This week my name got called out on the main stage at HubSpot’s Partner Day.
I wasn’t in the room for it (I was right outside in a conference room, which somehow makes it funnier). I found out because my phone started going off with texts from people who were.
As it was relayed to me, a global VP who runs HubSpot’s partner program said something like: “It’s 2026. Anyone still think AI is going to replace SaaS? Anyone in the back? Chris DuBois?”
So of course I reached out to her. I wanted to know what prompted it, and I’d enjoy having that conversation. I also HATE that I’m writing this purely on what other people said they heard. I’m not sure that would be enough to convict in court.
At the same time, the idea that a half-dozen people misheard the same thing doesn’t feel likely.
Anyways, I haven’t heard back yet.
In the meantime, here’s my best guess at what earned me the shout-out, and what I believe, because the version that made it onto the stage is a lot bigger than mine.
A while back, I commented on a LinkedIn post saying I’d basically canceled HubSpot.
That’s true. I rebuilt my website off of HubSpot, and I built my own CRM, which costs me less than $10 a month to run. Both are live, and both work exactly the way I want them to.
The thing that finally pushed me over the edge was blogs. I wanted to publish them through the API instead of pasting every post into the editor and fiddling with every little setting by hand, and getting that access would have cost me hundreds of dollars a month.
It would have been cheaper for me to hire a virtual assistant to do it, and I could have covered our monthly vehicle payment with the difference. Definitely didn’t make sense to upgrade for one feature.
Now, in the same comment, I said HubSpot’s marketplace seems to be imploding.
I want to be careful with that one, because it’s anecdotal. HubSpot doesn’t publish its marketplace traffic or purchase numbers, so nobody outside the company can prove it either way.
What I can tell you is that I talk to partners almost every day, and they keep telling me the same thing. Their apps and templates stopped bringing in business, and nobody is seeing their downloads go up.
So take it for what it is: one person’s read, built from a lot of conversations.
There’s another possibility, too. When I officially canceled my HubSpot account, I was honest in the cancellation note about why, and it said basically everything in this post: I can build the tools I need for myself now.
So maybe the LinkedIn comment wasn’t what did it. Maybe it was the note.
I hope that’s not it. Cancellation feedback is supposed to help a company get better, and I’d hate to think it gets read and then used to call someone out on stage. That would be in poor taste, and it would make a lot of people think twice about being honest on their way out the door.
Now, the stage line.
“AI is going to replace SaaS” is a much bigger claim than the one I’d make, and it’s an easy one to laugh at. (I’d laugh at it too.)
What I believe is that AI is changing who needs big SaaS.
Anyone can now build an application that does exactly what their team needs. The people pushing back on this keep picturing apps built to be sold, where you have to think about every feature the market might want, plus support, plus polish... An internal tool skips all of that. It only has to work for the team using it.
Is it junk code? Maybe. If it works for that team, it doesn’t matter.
I’m not a developer. I don’t know how to code. And I now have a working CRM that does everything I need.
With my CRM, I can enrich contacts, send a prospect a document with a trackable link and see when they open it, get nudged when it’s time to reach out to someone, run workflows, and track my revenue. I built it around how I work, on my own, without having to build it inside someone else’s platform.
It worked because I knew exactly what I needed before I built anything. If you don’t know that yet, a custom build just gives you a messier version of the same confusion.
That said, I don’t think this comes for everybody.
Big enterprise companies probably won’t do it. Moving an organization that size off a platform means changing everyone’s systems and habits, and they’ve spent a lot of money getting where they are (sunk cost is a powerful thing). They’re going to want a HubSpot or a Salesforce to host it and run it for them, somebody they trust to keep the lights on.
So the pressure lands on smaller companies first, because that’s where the math changed.
If you’re a HubSpot partner, read that sentence twice, because smaller companies are your clients.
HubSpot built its name on small businesses. Over the years it’s priced a lot of them out, and my blog API bill is a small version of that story. Now those same businesses can build a good-enough version of what they need on their own.
I don’t think implementation work disappears. I think the part that gets cheaper is the setup: properties, workflows, the stuff a client can now get done with an AI tool and a free weekend. The part that holds its value is the part tied to a business problem, like getting sales and marketing to trust the same data, or reporting leadership actually believes. If most of your revenue is the first kind, that’s worth thinking about now.
