Our small business had lost 90% of its revenue during the COVID shutdowns in California and was facing a permanent closure. We decided to put all of our effort and available resources into pivoting to e-commerce, shifting from being service to product focused. This was new territory for us, so we hired a consultant to help with marketing. Part of his proposal included signing up for Hubspot's Marketing Professional Tier which came to around $600/mo. We ended up terminating our agreement with the consultant about 30 days into the one year contract because it wasn't a good fit (we offered to pay him a termination fee, which he accepted). He had determined that Hubspot was unable to generate dynamic coupon codes in Shopify via Unific - a major reason we had signed up with Hubspot. For this and other reasons we decided Hubspot also was not a good fit and approached them about terminating our agreement approximately 30 days into it. I assumed that since such little time had passed and we hadn't used the Marketing Professional features yet that this would not be a problem. I was wrong.The most they offered was to turn off the auto-renewal of the contract at expiration. Absolutely zero consideration of the fact that we were only a month in and had only used features in their $50/month and free plans. No offer of a termination fee of any sort - only holding us hostage for the entire 12 months despite our complete and total dissatisfaction with the service. I've come across other jaw-dropping reviews about people not realizing their annual contract was on auto renewal and being unable to stop it even before the start date of the new contract because they had missed the notice window by a matter of days. It's frankly disgusting that this company relies on such draconian measures as a source of revenue. I can't imagine that it will ultimately serve them in a positive way. But please don't become a casualty of their business practices like we did.
