How do companies with a freemium model work around the email quotas in marketing automation tools like Hubspot, etc?
Like I’m thinking how do Calendly or Grammarly do it?
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I’m not sure I understand the question, but at larger scales you get your own IP address and more control over your own email sending (and fewer guardrails!)
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I’ll try to be more specific. We use Hubspot for our lifecycle emails to users. We also use Sendy for bulk emails (like Black Friday discount campaign).
We have a certain marketing contacts quota on Hubspot over which we’ll be charged overages. We’re expecting the active lifecycle audience to go up significantly in the coming months leading to much higher costs.
That made me wonder how other companies deal with these restrictions of these marketing automation tools.
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Maybe I don’t fully understand the question?
We’re a consumer app with millions of active email addresses. We use Iterable for both transactional and lifecycle marketing and have a contract with Iterable for our email volume. If we get close to reaching our limit, plenty of outreach from our Iterable sales rep to renegotiate our contract. 
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This is specifically an issue with hubspot, who charges you per contact (versus other places will charge you by email sent)
The best “workaround” is to juggle who is sync’d to hubspot to stay under your contact limit. Stop syncing/delete older users who haven’t been active in a while, who fall under a certain usage limit after a certain length of time, etc.
Otherwise, call up a sales rep and ask for a discount. We put the squeeze on them (and they put the squeeze on us to sign days before the end of their fiscal year) and I think we got a 68% discount for life or something. I wouldn’t expect something that high, but they can really work some magic sometimes.
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Echoing @Nathan not every CRM charges by contact list size. Some charge per user seat (how many sales & marketing people are using the tool). Depending on how you see your company growing, it might be worth taking a look at Hubspot alternatives if there is a risk it will become too costly in the long term.
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Yeah - I’d assume companies like Hubspot love it when their customers are successful, because that means more $$$. There are some folks from Calendly on this Slack but consumer-facing products don’t tend to be Hubspot’s bread and butter. If you have an app and you’re walking your users through a lifecycle then Iterable, Braze, and Customer.io are more popular. I think all three charge by send volume. Hubspot’s pricing is a little weird (and probably partly related to its legacy): you’re paying for contacts but those come with send limits (5x contacts for Starter, 10x contacts for Pro, 20x for Enterprise) and you can add on transactional email capabilities though I don’t see any information about their limits. But Hubspot is probably the wrong tool for a company at Grammarly scale.
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I had a similar product that was product led (so lots of free users). I’d send all system powered transactional emails and blast emails (for us this was reporting usually) through customer.io and put all users into customer.io which was about 70,000 users and then I’d only add paying customers and partners to HubSpot. There was a nice separation of concern that way. Sales could still send emails through HubSpot manually (using marketing approved templates), we got to send a mass volume of email without getting crushed by cost, and we could use HubSpot CRM for what it’s truly meant for which is keeping relationships with your paying customers.
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HubSpot makes it real hard to find info about their transactional email product. If I recall correctly, it’s an extra flat $500/m, plus $50 for a dedicated IP. Unlimited send.
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I think it’s now $600/month and includes the IP address. But yes: opaque pricing is their strategy.
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But we need to keep in mind that everything is negotiable.
Interesting, thanks for all the inputs folks, really really appreciate it! 
It seems like the best approach is to keep Hubspot to paid customers and use another tool for the free/basic user base which is cheaper (need to do the maths). We’re using Sendgrid for transactional emails and it seems like that’s under control, so not worried on that front.
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