Free plan contact limit: are deleted/restorable contacts counted toward the 1,000 contact limit?

Smart CRM & Sales Hub CRM
1

Hi everyone,

I’m using HubSpot Free Tools and recently encountered an issue with the contact limit.

When I tried to create a new contact, HubSpot showed a message saying that the portal had reached the record creation limit. However, the regular Contacts page showed only 907 contact records, so I thought I was still below the 1,000 contact limit.

I then checked the “Restore contacts” page and found 331 deleted/restorable contact records there. After manually deleting all of those records permanently from the restore page, I was able to create new contacts again.

I would like to confirm the following:

  1. In HubSpot Free Tools, are deleted/restorable contacts in the “Restore contacts” page counted toward the 1,000 contact limit?
  2. If they are counted, is this the official expected behavior?
  3. Previously, I believe I was still able to create new contacts even when the regular contacts plus restorable deleted contacts may have exceeded 1,000. Could this have been due to timing, a recent change, or a bug?
  4. Is there any way to permanently delete deleted/restorable contacts in bulk? In my account, it looked like I had to hover over each record and click “Delete immediately” one by one.
  5. What is the recommended way to manage unnecessary contacts in a free account so that this issue does not happen again?

Any advice or confirmation would be appreciated.

2

Hi @TOMONORI,

Happy to help here. In general, this topic isn’t documented very well by HubSpot so the exact behavior is a bit vague.

  1. What you’re describing, along with the descriptions of other users in the community suggests so, yes.
  2. This is not documented, as far as I know.
  3. HubSpot is sometimes changing how these limits behave, yes.
  4. No, you have to delete these individually.
  5. There is nothing you could do differently, as far as I know.

Best regards!