Online Marketing Tools for Small Business: Where Each Free Tier Stops

Most small businesses pick a marketing stack the same way. They sign up for the free tier, push a campaign, see the dashboard, and only later bump into the limit that ends the free plan. The limit is rarely the thing the vendor leads with in its advertising. The phrase on the button is usually "free for up to", and the word that follows "up to" is the one that costs you.

This page is a close reading of those three caps for HubSpot, Zoho CRM and Mailchimp, plus the published price of the first paid step on each. We work out what a stated company pays once it crosses each ceiling. We name the ceiling that arrives first, because that is the one that determines the real starting price for the tool.

What small businesses actually need from online marketing tools

The phrase "online marketing tools" covers a lot of ground. A two-person ecommerce shop needs email sends, a contact list and a way to score leads. A four-person consulting firm needs a CRM, a sales pipeline and a place to track which client said yes. A six-person SaaS startup needs lead capture, drip campaigns and a way to see which traffic source actually closed. Three tools, three different working lives.

The point of a marketing tool is not the dashboard. It is the daily question the tool answers for someone on the team. HubSpot's daily question is "which deal is closeable this week". Zoho's is "who on the team owns this contact and what did they last say". Mailchimp's is "who opened the last send and should we send again". The free tier of each tool is enough to see the dashboard. It is rarely enough to answer the daily question at the speed the team needs.

How each meter works

Three vendors, three different things to count. Before the tables, here is what each one is metering.

• HubSpot. The meter is the seat, defined as a logged-in user with edit rights. Two users get the free tool. The third user is the moment the bill starts.
• Zoho CRM. The meter is the user. The free edition covers three users. The fourth user is the moment the bill starts.
• Mailchimp. The meter is the contact held in the audience. The free plan allows 250 contacts and a 500-send monthly cap with a 250-per-day cap. The 251st contact, or the 251st send in a single day, is the moment the bill starts.

Notice that HubSpot and Zoho look the same on paper, both being "per person", and behave differently in practice. HubSpot's two-user free tier is the tightest of the three, so a sales and marketing pair exhaust it on day one. Zoho's three-user free tier buys you one more body, which matters for a three-person founding team. Mailchimp's meter is the loosest of the three on a contact-by-contact basis, because a small business with fewer than 250 contacts on its books is unusual, but it bites hardest once you start to grow, because the price rises with the size of the audience you are storing, regardless of how often you email them.

The free tiers, side by side

The Asyntai row is ours. Asyntai is an AI chat agent you put on your own site to answer marketing and product questions, deflect the questions that have published answers and route the rest to your team. The free row exists so a small business can run a real test on real traffic without a card on file.

HubSpot: the two-seat ceiling

HubSpot's free Sales Hub allows up to two users. The price page lists $0 for that tier, then $7 per seat per month on annual billing for Starter, with monthly billing pushing the same line to $20 per seat per month. The price page also lists a $90 annual and $150 per seat Professional and Enterprise tiers, plus a one-time $1,500 onboarding fee on Professional and a one-time $3,500 onboarding fee on Enterprise, and an extra-credit rate of $0.01 per credit on annual billing.

Two seats is a tight ceiling for any team that does marketing in shifts. As soon as a third person needs edit rights, the bill starts. The arithmetic for that team:

That is the cheapest realistic landing. If the same team pays monthly, the third seat is $20 per month, which is $240 a year for the same seat. The two numbers, $84 and $240, are both on HubSpot's published price list today. The annual figure is the one HubSpot advertises. The monthly figure is the one most small businesses pay, because most small businesses do not have twelve months of cash ready to prepay a marketing seat.

The credit meter matters too, and the price page says Starter is 500 credits and Professional is 3,000 credits. Credits are HubSpot's unit for actions like sending queued emails, running workflows and enriching records. A small business that emails its 500 contacts once a month and runs a couple of workflows will use a meaningful share of 500 credits within a quarter. Crossing the credit cap does not stop the campaign, it just bills extra at the rate published on the price page: $0.01 per extra credit on annual billing.

