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TLDR
- The HubSpot prospecting agent monitors companies for buying signals, finds up to three matching contacts per company and drafts personalized outreach from your CRM data.
- It costs $1 per lead the agent recommends outreach for, paid in HubSpot Credits at 100 credits a lead. Since June 2026 it is available on Starter, Professional and Enterprise editions of most Hubs.
- Included credits cover far fewer leads than most teams expect: 30 a month on a Professional portal before you buy more, and those credits are shared with other AI features.
- The agent is only as good as the data and definitions behind it. Fix your ICP properties, exclusions and sending domain before you enroll anyone.
- Start in review mode and set measurable targets, such as ICP match, edit rate and cost per qualified meeting, before it sends on its own. Elefante RevOps scopes this in a 45-minute assessment.
Your SDR team has more target accounts than hours. HubSpot now sells an AI agent inside the CRM you already pay for that researches accounts, finds contacts and writes the first email. Imagine a team switches it on, points it at a list and lets it run. A few weeks later, a rep notices that the agent emailed someone at an existing customer, from his inbox, about a problem the company solved for them last year.
Nothing in that story is a failure of the agent. It did what the setup told it to do. The HubSpot prospecting agent works with the data and instructions available in your portal, so outdated customer records, loosely defined audiences or missing exclusions can lead it to contact the wrong people.
This guide is for RevOps leaders, sales operations managers and sales leaders deciding whether to use the agent and how to set it up safely. It covers what the agent does, what it costs in practice, how to configure a play, what to test before it sends anything and where it falls short.
What the HubSpot prospecting agent does
The HubSpot prospecting agent is HubSpot's AI agent for outbound and re-engagement, also called the Breeze Prospecting Agent. According to HubSpot's setup guide, it performs three main tasks:
- Finds companies showing buying signals. The agent monitors the signals you prioritize, including company news such as funding announcements or product launches, and evidence that a company is researching topics you specify.
- Identifies the right people. For each company enrolled in a play, the agent finds up to three contacts matching your target personas. It can source contacts from one connected provider at a time: Apollo, Surfe, ZoomInfo or Seamless.
- Writes personalized outreach. The agent drafts emails using CRM data, including a contact's form submissions, page views, calls, meetings, notes and email opens from the past year, along with recent high-intent signals.
You configure the agent through plays, each with five tabs: Audience, Selling context, Outreach, Guardrails and Automation. You can run several plays at once, for example one targeting net-new accounts in a specific segment and another re-engaging marketing qualified leads that went quiet.
The agent tracks results on its Performance page, including enrollments, delivered, opened and clicked emails, replies and booked meetings. HubSpot also sends a daily digest summarizing the agent's activity.
Pricing, credits and plans
How much the HubSpot prospecting agent costs
The HubSpot prospecting agent uses outcome-based pricing, charging $1 per lead when it recommends outreach, according to HubSpot's product page. HubSpot introduced this pricing model on April 14, 2026, replacing the monthly charge for each enrolled contact.
You pay through HubSpot Credits. According to HubSpot's product and services catalog, recommending outreach for one lead costs 100 credits. Intent monitoring is charged separately: 10 credits per month to monitor a company for intent signals, and 50 credits per month for each custom signal monitored on a company, a feature currently in beta.
Every paid HubSpot subscription includes a monthly credit allowance. These allowances are not additive, meaning a portal with multiple Hubs receives the highest single allowance:
| Subscription | Included credits a month | Recommended leads that covers |
|---|---|---|
| Starter (Sales, Marketing, Service, Content, Revenue Hub or Smart CRM) | 500 | 5 |
| Professional | 3,000 | 30 |
| Enterprise | 5,000 | 50 |
| Data Hub or Customer Platform, Professional / Enterprise | 5,000 / 10,000 | 50 / 100 |
These allowances represent the number of recommended leads each plan can cover if no other HubSpot features consume credits. However, Customer Agent, Data Agent and Data Studio syncs share the same credit balance, so your available credits for prospecting may be lower. Unused credits do not roll over to the following month.
