How to Automate Follow-Ups in HubSpot Without Upgrading to Pro

The main reason growing businesses consider upgrading to HubSpot Pro is automation — specifically, the ability to send follow-up emails automatically without a human in the loop. But at £720+/month for Sales Hub Pro, it's a significant cost jump. And in most cases, it's not necessary.

Here are four approaches to follow-up automation that work on HubSpot Free or Starter. The right one depends on your team's technical comfort level and how much volume you're handling.

What HubSpot Pro actually gives you

To understand the workarounds, it helps to know what you're working around. HubSpot Sales Pro adds: 1-1 personalised email sequences, re-enrollment in workflows, predictive lead scoring, and full sales analytics. If you need sequences — multi-step, 1-1 automated outreach — Pro is probably the right call. But if you just want a follow-up email to go out when a deal reaches a certain stage, you don't need Pro.

Option 1: Task-based reminders (Free / Starter)

The simplest approach: use HubSpot's workflow builder to auto-create a task when a deal stage changes. The rep gets a task due in 3 days: "Follow up with [Contact Name]." They send the email manually. It's not glamorous, but it closes the gap between "we mean to follow up" and "we actually do."

• ·Enrolment trigger: Deal stage = Proposal Sent
• ·Action: Create task for deal owner, due 3 business days
• ·Optional: If task not completed after 5 days, create a second task

Cost: £0. Time to build: 20 minutes. Best for: teams of 1–5 where a human touch on every follow-up is desirable.

Option 2: Contact-based workflows with email actions (Starter)

HubSpot Starter includes the ability to send automated emails from within contact-based workflows. You can't re-enrol the same contact in the same workflow (that's a Pro feature), but for most use cases — sending one follow-up email after a specific trigger — it's sufficient.

Limitation: the same contact won't receive the email again if they retrigger the workflow. Workaround: clone the workflow and rename it per quarter, or per campaign. Not elegant, but functional.

Option 3: Make.com + HubSpot (from £9/month)

Make (formerly Integromat) has a mature HubSpot integration that can trigger on deal stage changes, contact updates, form submissions, and more. You can build multi-step follow-up sequences that combine email (via Gmail or Outlook), Slack notifications to the rep, and CRM updates — all without touching HubSpot's workflow builder.

This approach is more flexible than native HubSpot workflows and considerably cheaper than Pro. Good for: teams that want automation without the technical overhead of building their own integration.

Option 4: HubSpot API + cron job (£0/month, requires code)

The HubSpot v3 API is free. With a simple serverless function running on a cron schedule, you can query deals by stage, identify ones that haven't had contact in X days, and fire emails via Resend, Mailgun, or any SMTP provider. No HubSpot Pro required.

This is exactly what we built for a healthcare client: full renewal-sequence automation on a HubSpot Starter plan, zero additional software cost, 254 deals managed across 2 pipelines.

Cost: effectively £0 (Vercel free tier handles the cron, Resend free tier handles the emails up to 3,000/month). Requires: a developer or someone comfortable with TypeScript and REST APIs. Best for: technical founders or ops leads who want full control.

Which approach is right for you?

• ·Team of 1–3, mostly manual processes → task-based reminders
• ·Want automation without writing code → Make.com
• ·Technical team, high volume, zero extra software cost → API + cron
• ·Need true 1-1 sequences (multi-step, personalised, re-enrollable) → HubSpot Pro is the right tool

Not sure which fits your setup? A free 30-minute audit will tell you exactly what you need and what you don't — without a sales pitch for the most expensive option.