HubSpot Payments/Commerce, Subscription Management

Revenue Hub Commerce Tools
1

We’re evaluating how to improve our own subscription and billing management experience, and we’d love to understand how HubSpot has structured this internally.

In particular, we want to create an experience similar to HubSpot’s, where customers can manage an existing subscription and easily:

  • Add additional licenses/seats
  • Have those licenses prorated to the current subscription term
  • Keep all licenses aligned to the same renewal/billing date
  • Update quantities without creating a separate subscription
  • Manage upgrades or changes during the billing cycle
  • Have billing adjust automatically based on the effective date of the change

Has anyone done this from a systems and billing architecture perspective?

We’d especially like to understand how this functionality could be powered primarily by HubSpot, Stripe, another billing platform, custom development, or a combination of systems. If there are HubSpot products, APIs, workflows, or recommended integrations that would allow us to replicate a similar subscription-management experience for our own customers, we’d appreciate any guidance or documentation you can point us toward.

Our goal is essentially to build the same type of license-management and prorated billing experience that HubSpot provides its own customers.

Thank you!

3

Hey @TracyLew22,

Welcome to the Community! :tada:

Great question! Replicating a HubSpot-style subscription and billing management experience is a pretty involved challenge and I haven’t quite come across this use case before.

Heres a few community threads that could point you in the right direction!

I’d also like to tag in some folks from the community to see if they have any specific suggestions for you!

Hey @val_kouba, @lnorden, @EugeneAtKiwi, @Anton – do you have any suggestions @TracyLew22 on how they could manage this?

Thanks in advance!

Sam | Community Manager

4

Thanks, @stassey , and hey, @TracyLew22 !

Definitely not a one-size fits all answer, and I’m usually working with teams to determine what’s sustainable long term, and what can be handled without ‘rebuilding’ custom when there are potentially native platforms in and out of Hubspot that can handle the need and then integrate.

If you answer these three questions, I can update this with a couple additional thoughts.

  1. What Hubs and Tiers are you’re using? Revenue Pro and/or Data Hub?
  2. Audience - individual(s) purchasing for their organization(s)?
  3. If the licensing/seats are managed in a different platform -
    what systems are you’re using - or has this been established yet?
  4. What access is, or should be triggered based on these seats and licenses?

Know you’re looking into a holistic solution, and I’m hesitant to suggest features without knowing more about the processes at play - but here are some features that could play into a solution for you.

1.) Set Up a Self-Serve Billing Portal for Buyers - Public or private portal space to self-manage *some(!) billing features.

  • They can manage subscriptions here.
  • Recently out of beta, but may be customization you can use to enhance, especially with private pages.

2.) In addition to the prorated subscription, and pro-rated calculations for line-items shared by @stassey , which works for recurring charges, the recent July 15th release allowing teams to Set Expiration Dates and Limit Checkouts on Payment Links has been a solution I’ve used to plan and prorated one-time purchases if it’s based on billing cycle.

  • Publish Link A with amount A during a certain period
  • Publish Link B with pro-rated amount B during a certain period. Less manual than it used to be.

More of the system work should be manageable with automation and associations in HubSpot, but again, depends on some of the factors above.

You’re in the right community for this! Best of luck

Val (Kouba) Hartle

Solutions Architect and HubSpot Specialist | Stratagon Inc.

5

Thanks @stassey !

Hey @TracyLew22 , you’re talking about billing for your own product, right? Then I’d say it really depends on what you’re going to use for payments and how your software is already structured. Billing portals (like Stripe’s one) work great in simpler setups: e.g. simple tiered pricing with several pre-built plans to choose from and maybe some optional add-ons. For something more complex, you’d probably want to have a more flexible setup via API.

The most important step would be to design the structure of your “subscription”: what it consists of? What should be changed by the customer and what not? How would different variations look like (example for particular customers). That will really help in reviewing what can be achieved with various solutions to choose the most appropriate one.

For example, HubSpot’s subscription has different “products”—Hubs—with different tiers included and a bunch of add-ons. So we can imagine what it might look like for someone with Sales Pro x 3 seats vs someone with a bunch of Hubs and add-ons and how much control a customer should have over all the components in both scenarios.

6

Hey @TracyLew22,

If you like to build something like this, you’ll need a solid membership area (available in Content Hub Professional & Enterprise) and quite a lot of custom development.

I’ve done some quite advanced membership areas in the past and depending on every detail, dev team size and experience this can take a several months just for the development stage.

The core idea is:
Use the membership area to create the foundation for “sign-up” and “login” and personalization.

Once done, it’s completely up to you.

Personally I’d recommend to create a custom object (available in any Enterprise tier) for this type of result, but you can do quite a lot with associations.

Something like a profile page is easy as this is just a regular form (you can hide the email field and sync it to the login email so you don’t end up in a contact mess).

A dashboard can be a static template with tons of personalization tokens or plain properties.

Data handling can be done by GraphQL or individual APIs.

Quotes & Invoices can be done via HubSpot. Just create a dedicate quote template and use the Quotes API.

For something like a FAQ area, you can either use a HubDB, custom object properties or plain custom modules.

…

Note: If you should have Enterprise, I highly recommend to use the highly sensitive properties to keep information like payment accounts and such as private as possible

To get custom billing like stripe in, you can easily use some embed codes if you don’t want to deal with 3rd party APIs.

There are countless options and routes you can go. I’d say that the most important part would be to think outside the box.

For example:
Sure, a blog is primarily used for a blog functionality, but with a few custom modules (optional) and some custom templates, you can build whole pages and just use the listing/detail or the tag logic.

Hope this helps

best,
Anton

7

Hi @TracyLew22 — I think you can get fairly close to what you described using HubSpot’s native subscription functionality, so I wouldn’t jump straight to custom development.

For your use case, I’d model the customer’s plan as one subscription with recurring line items, where the seat/license count is represented by the line-item quantity.

The important part is that HubSpot supports changes to active subscriptions, including changing quantities and adding/removing line items. It also supports proration for those changes, so the customer can be charged or refunded for the difference based on the change rather than creating a completely separate subscription. HubSpot documents this here: View and manage subscriptions billed in HubSpot.

So your flow could be:

Existing subscription → Change seat quantity → HubSpot calculates the prorated adjustment → Subscription continues on the existing billing cycle.

That covers a big part of what you’re looking for.

The remaining question is the self-service experience — how customers log in, see their current seats, change quantities, and manage payment details. I’d evaluate HubSpot’s available billing/customer-facing functionality for that piece before introducing Stripe or building a custom portal.

So my recommendation would be: model the billing in native HubSpot first, test the subscription + line-item + proration behavior, and only introduce custom/API development for the gaps you actually find.

That should give you a much clearer picture of whether you need another billing platform at all.

A few KBs I’d bookmark:

If it does the trick, a solution mark would be greatly appreciated, it helps other users with a similar setup find the answer too!

I use a mix of HubSpot documentation, Community discussions, search, and generative AI tools to research different perspectives. AI is great for helping me explore ideas and uncover things I might miss, but I always bring my own judgment and practical thinking to the final answer.

Thank you
Connected CRM Studio