Zoho CRM: the three-user ceiling

Zoho CRM's free edition is free for three users. The price page lists Standard at $14 per user per month billed annually and $20 per user per month billed monthly. The annual prepay figure is $168 per user per year. Professional sits at $23 per user per month annually and $276 per user per year prepaid. Enterprise is $40 per user per month annually and $480 per user per year prepaid. Ultimate is $52 per user per month annually and $624 per user per year prepaid. Local taxes are charged on top.

The free edition buys one more body than HubSpot's free tier, which is the difference between a sales and marketing pair and a three-person founding team. The bill starts when a fourth user is added. The arithmetic for that team:

That is also the figure Zoho prints as the annual prepay on its price page: $168 per user per year. The same user on monthly billing is $20 per month, which is $240 a year for the same seat. Local sales taxes apply on top of either figure, so the bill a US buyer sees is the prepay plus whatever the buyer's state charges.

Two caveats. First, Zoho publishes prices for four paid tiers and the first paid step on annual billing is Standard at $14 per user per month. The Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate tiers are not the first paid step. They are the second, third, and fourth paid steps. A small business that needs anything beyond Standard's features moves to Professional at $23 per user per month annually, which is $276 per user per year prepaid. The meter is still per user, so the arithmetic scales with headcount on every tier.

Mailchimp: the contact-held ceiling, in euro

Mailchimp publishes its prices in euro on its pricing page. The free plan allows 250 contacts and 500 sends per month, with a daily cap of 250 sends. The first paid bracket starts at 501 contacts. Mailchimp charges by contacts held, not by emails sent, which is the part most small businesses miss when they read "unlimited sends" in a comparison table.

At the 0 to 500 contact bracket, Mailchimp's pricing page lists Essentials at EUR 11.28 per month, Standard at EUR 17.35 per month, and Premium at EUR 303.69 per month. All three figures are in euro exactly as Mailchimp publishes them. We are not converting them to dollars, because conversion is not the question. The question is which ceiling ends the free tier first, and the answer is the contact list.

The arithmetic for a stated business that has crossed the free ceiling:

That figure assumes the audience stays under 501. Mailchimp's pricing rises with the contact count, so a 5,000-contact audience pays a higher per-month rate than a 501-contact audience, and a 50,000-contact audience pays a higher rate still. The meter is the audience size, not the send volume. A small business that signs up at 501 contacts and runs one campaign a month pays the same as one that signs up at 501 contacts and runs ten campaigns a month.

Two caveats. First, the price page lists the Standard tier at EUR 17.35 per month and the Premium tier at EUR 303.69 per month at the same 0 to 500 contact bracket. Premium is not the first paid step. Essentials is. Second, the contact ceiling is what ends the free tier for any small business that has a list of more than 250 people. The send ceiling of 250 per day only matters for a business that tries to send more than 250 emails in a 24-hour period from a free account, which most small businesses do not.

The ceiling that arrives first

For most small businesses the contact list is the ceiling that arrives first. The reason is simple. Two-seat and three-user free tiers are short ceilings, but a small business that hires a third or fourth person knows it has done so. A small business that grows its contact list from 250 to 500 often does not notice it has crossed the line, because the marketing tool keeps working and the dashboard keeps reporting opens and clicks.

Mailchimp's pricing page makes the meter explicit. The price rises with the contact count, not the send count. HubSpot and Zoho publish per-seat and per-user prices that look similar at first read, but the per-seat figure is a per-action figure too. The HubSpot price page lists 500 credits on Starter and 3,000 credits on Professional, with extra credits at $0.01 each on annual billing. A small business that runs a few campaigns a month and enriches a few contacts a month will burn through 500 credits within a quarter on Starter, and will then start paying per extra credit.

The credit overage is the second ceiling on HubSpot. The first ceiling is the seat count. The two ceilings stack. A small business that has paid for the third seat at $7 per month annual billing and is also burning 200 extra credits a month is paying $84 a year for the seat plus $24 a year for the credits, which is $108 a year on HubSpot before any other cost. Most buyers see the seat figure on the invoice and miss the credit overage until the second or third month.

What a stated business pays once it crosses each ceiling

Pulling the three numbers into one view, so the buyer can see what the same stated company pays once it crosses each free ceiling.

The Asyntai row is the published self-serve price on our pricing page. Asyntai is not a marketing campaign tool in the same shape as the three above, so the "what gets added" column is the moment a small business outgrows the 50 free messages a month and moves to the Starter tier. The comparison is honest only if the row is labelled as ours.

Why the free tier is the wrong question to ask first

The free tier is a marketing tool, and it works on small businesses because the price of the first paid step is hidden inside a word. The word is "up to". Every vendor uses it. HubSpot says free for up to 2 users. Zoho says free for 3 users. Mailchimp says free for up to 250 contacts. The "up to" is what a small business remembers. The number after it is what a small business forgets.

A small business that is choosing a stack this week should ask four questions in this order:

1. What is the meter on the free tier? Seats, users, contacts, sends, messages?
2. What is the cap on the free tier? Two, three, 250, 500, 100?
3. What is the published price of the first paid step, in the buyer's billing currency and on the buyer's billing cycle?
4. What other meters apply on the first paid step? Credits, contacts, sends, messages?

Most small businesses stop at question two. They ask how many seats or how many users they get on the free tier, and they stop reading. The mistake is that the meter is what determines the bill, and the cap is what determines the moment the bill starts. Knowing the cap without the meter is like knowing the speed limit without knowing whether the road charges by the mile.

The contact list is the meter most small businesses miss

Mailchimp's pricing page is the clearest of the three on what it charges for, because the rate rises with the contact count and the price page is sorted by contact bracket. HubSpot's price page sorts by tier and lists credits as a feature inside each tier, which makes the credit ceiling invisible to a buyer who is reading down the page. Zoho's price page sorts by tier and lists users as the meter, which is correct, but does not surface the second meter on higher tiers, which is feature gates. A small business that needs a feature on a higher Zoho tier is paying for the feature, not the seat.

For most small businesses, the contact list is the meter that grows the fastest. Email sign-ups accumulate. Sales reps leave and the contacts they added stay. The contact list grows whether the team emails the list or not. A small business that grows its contact list from 250 to 5,000 over two years is paying a different Mailchimp rate at 5,000 contacts than at 250, and the rate difference is what the price page makes explicit.

When the seat matters more than the contact

There is a case where the seat matters more than the contact, and that case is a small business that hires fast. A consulting firm that hires four consultants in its first quarter and tries to put all four on HubSpot's free Sales Hub will hit the seat ceiling before it hits the contact ceiling. The arithmetic is the same as the HubSpot arithmetic above: $7 per month annual billing for each seat beyond two. The same firm on Zoho's free CRM has one more body of free access, so the seat ceiling arrives at the fifth hire, not the fourth.

There is a case where the contact list matters more than the seat, and that case is a small business that runs marketing campaigns but does not hire. A two-person ecommerce team with a 5,000-person email list pays Mailchimp's 5,000-contact rate, not the free tier. The seat cost is zero because the team fits on the free plan. The bill is the contact list, not the seat.

What to measure in your own data

Three numbers a small business can check on its own site today, before picking a marketing stack.