If you run out of credits without additional capacity or an enabled overage option, usage-based features pause until the next monthly reset. HubSpot offers capacity packs that can automatically increase when you exceed your limit. Since September 16, 2026, a Super Admin or Billing Admin can also enable pay-as-you-go overages, billed monthly in arrears. Pricing and terms depend on the option your portal uses.
Credit usage can increase faster than expected. In a September 2026 HubSpot Community discussion, a user managing a three-person BDR team reported using all 5,000 credits within the first couple of months and upgrading to 25,000. Rather than assuming your included credits will be enough, estimate usage based on how many leads you plan to work each month.
For example, a Professional portal with 3,000 included credits could face the following additional monthly costs at HubSpot's pay-as-you-go rate of $0.01 per credit:
| Leads recommended a month | Credits needed | Extra credit cost a month |
|---|---|---|
| 30 | 3,000 | $0 |
| 100 | 10,000 | $70 |
| 500 | 50,000 | $470 |
| 1,000 | 100,000 | $970 |
These figures are illustrative. They assume the prospecting agent is the only feature consuming credits and exclude intent monitoring, which costs another 10 credits per monitored company each month. HubSpot also lists capacity packs at $10 per month for every additional 1,000 credits, but these packs carry a contract term.
You pay when the agent recommends outreach, not when a lead replies or books a meeting. This makes cost per qualified meeting a more useful measure of value than cost per recommended lead. You will need a controlled test to calculate it. The pricing model makes sense for focused re-engagement plays, while teams prospecting thousands of new contacts each month should compare the cost with other outbound approaches.
For additional subscription costs, see our HubSpot pricing guide.
Which HubSpot plans include the prospecting agent?
Since June 2026, the HubSpot prospecting agent has been available on Starter, Professional and Enterprise editions. In its June 2026 product update, HubSpot announced that "any non-free portal can now set up Prospecting Agent".
According to HubSpot's setup guide, the agent is available with Marketing, Sales, Service, Data or Content Hub on Starter, Professional or Enterprise plans, and Smart CRM on Professional or Enterprise plans. HubSpot Credits are required, and only users with paid seats can use credits.
To configure the agent, you must be a Super Admin or have the "Access prospecting agent" permission. Four AI settings must also be enabled: general access to AI tools, CRM data, customer conversation data and files data.
There are two important limitations to consider. First, some newer features are still being introduced through betas. HubSpot's September 2026 update states that plays require the Prospecting Agent private beta, alongside an update allowing Breeze to configure plays from a description of your target segment, personas and goals. However, the main setup guide documents plays without a beta label, suggesting that the beta requirement most likely applies to the newer play features. Check which features are available in your portal before planning around them.
Second, actions that consume HubSpot Credits cannot run in sandbox accounts. This means testing the agent in production with review mode enabled.
How to set up the HubSpot prospecting agent
To set up the HubSpot prospecting agent, first decide which accounts to target, what the agent can say and when it can send. These decisions matter more than the configuration itself, so start by preparing your CRM data and sending infrastructure.
1. Fix the CRM data the agent reads
The agent drafts from your CRM, so it repeats whatever is wrong in it. Before you enroll anyone, check four things:
- ICP properties exist as fields, not opinions. Industry, company size, region and persona need to be properties with consistent values, because segments and personas are built from them.
- Lifecycle stages are accurate. If customers and open opportunities are not marked correctly, the agent can treat them as prospects.
- Exclusion lists are ready. Customers, open deals, competitors, partners and anyone who has opted out should be excluded before the first play goes live.
- Owners are current. If the agent sends from the contact owner's inbox, an owner who left the company becomes a problem on day one.
This is not a small risk. In Validity's 2025 State of CRM Data Management report, 76% of CRM users said less than half of their organization's CRM data is accurate and complete.
