Is HubSpot Actually Free?

We've gotten some comments on some of our other YouTube videos questioning whether HubSpot is actually free and how much you get for free. My personal favorite is this one here. Wow. It's free to sign up and pay a fortune to do anything. Now I get it. HubSpot has a lot of paid tools and some of them are very expensive for a solo entrepreneur or a small, small business. But there is actually a lot you can do for free inside the HubSpot platform. And to prove it, I created a website called imadethis Website for free dot com. Let's take a look here. Here I am. While I made this website for free.com I have a logo, I have pictures and words, I have a blog, I have a Contact Us page with a form on it. I have a chat pane where I can communicate with my visitors. And there's even more things you can set up which I'll show you in the course of this video. So let me walk you through how I built this website for free using HubSpot. We're just going to start right here on HubSpot's free CMS tools webpage. If you Google HubSpot free CMS, you'll land here and you can click this get started for free button. If you don't have a domain, you should probably go buy one from Godaddy or somewhere. But you don't have to have one to get started. I happen to have one, so I'll just put that in here. Now here is a really powerful thing inside of HubSpot. If you don't know how to build a website, you can let our AI do it for you. Check this out. You can click this button. You can say I'm building a web page to demonstrate HubSpot's free tools. Trying to showcase my work. Let's say I want it to be vibrant. Now the AI thinks for a bit and ta da, we're well on our way to having a website built for us. We'll need to go in and replace the text and pictures, but the structure is all here. Now if AI website creation isn't your thing, if you're a creative type who would rather be more hands on with the process, let's take a look at that. Let's build some website pages inside of HubSpot. Sure. Make manually. This is what it looks like inside of HubSpot where you manage your website pages to create a new one. You just come to the create button and you decide whether this is going to be a website page or A landing page. We'll stick with a website page. For now, let's figure out if we can make a Contact Us web page. Now, there are a lot of different themes and templates you can choose from our marketplace. We're going to stick with the default one of Growth, but you could change that if you wanted to. And if we scroll down a little bit, we can see there are lots of templates here we can start with. We're looking for a Contact Us page, so we'll just select this template. Now, here we are with the beginnings of a Contact Us page. We're going to want to change some imagery and text again and we're going to need to create a form. But the good news is that's another thing you can do for free inside of HubSpot. To create a new one, we'll just click this Create form button and you can choose a lot of different styles of form. So for this one, we'll stick with an embedded form. If you want to build this from scratch, you totally can. And the blank template is a great place to start. But we're looking for a Contact Us form, and here is a template for that already made. So if I just click Start, I'm basically already done. I'll call this form Contact Us form, update it, Publish. And now I have this link I can copy. I have an embed code I can use elsewhere. But remember, HubSpot is all one connected system. So I'm just going to skip this step and I'm going to go back to my website pages. And it should be fairly straightforward for me to just take this HubSpot form and embed it in my HubSpot page. So if I edit my Contact Us page and I go down to this part where I need a form, I can choose a form from HubSpot and it's there. I'm done. This is where we start to unlock the power of HubSpot's different free tools, all being connected to each other. And if you want to use one inside of another, you usually don't have to copy, paste or edit code anywhere. You can just select it from a dropdown list. After you've worked on your page for a bit and you're ready to publish it. The Publish button is up here in the top right corner. And if there's anything preventing HubSpot from publishing it, it's going to be called out right here. First of all, this page needs a title. No surprise there. This is going to take us right to where the title should go. So we can just say contact us. And actually anywhere you see this little lightning bolt AI can help you generate the content. So titling a contact Us page is pretty straightforward, but meta description might be a little tougher for you. But if you just click this button, that's going to automatically populate based on the information on the page. Now that we're done with that, we should be able to publish this page. And look, we've put it on this free HubSpot domain. If you have a domain that you want to connect you, now is a great time to do that. But look, even if you don't, you can publish for free on HubSpot. Let's look at the process of adding a domain. We'll just click this Add domain button. This is going to take me to a settings page. If you need to buy a domain, you can push this button to go directly to GoDaddy from inside HubSpot. Or if you already have a domain, you can click this button to add it here. Either way, we're trying to make it as easy as possible for you to get your website up and running with your custom domain using HubSpot. In addition to creating a website with website pages and landing pages, HubSpot's free tools also enable you to make a blog. So check this out. If you haven't started your blog, you're going to see a page like this inside of HubSpot and you can just click create your first blog. And maybe I call this the totally free blog. I can choose the language, I can choose the URL, I can add a meta description blog I created for free on Hub HubSpot and I am ready to create this blog. If you have a blog you're porting over from another source, you can import that here. If you're starting fresh, you can just create new post and get dropped right in here where you can give it a title and start creating content. After spending just a little bit of time creating some pages and tweaking some settings, I was able to pull together a small website that I felt really good about. Take a look at this. I have three different web pages and we can view these in here. And look, I've added my own logo. I've added custom menu items to go to my blog and my Contact us page. I've created this pricing page and even an FAQ down at the bottom. And I've changed that bright, gnarly purple that the AI gave me to something a little cooler and chiller. So now we've put together the Beginnings of a website that actually looks pretty good. But we've only used HubSpot's website tools. HubSpot has lots of other free tools that are actually really relevant to your website. And one of my favorite ones is our meeting scheduling tool. Our meetings tool lets your visitors get direct visibility into your calendar or one of your teammates calendars and book time with them right there without any back and forth of email. Let's take a look at how to set that up. So this is a meetings page inside of HubSpot and the first thing you're going to want to do is connect your calendar. Otherwise what are we even giving people visibility into? This works whether you have Gmail or Outlook or Exchange. You just click on your provider, connect