• Contact list size. The total contacts on the email tool's audience right now, including unsubscribed and cleaned. Mailchimp prices on the held total, not the active total, so the number on the dashboard is the number on the bill.
• Active seats. The number of people on the team who log into the tool and click send, build a workflow, or edit a campaign. HubSpot and Zoho price per active seat. The intern who logs in once a quarter to check the analytics is an active seat on the day they log in.
• Sends per month. The actual number of emails sent in the last 90 days, divided by three. The daily cap on Mailchimp's free plan is 250 sends. A small business that sends 260 emails on a single Tuesday has crossed the daily cap even if its monthly total is well under 500.

Those three numbers are the inputs to the three ceilings. A small business with a 5,000-contact list, two active seats, and 1,200 sends a month will pay Mailchimp's 5,000-contact rate, will not pay HubSpot's seat cost on Sales Hub, and will not cross Mailchimp's monthly send cap. The bill is the contact list, not the seats and not the sends.

The mistake most small businesses make

The mistake is comparing the free tiers. The free tier is the cheapest part of the bill and the shortest part of the relationship. The relevant comparison is the first paid step, on the buyer's billing cycle, in the buyer's billing currency, with the second meter included if the vendor has one.

A small business that is comparing HubSpot's free Sales Hub against Zoho's free CRM against Mailchimp's free plan is comparing three tools that none of them will be on in twelve months. The bill that matters is the one that arrives when the free tier ends, and the ceiling that ends it is the one that grows the fastest.

For a small business with a 5,000-contact email list and a team of four, the Mailchimp bill is the first one to arrive and the one that grows the most. For a small business with a 50-person email list and a team of four that hires fast, the HubSpot bill is the first one to arrive because the third seat is the moment HubSpot starts charging. For a small business with a 200-person email list and a team of three, the Zoho bill is the last one to arrive because the free CRM covers three users, and the Mailchimp free plan covers the contact list at 200.

A worked example using Asyntai's own published figures

The arithmetic above uses only the published prices for the three tools. For a worked example that uses Asyntai's own published figures, so the working is real without quoting a rival on this page, the question is the same. The meter is messages answered by the agent, not seats or contacts. The cap on the free tier is 50 messages per month. The first paid step is Starter at $39 per month for 800 messages.

The meter is messages answered by the agent, which is the count of conversations the agent finishes inside the buyer's site. Seats are not the meter. Asyntai Starter includes two seats, Standard includes three seats, Pro includes ten seats. A small business that hires its third person moves to Standard at $139 per month, which is the second paid step on the price page.

When to move up from each free tier

Three signals that the free tier has ended, one per tool.

• HubSpot. A third person on the team logs in and tries to send a campaign, edit a workflow, or run a report. The free tier covers two users. The third login is the moment HubSpot starts charging.
• Zoho CRM. A fourth person on the team needs a login with edit rights. The free edition covers three users. The fourth login is the moment Zoho starts charging.
• Mailchimp. The contact list crosses 250, or the daily send count crosses 250. The free plan is 250 contacts, 500 sends per month, 250 sends per day. The 251st contact, or the 251st send in a day, is the moment Mailchimp starts charging.

Those three signals are the practical trigger for the first paid step. The signal that arrives first is the one that determines which tool the small business pays for first.

What a small business can do this week

Five practical steps, in the order a small business should take them.

1. Pull the contact list size, the active seat count, and the sends-per-month from each tool already in use. Those three numbers are the inputs to the three ceilings.
2. Decide which ceiling is most likely to arrive first. For most small businesses, the contact list is the one.
3. Read the published price of the first paid step on the tool that has the ceiling most likely to arrive first, in the buyer's billing currency and on the buyer's billing cycle.
4. Read the second meter on that tool's first paid step. HubSpot lists credits. Zoho lists features by tier. Mailchimp lists contact brackets. The second meter is what the small business forgets.
5. Run the arithmetic using only the published prices, not a market estimate. The published price is the one the card will be charged in. The market estimate is the one a comparison article invents.

Those five steps take an afternoon. The output is a forecast of which marketing tool the small business pays for first, and what the first paid step costs, in the buyer's own billing currency, on the buyer's own billing cycle.

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