I also believe in something called dialectic thinking, which is holding two ideas that seem to be at odds at the same time.
HubSpot is still a great platform, and I appreciate it for what it is. It’s also the wrong platform for me (and a lot of small businesses) right now, and it’s going to feel real pressure from what AI puts in people’s hands.
Both of those are true.
If I were HubSpot, I’d lean hard into the things people can’t easily build for themselves, like a website editor a whole marketing team can work in. (Losing the visual editor was my biggest hesitation about leaving.) That’s a real reason to stay on HubSpot, and I’d make it as good as it can possibly be.
So yeah, it’s safe to say I don’t bleed orange anymore. I still like HubSpot, and I still appreciate what it’s built.
The part I care about most is the partners.
A lot of partners I know are struggling to keep bleeding orange. Some of them are vomiting orange at this point, and nobody wants to see that.
Part of it is that features partners built and sold in the marketplace keep showing up as native HubSpot features, included in a subscription. The way it’s been told to me, the partner finds something their clients need, builds it, uses it internally, and lists it on the marketplace. Once the listing proves HubSpot users want it, HubSpot builds its own version.
I’ve heard some version of this from more than one partner it happened to. I’m not going to name them, because they’re still in the program and they told me in confidence. But it’s a pattern I keep hearing, and it’s a hard one to build a business around.
Another part of it is where the deals go. They tend to go to the elite partners, and a lot of smaller agencies joined the partner program specifically to get a share of those.
And this summer HubSpot mandated the $400 a month fee to stay in the partner program, waived only if your clients spend enough through you. For a big partner that’s a rounding error. For a five-person shop it’s a real line item, and it showed up right when the leads were already thin.
I’ll put my own cards on the table here. I was in HubSpot’s Provider program, and I got cut in that migration. I wasn’t reselling HubSpot. I was helping agencies set up their own systems and recommending how they could get more out of HubSpot for their clients. (If that makes this read like sour grapes to you, fair enough. I’d rather tell you than have you find out.)
When I was advising PartnerHub, we studied the partner programs of big tech companies, including interviews with nearly 600 HubSpot partners. That’s not even 10% of HubSpot’s partners, but it’s a decent sample. We asked partners how many leads they got from the vendor, what kind of business they ran, and how the relationship worked day to day.
What we found is that every partner program hits a size where the vendor can’t take care of all of its partners. The agencies bringing the vendor the most business get the preferential treatment. There were never enough leads to go around in the first place, so the leads flow to those biggest partners, and everyone else stays in the program hoping it’ll help them grow, and it can’t.
I call it the Starving Sibling Effect. The big siblings grab everything on the table, and the little ones go hungry.
And you see the same thing at Salesforce, at Marketo, and in pretty much every partner program once it gets big enough. If anyone at HubSpot reads this far, I’d want them to hear it as a pattern that comes with growth, and HubSpot just happens to be the size where it shows.
I still want to help, though.
There are plenty of agencies that are bought into HubSpot because it gets their clients better results, and I want those agencies to win.
The trouble is that almost every partner sounds the same. They wait to see what HubSpot is promoting, and then everybody talks about the same thing at the same time. From the buyer’s side, there’s no way to tell them apart, so it comes down to who got there first and who has the best price.
If you’re a partner and that sounds familiar, the way out is positioning. Show people how you’re different in a way HubSpot’s own messaging never will, and you stop competing on speed and price.
Try this. Take your homepage and cross out every mention of HubSpot. If what’s left doesn’t tell a buyer who you’re for and what problem you solve, you’ve been borrowing HubSpot’s positioning, and so has every other partner in your city. The partners I see holding up best lead with the client’s problem or industry, and HubSpot shows up as the how.
(I know, I always say that. It’s still true.)
And if you’re a partner feeling the squeeze right now, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not the only one. Hang in there.
So I left HubSpot, and I’m still rooting for the people who build on it.
If you want more takes like this, from someone with no vendor to protect, follow along.
Your point about smaller businesses using AI to make internal tools to solve a very specific problem is spot-on. I'm seeing this happen a lot. Because, often, those bigger tools (say, Hubspot) are behemoths and too cumbersome to be light and agile and actually DO THE THING they promise will make your life easier. Exhibit A: your struggle in publishing a blog post. So you go build something that does solve your problem in a lightweight way.