Yes — for most small businesses, paying for HubSpot just to send automated follow-up emails is overkill. You can build the same basic workflow (welcome emails, post-purchase check-ins, review requests, abandoned-cart nudges, re-engagement sequences) using free or low-cost tools that cost $0–$30/month instead of HubSpot's $800+/month for the Marketing Hub Professional plan. The trade-off is that you'll piece together 2–3 tools instead of one all-in-one platform, and you'll do a bit more setup yourself. For a business sending under 5,000 emails a month, that's a fair trade.
What you actually need to automate follow-ups
Strip away the marketing buzzwords and email automation has three parts:
- A trigger — someone fills out a form, buys something, books an appointment, or hits a date (like 30 days after purchase).
- A delay or condition — wait 2 days, or only send if they haven't replied.
- An email that goes out automatically — usually one of a sequence.
Any tool that handles those three things can replace HubSpot's follow-up automation for a small business.
Free and low-cost tools that do this well
- MailerLite — Free up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails/month. Has a visual automation builder that handles triggers, delays, and branching. Paid plans start around $10/month.
- Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) — Free up to 300 emails/day with unlimited contacts. Automation is included on the free tier, which is rare. Good if you have a big list but send infrequently.
- Mailchimp — Free up to 500 contacts. Automation is limited on the free plan now (single-step only), so you'd need the $13/month plan for real sequences.
- Zapier or Make — Not an email tool, but the glue that connects your booking system, Shopify, contact form, or CRM to whichever email tool you pick. Free tiers cover most small-business volume.
- Your existing tools — Shopify, Squarespace, WooCommerce, Calendly, and Square all have built-in email automation for the most common triggers (order placed, appointment booked). Check what you already pay for before buying anything new.
HubSpot's value is the unified contact database that tracks every email, page view, and deal across sales and marketing. If you don't need that — and most small businesses don't — you're paying for features you'll never use.
A practical setup that works for under $20/month
Here's a stack we've set up for plumbers, dentists, salons, and online shops:
- Form or booking tool (Calendly, Jotform, or your existing checkout) captures the contact.
- Zapier sends that contact into MailerLite and tags them based on what they did (booked a service, bought a product, downloaded a guide).
- MailerLite automation sends the welcome email immediately, a follow-up 2 days later, and a review request 7 days after the appointment or delivery.
- A Google Sheet or Notion page as a simple log if you want to track replies without a CRM.
Total cost: free to about $20/month depending on list size. Setup takes a weekend the first time, then runs without you touching it.
When HubSpot (or similar) actually makes sense
Skip the free stack and pay for an all-in-one platform when you have a sales team that needs to see every customer interaction in one place, when you're managing a long B2B sales cycle with multiple touchpoints per deal, or when you're past roughly 10,000 contacts and the patchwork starts breaking. Until then, automated follow-ups don't require a $10,000-a-year tool.
Related questions
- Can AI chatbots actually replace a customer service rep for a small business, or do they hurt the customer experience?
- What tasks should a small business automate first to save the most time?
- How do I connect my contact form to a CRM, Google Sheets, and SMS notifications automatically?
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