Hi @StPatrick,
Happy to help here.
@StPatrick wrote:
(b) marks the contact as a non-marketing contact so we don’t violate any unsubscribe requests.
These two things don’t have anything to do with each other – the marketing contact status is purely a billing feature and doesn’t say anything about consent or a legal basis for communication. (Consent should always be managed with subscription types.)
@StPatrick wrote:
(a) sends the contact to the other program (provided that they did not opt-out) via Zaiper [need to check this for best way to do it] and then
Have you double checked how your marketing contact costs would increase? On this page, search for “marketing contacts pricing” and scroll down to the table below: https://legal.hubspot.com/hubspot-product-and-services-catalog
At a first glance, an overflow workaround might seem like the better option but the next contact range / bucket will give you peace of mind for a long time.
If that is not an option, then yes, syncing the contacts to another system, either via a direct integration or Zapier, could be feasable. When you do that, keep in mind that you would also have to make sure that one system has all information about unsubscribed contacts. There might be cases where the same contact is in both systems, unsubscribes in one and then should marked as unsubscribed in both. (This is one of the reasons why I would try to avoid such a setup as much as I can.)
Hope this helps!