Our guide to auditing a HubSpot portal covers the cleanup, and our HubSpot implementation readiness checklist covers the definitions to agree before you automate anything.
2. Prepare the sending domain
The agent sends from a connected user inbox, either the contact owner's or one chosen user's. If that inbox uses your main business domain, prospecting activity can affect the same sender reputation your customer and finance emails rely on.
The messages are subject to mailbox provider rules. Google and Yahoo both apply stricter rules to bulk senders, which Google defines as sending more than 5,000 messages to Gmail addresses in a day. Yahoo's basic rules apply to all senders.
| Requirement | What Google and Yahoo ask for |
|---|---|
| Authentication | SPF and DKIM, plus a DMARC record with at least p=none (Google, Yahoo) |
| Spam rate | Google asks senders to stay below 0.1% user-reported spam and never reach 0.3%. Yahoo asks for below 0.3% |
| Unsubscribes | One-click unsubscribe for marketing and promotional messages, with requests honored within two days |
A play that emails the wrong audience can push spam complaints up for the whole domain, and that affects the emails your customers and finance team depend on. Keep daily limits conservative at first, watch complaint rates and keep opt-outs in your exclusion lists.
3. Define the audience
In the Audience tab, choose the target company segments, the signals that matter and the target personas. Turn on "Source contacts for me" if you want the agent to find contacts, and set a daily limit on new contact suggestions.
Each recommended lead costs credits, so the daily limit is also your budget control.
4. Write the selling context
Generate the selling context from your website or write it yourself: what you sell, your value proposition and the pain points you solve. Then choose the products or services the play should sell.
Write it as you would brief a new SDR. Generic context produces generic emails.
5. Choose the outreach mode
The prospecting agent offers two outreach modes:
- Sequence: Sends a fixed series of steps, with delays in business days.
- Adaptive: Adjusts emails to each prospect's actions, engagement and signals. It lets you set the minimum days between emails and the maximum emails per enrollment. Adaptive also supports outreach in the contact's preferred language and calls to action such as a meeting link or a HubSpot document.
6. Set the guardrails
Choose the sender, the tone or your brand voice, the calls to action and the sending schedule. You can limit sending to business days and use an automated send window.
7. Start in review mode, then test
In the Automation tab, choose Review before sending. Use the Test button to generate sample outreach, read it against your selling context and fix the play before you turn it on.
Edits to a play only apply to newly enrolled contacts, so get it right before the first enrollment.
Review mode reduces the risk of sending unsuitable emails, but it does not make testing free. Leads the agent recommends outreach for during testing are charged like any other. Set a testing budget and a low daily limit before you enroll your first batch.
8. Enroll, monitor and adjust
Enroll companies from the monitored companies view, manually, through Breeze Assistant, through workflows or with automated triggers such as a page view, a form submission, days since last engagement or being added to a list.
Check the Performance page weekly and compare replies and booked meetings with your existing sequences before you scale up.
Example: a re-engagement play
This is an illustrative setup, not a client result. It shows how the settings above fit together for the use case where the agent tends to earn its credits.
| Setting | Example |
|---|---|
| Audience | B2B SaaS companies that match your agreed ICP properties |
| Trigger | Contacts who engaged before, went quiet and now show a new buying signal, such as a pricing page view |
| Exclusions | Current customers, open opportunities, partners, competitors and opt-outs |
| Selling context | One product, one buyer problem and the value proposition sales has already approved |
| Outreach | Adaptive mode with a low maximum of emails per enrollment |
| Automation | Review before sending |
| Success measure | Qualified replies and meetings per recommended lead, compared with your current re-engagement sequence |
Planning outbound from your own domain?
Our free Email Infrastructure & Campaign Planner maps mailboxes, backup inboxes, live campaigns and your campaign backlog in one sheet.
Test the HubSpot prospecting agent before it sends on its own
Review or send automatically
The HubSpot prospecting agent offers two modes in the Automation tab. Review before sending means a person approves each message. Send automatically means the agent sends without review, based on your outreach settings.
| Mode | Use it when | The risk |
|---|---|---|
| Review before sending | The play is new, the audience includes high-value accounts, or reps still edit most drafts | Review time eats into the hours the agent was meant to save |
| Send automatically | The play has met the targets below in review mode, and exclusions are proven | A wrong segment, stale owner or weak selling context reaches prospects at scale before anyone notices |
One user's experience points the same way. In the Community thread quoted above, they said autonomous mode "didn't work for us", but "the drafts it produced were specific enough that editing them was faster than starting from scratch." Their conclusion was that the agent "really earns its credits re-engaging MQLs you already know are worth a conversation."
What to test before it sends
Before the agent sends emails, test each play against scenarios where a wrong email would hurt. Write down the expected result before running each test.
| Test | What to check | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Existing customer at a target company | The contact is excluded and never enrolled | Prevents prospecting emails to people who already pay you |
| Open deal | Contacts on open opportunities are excluded | Keeps the agent out of conversations a rep is running |
| Departed owner | The fallback sender is used and the record is reassigned | Stops emails going out from an inactive inbox |
| Persona match | The three contacts found match your personas, not just the job title keyword | Shows whether persona definitions are tight enough |
| Selling context | Drafts describe your product and pain points correctly for each segment | Catches outdated or generic positioning |
| Opt-outs | Unsubscribed contacts are never enrolled | Protects compliance and sender reputation |
| Reporting | Agent emails, replies and meetings appear where your team reports on pipeline | Confirms you can measure the agent against sequences |
| Credit use | Credits used in a test batch match the leads recommended | Confirms the monthly budget before you scale |
The reporting test is worth running early. In one HubSpot Community thread, a user reported in March 2026 that emails sent by the agent were not showing up as tracked activity in reports. Check that your dashboards capture what you need before you judge the results.
When to let it send automatically
The time you save on the task moves to checking the task, and the error to watch is the quiet one. Accurate outreach is not the same as effective outreach. A team can approve every draft and still pay to contact people who were never going to buy. Before you switch a play to Send automatically, agree on a target for each of these and measure them over a set number of recommended leads, not a set number of days:
- ICP match. The share of recommended leads that actually fit your ICP and personas.
- Edit rate. The share of drafts that needed more than light edits before sending.
- Results against your sequences. Qualified replies and booked meetings per recommended lead, compared with your best existing sequence for the same segment.
- Cost per qualified meeting. Total credit spend in dollars divided by qualified meetings, rather than cost per lead.
- Safety. No exclusion failures in testing, and spam complaints below Google's 0.1% threshold.
If a play misses its targets, check the audience definitions, the CRM data, the contact source and the selling context before you change its automation settings.
Where the HubSpot prospecting agent falls short
The HubSpot prospecting agent is a strong fit for some motions and a weak one for others. These are the limits to plan around.
| Limitation | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Pay per recommended lead | Cost grows with every lead recommended and every company monitored. It suits focused plays better than high-volume cold outbound |
| Sends from a connected user inbox | The agent does not distribute sending across multiple domains, so you need to manage the reputation of the connected sending domain |
| No shared inbox support | Teams that sell from shared inboxes have asked HubSpot for it. One user wrote in July 2026: "we can't use sequences or the AI Agents because of it." |
| One contact data provider at a time | If your team relies on several providers, such as Apollo and ZoomInfo, you have to pick one for the agent |
| Depends on your CRM data | It cannot tell that an industry value is wrong or a lifecycle stage is stale, so outdated records produce confident outreach to the wrong people |
| Little independent evidence | The published performance figures come from HubSpot, so your own controlled test is the evidence that counts |
On that last point, HubSpot's product page states that customers see "76% more qualified leads generated", "80% more meetings with prospects booked" and a "26% higher deal win rate". The page gives no methodology or baseline for these figures, so treat them as vendor claims and measure against your own sequences.
