When looking to get the total number of contacts you have in your HubSpot portal, we can look into using the default property - create date (the date that a contact entered the system)
In this case, you're right, we can definitely utilize the contact list APIs together with the create date property:
In-app, you can create an active list to use filter such as e.g. contact properties > create date is between xx and xx or create date is before xx
Next, you can use this endpoint: Get contact lists and the size property will indicate the total contacts in that particular list
This makes sense to get total contacts. But if we wanted to get total number of contacts by created date from the API, is the only way to query every contact and then count them by date?
This way, you're only calling the API to get the list size, the API isn't querying every contact and count them by date; because the active list already contain contacts created between those date range
Like my example in the first post, I am looking to have the date returned, along with the count of contacts registered on that date.
Date - Contacts
7/1/19 - 2109
7/2/19 - 2188
7/3/19 - 2304
It does not seem like that is possible at this time just from the API. It sounds like the best option would be to query all contacts once, to get their registered date, create this list like above example, and then query daily at end of day and log the daily total moving forward.