Best way to build a Directory

Service Hub Tips, Tricks & Best Practices
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1

Hi team,

I’m building a Community Resource & Partner Directory to track organizations like home care agencies, transportation, and meal programs. I am on the HubSpot Free tier and need a central place to document:

  • Organization Info: Name, contact roles, phone/fax, and addresses.
  • Services: Capacity (waitlists), hours, and lead times.
  • Process: Required documents, costs, and follow-up protocols.

My Questions:

  1. Since I don’t have Custom Objects, should I use the Company or Contact object as the primary record?
  2. How do I best set up custom fields for things like “Capacity” so they are searchable for the whole team?
  3. What is the best way to categorize these so we can quickly filter by service type (e.g., searching only for “DME companies”)?

Thanks for any advice on structuring this!

2

Hi @LOraa

Thanks for sharing this — building a structured resource directory on the Free tier is totally doable, but it does take some thoughtful modeling.

I’d like to bring a few Community members into the conversation who’ve built directory-style setups without Custom Objects.
@karstenkoehler @criza_h0 @AdamLPW — hope you’re all having a great week! Have you used Companies vs. Contacts as the primary record for resource directories on Free, and how have you handled searchable fields like capacity, services, and process details? Any tips on categorization or filtering without custom objects would be really helpful.

Looking forward to your insights.
Best,
Victor

3

Hey @LOraa honestly you’re going to have a lot of difficulty running this under the free tier. You could make it work without custom objects, but having only 10 custom properties in the free tier will severely limit you.

It sounds like you have your question answered already though, an organisation = a contact record. Anyone within that org = a contact.

You will have 10 custom properties (fields) though, so you will need to choose the more important properties you need for your companies and use those. Once you have these and populate them within the records it’s very easy to filter your company listings by values within those.

There are some helpful knowledgebase articles which might interest you here: