 'Marketing Contacts', so you pay premium rates to market to accounts-payable contacts.
Source: Avidly Agency, HubSpot pricing guide ↗✕If you exceed your tier by even one marketing contact you jump a full 1,000-contact tier, and Starter users must email support at least five business days before renewal to request a downgrade.
Source: HubSpot KB, marketing contacts billing ↗✕Flipping a contact to non-marketing doesn't take effect until the next monthly update date, so reconciling at the end of the billing cycle is a mess.
Source: HubSpot Community, non-marketing contact delay ↗
A bespoke contacts store costs the same to host 5,000 or 500,000 rows — your bill is engineering hours, not record count. We model contacts in a Postgres schema you own, run dedupe and segmentation in SQL, and let integrations write in whatever shape you need without re-tagging them as 'marketing' behind your back. Status changes apply instantly; exports are a pg_dump away.