How to Reduce the Total Cost of Salesforce and HubSpot Without Losing Functionality
Salesforce and HubSpot costs usually do not become excessive because of one major purchase.
They increase gradually.
More users are added. New managed packages are installed. Extra tools are connected. Storage grows. Old automation remains in place. Contracts renew with products and licenses that nobody has reviewed for years.
That is why reducing Salesforce and HubSpot costs should not be treated as a license-cutting exercise.
The better approach is to review the total cost of ownership across six areas.
1. Review Users and License Types
Start with usage.
Look at active users, login frequency, role, last login date, and what each person actually does in Salesforce and HubSpot.
The objective is to identify:
Users who no longer need access
Users who rarely log in
Users who only need reporting or limited access
Users whose license type exceeds their actual requirements
A salesperson may need a full Sales Cloud license. Someone who only needs to view data or interact with a limited set of objects may not.
The key is to match business need to license capability rather than giving everyone the same level of access.
2. Audit Salesforce and HubSpot Products and Add-Ons
The next layer is everything purchased on top of the core platform.
That can include additional storage, sandboxes, analytics products, AI features, security products, CPQ-related functionality, telephony, or other Salesforce and HubSpot add-ons.
Ask:
Is the feature actively used?
How many users rely on it?
Is there an alternative already available elsewhere in the stack?
Is the business getting enough value to justify the recurring cost?
Unused add-ons are often harder to notice than unused user licenses because they sit quietly inside the contract.
3. Review Managed Packages
Managed packages are another common source of unnecessary spend.
A package may have been purchased because it solved an important problem three years ago, but the business may now use only a fraction of its functionality.
Review each package and identify:
Which features are used
Which users depend on them
What the annual cost is
Whether Salesforce and HubSpot can now handle the requirement natively
Whether the critical functionality could be rebuilt more economically
This does not mean every package should be replaced.
Sometimes keeping a package is still cheaper than owning custom functionality.
The point is to make the decision deliberately.
4. Review External Applications and Integrations
Some of the biggest savings are outside Salesforce and HubSpot.
Companies often pay separately for forms, workflow tools, reporting platforms, document generation, enrichment, scheduling, middleware, or niche operational applications.
Individually, each tool may look inexpensive.
Collectively, they can become a significant part of the technology budget.
The better question is:
Can this business process be handled inside Salesforce and HubSpot or with a simpler architecture?
If a standalone application costs $1,000 per month but the business only uses three basic functions, rebuilding those functions inside Salesforce and HubSpot may reduce recurring spend and simplify the workflow.
5. Reduce Architecture and Maintenance Cost
Licensing is only one part of Salesforce and HubSpot cost.
A complex org can be expensive to maintain even when the contract itself looks reasonable.
Technical debt increases the time required for every future change.
Typical examples include:
Duplicate fields
Legacy automation
Old Process Builder logic
Overlapping Flows
Fragile integrations
Unused custom objects
Poor naming conventions
Missing documentation
If every small change requires hours of investigation, the organization is paying for complexity.
Simplifying the architecture can reduce admin, development, consulting, testing, and support costs over time.
6. Review Contracts, Storage, and Infrastructure
Finally, review the commercial and infrastructure layer.
Look at:
Contract renewal dates
Committed license quantities
Unused products
Storage consumption
Sandbox requirements
Data retention
File growth
Historical data, old files, activities, and email records can also create unnecessary storage costs if there is no retention strategy.
The worst time to discover unused licenses or unnecessary products is after the renewal has already been signed.
Look at Salesforce and HubSpot as Part of the Entire Technology Stack
The goal should not be to make Salesforce and HubSpot as cheap as possible.
It should be to reduce the total cost of the technology stack without damaging the business process.
That means reviewing licenses, Salesforce and HubSpot products, managed packages, external software, architecture, storage, and contract structure together.
In many organizations, meaningful savings already exist inside the current setup.
They simply have not been identified because nobody has reviewed the environment as one connected system.