your calendar, accept the terms, and now that's it. You have a meeting page here. And if we, if we just click on it here, we can see what it looks like. This is the experience people are going to have. They can choose how much time they want to meet with you, but you can customize a lot of this. If we come over here and under edit, we get these settings pages. So first of all you can choose an internal name for it. This is just a generic one. What if we call it Meet with customers Kyle? Right now anyone who uses this meeting link internally will know that that's what this is for. And you'll see why that's useful in just a minute. Event title is how this is going to appear both on your calendar and on your guest's calendar when they book time with you. So if you want to say Kyle and their first name, meet together as friends, you can do that. And that's what it's going to be called if you want to add a location, if this is an in person meeting or, or you can add integrations to Zoom and other video conferencing apps so that this is automatically populated with one of those links. Whatever will work best for you and your team. You can also give people the ability to cancel and reschedule their meetings, which will add some links to the description. So they can do that. If you want to add a description here, you can do that and you can add some bullet points here if you wanted to. Up at the top, there are two other pages of options you should pay attention to. First is scheduling. So you'll notice on the page the headline here is Meet with Kyle Jepsen. You can alter that. Pick a time to meet with Kyle. How about. So it fits on one line. You can choose what durations are going to be available to people. If you want all your meetings to be exactly 30 minutes, you can make that the only option here. You can choose your time zone, but the availability will appear in the visitor's time zone. And you can choose what days you're available for these meetings. So by default, It's Monday through Friday, 9, 5. But you only want people to book meetings with you on Tuesdays and Thursdays or only in the afternoon or only in the morning. You can totally do that. There are a few additional settings down here. We won't go into those today, but you have a lot of flexibility and control over when people are going to be able to book you, how much advanced time they need to give, that sort of thing. So let's save this. And we now have a meet with Kyle meeting link. If we go back to our website pages, let's look at this contact us page. We can add a meeting module right here. We can just drag this over, put it right here. We can select the meeting link. This is where that internal name becomes really important. If you have lots of different meetings per user or lots of different users with meetings, want to make sure we're selecting the right one. And then if we refresh this page, look, this meeting page is just embedded right here. We could actually remove the contact us form and just let people book time with me if that's what we wanted. Because HubSpot is a single connected system. The meetings tool, which lives in Sales Hub and Service Hub, works by default. No copying code, no embedding anything, no customizing the page to enable people to use that tool on their website pages. You can just drop it here and you now have that. Another great free tool you can add to your website is our live chat and chatbot functionality. So here's what chat looks like on a HubSpot page. There's just this little chat bubble in the bottom right corner here. You click on it and you can chat with a person. And this goes into an inbox that you can also access in your free tools. So if someone comes by and says, hey, what is this website? We can come over here and see a live chat has just come in. I can click on it and we can have this conversation back and forth. That's really great. If you want to engage with visitors to your website in real time, and if you have the availability, or someone on your team does, to answer questions as they come in, this is going to be a really powerful way for you to connect. But assuming you don't have that kind of time and you want to automate this a little bit. Bots can be really helpful. So check this out. This is the chat flows page inside of HubSpot. And here's where I set up that live chat pane we were just using to create a new chat flow. You click this button here and you can set this up for either your website or Facebook messenger, which is super cool, but we're focused on the website right now. And what you saw was live chat. But notice we also have a lot of bots and one of them is a meetings bot. Remember that meetings page we just set up? Here's another great place you can use it. So if we select this option and if we select the meeting link we just set up, look at this experience we're going to be able to give people. We'll create this, and this page shows you all the logic happening on the back end. But let's just name this thing and turn it on Kyle's chat. And now if we go back to chat flows, we'll turn the live chat off and we'll turn the chatbot on. Now let's go to our website and see what this experience looks like. So now when I click on the chat button, I get a robot answering. To set up a meeting, I'll need a few details first. What's your full name? Great. Where do you want me to send a calendar invite? Here's my email. What day works best? I can just choose one of these options or select another day. Awesome. Your meeting is booked. Now, obviously there's a few little formatting things I should go in and adjust, but that took me just a few clicks to set up. It was totally free and now people can book time with me either on that website page or just by talking to a bot. This is really powerful functionality, and again, we're not paying HubSpot anything for it. There are lots of other free tools inside of HubSpot that we don't have time to cover. In this video, I'm thinking sales tools like tracking emails, using email templates, tracking your revenue and reporting on that. There are more service tools and marketing tools than I've touched on here. But the last thing I want you to know, the one thing I think I have to show you is the reporting inside of HubSpot. So here I am on a dashboard inside of HubSpot. This is just the default marketing dashboard. We can see our website has already had some sessions and even one new contact that was probably me submitting that meeting request through the bot. But you're going to be able to report on everything. You don't have to create any reports. They're all just going to come standard. So so you can see how the marketing work you're doing in HubSpot is performing. But that's not all you can measure here. Let's say you are using the sales tools inside of HubSpot. You can create a dashboard for that too. And this is another thing you don't have to do manually. If you just search for sales, you can look, do I want general sales? Am I a sales manager? Am I a sales rep? If you select one of these, you'll see what reports are included. You can check and uncheck them as your interests dictate. And when you're done, you can create a new dashboard and and be able to track those metrics as well. So my advice to you, rather than trusting me and this whole video when I say HubSpot's free tools are worth it, are to try them out and set up some reporting and measure the results you get. See how far you can take your business just using HubSpot's free tools and let us know in the comments how it went.