CRM Free Tiers: What Happens When You Outgrow One
Capsule, HubSpot and Pipedrive at 1–5 people. The free tiers are the easy part — the upgrade step is where the cost lands, and it isn't where most people look.
What's in this guide
Most CRM comparisons for small teams line up the free tiers and count contacts. That is the least important number on the page.
A free tier is a temporary state. You will either abandon the CRM or outgrow it, and the cost of the second outcome is decided by a price you did not look at when you signed up. Here is what the free tiers actually give you at 1–5 people, and — the part that matters — what the step off them costs.
All figures below were read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 2026-07-30 and carry that date. This is a pricing and plan analysis, not a review: we have not yet run these products through the lab, and we do not rank what we have not tested. See how we test.
The three free tiers, side by side
| Free tier | Paid step | Billing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capsule | 2 users, 250 contacts, 1 pipeline | $18/user/mo | Annual or monthly (annual saves up to 14%) |
| HubSpot | 2 users, 1,000 contacts | $7/user/mo promotional · $20 standing | Annual or monthly (+186%) |
| Pipedrive | None — 14-day trial, no card | $14/user/mo | Annual ($14) or monthly ($24, +71%) |
Read that table twice, because the obvious conclusion is wrong.
Why the contact limit is a distraction
HubSpot’s free tier holds four times as many contacts as Capsule’s. At 250 contacts versus 1,000, HubSpot looks like the clear winner.
But consider what a two-person service business actually has. If you are a consultancy with 40 active clients and a pipeline of 30 prospects, you are nowhere near either limit. The contact ceiling only binds if you are doing volume outbound — and if you are doing volume outbound, you are not choosing between free tiers.
What binds first, for almost everyone, is the seat limit. Both Capsule and HubSpot cap the free tier at two users. The moment a third person needs to see the pipeline — a new hire, a contractor, an assistant doing scheduling — you are paying. Not at 251 contacts. At three people.
That reframes the decision entirely: you are not choosing a free tier, you are choosing which paid plan you will be on within a year.
The upgrade step, priced
At three users, the month you hire:
| Cost at 3 users | Annually | |
|---|---|---|
| Capsule Starter | $54.00/mo | $648 |
| HubSpot Starter (promotional $7) | $21.00/mo | $252 |
| HubSpot Starter (standing $20) | $60.00/mo | $720 |
| Pipedrive Lite | $42.00/mo | $504 |
HubSpot is either the cheapest option on this page or the most expensive, depending on which of its two prices you are paying — and the $7 is a flagged new-customer promotion, not the list rate. The standing monthly price is $20 per seat, a 2.9× step-up.
This is the single most common way small teams get the CRM decision wrong. They compare the promotional rate to competitors’ standing rates, budget accordingly, and get a different invoice in month 13.
Budget the number you will pay in year two, not the one on the signup page.
Capsule’s honest trade
Capsule’s free tier is the tightest of the three on paper: 250 contacts, one pipeline, two users. Our own note in the pricing tracker says it “genuinely covers a small shop where only two people touch the pipeline,” and that is the right framing — it is a real product at zero, not a demo designed to fail.
Its paid step has one property worth naming: there is one price. $18 per user per month, annual billing, no promotional rate, no month-13 surprise. That is more expensive than Pipedrive’s $14 and more expensive than HubSpot’s promotional $7. It is less expensive than HubSpot’s standing $20.
The ladder above Starter is worth knowing before you commit: Growth is $36, Advanced $54, Ultimate $72 per user per month. Workflow automations, multiple pipelines and reporting dashboards sit above Starter, so if you need any of those on day one, budget against $36 rather than $18 — at which point Pipedrive’s mid tiers deserve a direct comparison.
Correction, 2026-08-18: an earlier version of this page said Capsule Starter was annual-billing only. That was wrong — Capsule’s pricing page offers both annual and monthly, with annual saving up to 14%. We have not yet verified the exact monthly per-tier figure, so it is absent from our tracker rather than estimated. See our corrections policy.
Pipedrive has no free tier at all
Worth stating plainly because comparison articles routinely imply otherwise: Pipedrive offers a 14-day trial with no card required, and then you pay. There is no free plan to sit on.
That is not a criticism. A time-boxed trial with no card is arguably more honest than a free tier engineered to become unusable at exactly the point you have entered all your data. But it does mean Pipedrive is not in the same conversation if “free until we grow” is your plan.
Its monthly-billing penalty is also material: $14 annually versus $24 monthly, +71%.
Which to pick, on the pricing evidence alone
We have not tested these products, so this is a plan-economics recommendation and nothing more.
If only two people will ever touch the pipeline: Capsule Free is the cleanest fit. 250 contacts is enough for a service business with clients rather than leads, and if you never outgrow it you never pay.
If you expect a third user within the year: compare Capsule at $54/mo against HubSpot at its standing $60/mo, not its promotional $21. They are close, and at that point the decision is about the product rather than the price — which is exactly what our lab testing is for.
If you want the lowest annual paid rate and don’t need a free tier: Pipedrive Lite at $14/user is the cheapest standing per-seat price of the three. Take the annual billing; the monthly rate is 71% more.
If you are doing volume outbound: none of this applies to you and you should ignore this page.
What we haven’t told you
Deliberately, because we don’t know it yet:
- How each one behaves when you actually import a messy contact list
- Whether the free tier’s single pipeline is a real constraint in daily use
- What happens to your data when you cancel, and how hard cancelling is
- Whether the mobile apps are usable for someone updating a deal from a client’s car park
Those are the questions that decide whether you keep a CRM, and none of them can be answered from a pricing page. Our CRM lab runs are queued on the public test log, and until they happen this page tells you what things cost, not which one is good.
That distinction is the whole point of the site.
Prices are verified list prices from each vendor’s official pricing page on 2026-07-30 — see the pricing tracker for source links and check dates. We have not completed hands-on testing of these products and do not rank them here. This page contains no affiliate links.
Get told when these prices change
Promotional CRM rates expire and standing prices are often several times higher. We re-check all 20 vendors' pricing pages every Monday and email you what moved.