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Your contacts are yours, not HubSpot's

Jun 19, 2026 · Zerosoftware · 3 min read

Look at your HubSpot invoice. If your company is doing well, it went up. Not because you use more features — because you collected more contacts. You did your job right: more people know you, more people gave you their email. The reward is a bigger monthly bill. It's the only business where having more customers of your own costs you extra.

The contact tax

A contact is a row in a table: name, email, phone, company, a few dates. A few hundred bytes. A hundred thousand contacts take up about 50MB of disk. A $5 VPS ships with 25GB — room for the databases of five hundred companies.

Now look at the pricing page: Marketing Hub Professional starts at around $890 a month and includes 2,000 marketing contacts. Went over? Extra contacts come in paid bundles. Your invoice is indexed to the size of your own database. You're not paying for technology — you're paying rent on your own data, and the rent goes up every time business goes well.

When your bill grows with your contacts, you're not buying software. You're paying a toll to talk to your own people.

The real lock-in isn't the CSV

Yes, HubSpot lets you export a CSV of names and emails. That's not freedom; it's a courtesy. What the CSV doesn't carry is the memory:

  • The history: which emails each contact opened, which pages they visited, which campaign brought them in. The full timeline of the relationship.
  • The associations: which contact belongs to which company, which deals they were part of, which tickets they opened.
  • The workflows: the sequences, the nurtures, the automations you built over years. Those don't export — they get rebuilt, by hand, on the other side.

You can leave, but you leave without your memory. The honest test is this: can I walk out in 10 minutes with everything, not just the list? If the answer is no, your contacts aren't yours. They belong to the CRM, and you're renting them back.

What we're building

Our CRM ships in Q1 2027, born with the same rules Link already runs on:

  • API-first: the public API is documented on day one, same as Link's v1 API. Anything the interface does, curl does.
  • Full export, always: JSON, CSV or API. Everything, history included. No permission needed, no support ticket.
  • Unlimited contacts: because a contact is a row and rows cost nothing. Your bill doesn't grow when you do.
  • The same contract as always: open code, self-host for $0 on your VPS, or hosted cloud at the real cost of infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Link is live today — short links, cookie-less analytics, QR codes, an API documented at /docs — and it runs on exactly this principle: your data leaves as easily as it arrives.

Your contacts are yours because the relationships are yours. A CRM should be a tool you use, not a vault that charges you to look at what's yours.