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If you’ve been on LinkedIn lately, you’ve probably seen a post or two with a screenshot of HubSpot’s stock price, which has dropped over 70% in the past year, despite regularly beating their revenue targets. These posts espouse that legacy SaaS, including HubSpot, is in danger of being replaced by custom vibe-coded in-house business applications.
If you haven’t heard the term "vibe-coding," it basically refers to using tools like Lovable or Claude Code to build applications by just describing what you want, in natural language (no developer experience necessary!)
The allure of the “Vibe-Coded CRM" is incredibly strong. Just imagine running your business on a platform that is perfectly customized to your business, has all of the features of HubSpot you need, none of the ones you don’t need, and costs a fraction of the price. People are looking at their $1,500/mo HubSpot bill and then looking at a $20/mo Claude subscription and thinking, "I can bridge that gap."
But as someone who lives and breathes operations, I think we need to have a serious talk about whether these vibe-coded CRM replacements are a good idea long-term and what is actually happening with HubSpot’s stock price.
The Risks of a Vibe-Coded CRM
I love the idea of vibe-coding business applications. You can create something customized, automate manual tasks, and consolidate your tech spend. This is great for replacing point solutions or, better yet, building an application that doesn’t exist in the market yet.
But, your CRM is the beating heart of your GTM operations. It’s the source of truth for your data, the nexus for your integrations, and home-base for your marketing, sales, and possibly even service teams. That’s a lot of trust to put in a codebase that hasn’t been rigorously tested and proven over years (if not decades).
Here are some things to consider before you cancel your HubSpot contract:
Downtime
If your custom CRM goes down, you are the DevOps team. You have to drop everything, open your IDE, and try to "vibe" your way back to an online status while your VP of Sales is breathing down your neck because they can't see their pipeline and their team can’t prep for their calls.
On the rare occasion that HubSpot has a service interruption, I don’t panic. I check their status page, take my dog for a walk, and by the time I am back at my desk, the situation is usually resolved. HubSpot has thousands of world-class engineers whose entire job is to make sure that system stays up and my data is preserved.
Compliance
As your company grows, you inevitably hit compliance hurdles. If you land a big enterprise client and they send you a security questionnaire asking how you handle data encryption at rest or how you manage PII in your custom-built app, "I asked Claude to make it secure" is not going to pass the audit.
Ensuring your custom app is GDPR compliant or SOC II certified is a serious lift that you don’t need to worry about when you purchase a solution that already has put in that work.
Tech Debt
With vibe coding tools, building a CRM is easy. But maintaining a CRM is incredibly hard. AI-generated codebases suffer from a couple of specific issues that may eventually break your system:
Limited Context Windows: AI tools operate with “context windows,” which are essentially it’s capacity to remember things without hallucinating. Claude Code, for example, has a context window of 1 million tokens and it’s got built-in safeguards. When your code gets close to the limit, it triggers an automatic "compaction" where it summarizes the earlier parts of the codebase and clears out old tool outputs to make room for new code. Unfortunately, that compaction can remove small bits of code that don’t change anything obvious in the immediate term, but over time can degrade functionality.
Lack of Modularity: In traditional coding, you build modularly, planning for future functionality. In vibe-coding, the AI often takes shortcuts to give you the best code for exactly what is in your prompt, not considering what tomorrow might bring. In a vibe-coded CRM, changing one component might require a total rewrite of the core logic.
I honestly hope I am wrong. If I start seeing posts that say “A year ago, I vibe-coded my own CRM to replace HubSpot and it was the best decision I’ve ever made,” I will be in the comments celebrating them.
But, because of the risks, I wouldn’t feel comfortable creating a vibe-coded solution for something as business critical as a CRM. And I am not the only one. Lovable, the company behind one of the top vibe-coding tools, uses HubSpot as their own CRM. If they thought it was viable to run their business on a custom-built tool, don’t you think they would be eating their own dog food and shouting it from the rooftops? But they aren’t.
Why HubSpot’s Stock is Hurting
If I’m saying these DIY CRMs aren’t a real threat to Enterprise systems (yet), why is the stock down?
It’s not because people are successfully replacing HubSpot with Lovable. It’s because HubSpot is currently in the awkward teenage years of a massive strategic pivot.
HubSpot’s Identity Crisis
For over 2 decades, HubSpot was the "darling of the SMB." It was the affordable, easy-to-use alternative to expensive, unintuitive solutions like Salesforce. But HubSpot has intentionally moved upmarket. They want the Enterprise. They want the $250k+ annual contracts. This move is working. HubSpot is starting to cement its reputation as an Enterprise-ready platform.
But that shift is also creating a massive vacuum at the bottom. Small businesses are seeing ballooning costs and complexity. Just check out the r/hubspot subreddit and, just about every day, you’ll see a small business talking about how HubSpot has become too expensive and complaining that they are paying for features they don’t use.
When an SMB feels like they are being priced out of a tool they love, they start looking for an alternative. And there aren’t many great ones. Monday, Zoho, and Attio each come with their own set of limitations. So, it’s not wonder they are considering creating their own in-house solutions.
It doesn’t help that posting on LinkedIn that you have vibe-coded your own CRM to replace HubSpot virtually ensures your post will go viral, which is great marketing for your company. So SMBs are basically being incentivized to try it and see if it works.
AI vibe-coding isn't the solution yet, but it’s the most vocal protest against legacy pricing that SMBs have at their disposal.
The AI Uncertainty Multiple
While I think the shift out of the SMB market is the primary cause of the stock variability, I don’t want to discount the uncertainty around AI’s effect on SaaS. AI coding tools will continue to improve. Context windows will get larger and scalability issues will get addressed. This uncertainty is compounding the effects of HubSpot’s strategic shift.
If anyone can build a CRM, why should a company trade at 10x revenue? What the market is missing is that we don't pay HubSpot for the "code." We pay them for the infrastructure of trust. We pay for the ease of integration, the support and partner ecosystem, and the certainty that the data will be there tomorrow morning.
My Advice to HubSpot Owners
If you're a HubSpot Admin or VP of Marketing and your CFO sends you a post like this one and asks, "Why are we paying for HubSpot?", here is how you handle it:
Don't build a CRM…build on a CRM. I am all for vibe-coding! But don't use it to replace your database. Use it to build "micro-tools" that connect to HubSpot. Need a very specific, weird internal calculator for your sales team? Vibe-code that as a standalone app and use the HubSpot API to push the data back into a custom property. You get the "vibe" innovation without the "system of record" risk.
Audit for tech complexity. If you are on an Enterprise license but only using 20% of the features, you are part of the "HubSpot is too expensive" narrative. Do an annual audit just before your contract renews:
Clean out your marketing contact list to get the number you pay for lower
Ensure you have assigned out all of the seats you are paying for
Check the product updates page to see if you have any point solutions that can now be replicated with native HubSpot functionality to consolidate your stack
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