Is the HubSpot prospecting agent worth it?
The HubSpot prospecting agent addresses a real capacity problem. In Salesforce's 2026 State of Sales report, sellers said they spend only 40% of their time selling, while 48% said they lack the bandwidth for adequate cold outreach. Automating research and drafting may help, but the decision comes down to whether the agent produces relevant conversations at a reasonable cost.
| Your situation | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Clean ICP properties, clear personas and a backlog of known accounts or MQLs nobody has time to work | A good fit. Start with a re-engagement play in review mode |
| Already on HubSpot Professional or Enterprise, with SDRs who spend hours researching accounts | Worth a controlled test against your best sequence |
| High-volume cold outbound across many new contacts each month | Usually cheaper and safer on a dedicated outbound stack with separate sending domains |
| CRM data you do not trust, or no agreed ICP | Not yet. Fix the definitions first, or the agent will scale the problem |
How Elefante RevOps helps with the HubSpot prospecting agent
We help B2B revenue teams with $10 million to $500 million in revenue put AI to work inside HubSpot without losing control of the data or the brand. We are a HubSpot Diamond Partner and a Clay Studio Partner, so we can tell you honestly when the prospecting agent is the right tool and when a Clay-based outbound workflow will do the job better.
We start where the agent's results are decided: the data underneath it. For Krisp, an AI voice software company with a large inbound lead flow, we built a five-part lead scoring model in HubSpot, including an ICP Fit score based on seniority, department, company size and industry, and synced it to Salesforce so marketing and sales worked from the same view.
That kind of property-level ICP definition is what an agent's segments and personas need. Read the Krisp case study.
We start with a 45-minute assessment of your CRM data, prospecting process and goals, followed by a written scope and a fixed price. If the prospecting agent fits the way your team sells, we help put the data and processes in place for it to work reliably.
For outbound motions that need a different approach, our account-based marketing service connects inbound and outbound workflows using Clay. For a broader CRM build, see our HubSpot implementation services.
Thinking about turning on the prospecting agent?
Book a call with our team to check your ICP data, exclusions and sending setup before the agent sends its first email.
FAQ
What is the HubSpot prospecting agent?
The HubSpot prospecting agent is an AI agent inside HubSpot that monitors companies for buying signals, finds up to three contacts matching your target personas at each enrolled company and drafts personalized outreach using your CRM data and recent intent signals. You configure it through plays, and you can review each email before it sends or let the agent send automatically.
How much does the HubSpot prospecting agent cost?
HubSpot charges $1 per lead the agent recommends outreach for, paid as 100 HubSpot Credits per lead. Paid subscriptions include a monthly credit allowance, for example 3,000 credits on Professional editions, which covers 30 recommended leads if nothing else uses credits. Pay-as-you-go overages are listed at $0.01 per credit, and capacity packs have separate terms.
Which HubSpot plans include the prospecting agent?
Since June 2026, the prospecting agent is available on Starter, Professional and Enterprise editions of Marketing, Sales, Service, Data and Content Hub, and on Smart CRM Professional and Enterprise. It requires HubSpot Credits, and only users with paid seats can use credits.
Can the prospecting agent send emails automatically?
Yes. In each play's Automation settings you choose between "Review before sending", where a person approves every message, and "Send automatically", where the agent sends without review based on your outreach settings. Most teams should start in review mode and switch only once the play meets agreed targets for ICP match, edit rate and qualified meetings.
Where does the prospecting agent get its contact data?
It uses data already in your HubSpot portal, including form submissions, page views, calls, meetings, notes and email opens, plus company news and research signals. To find new contacts, it can connect to one external provider at a time: Apollo, Surfe, ZoomInfo or Seamless.
What happens when HubSpot Credits run out?
If you have not bought extra capacity, usage-based features such as the prospecting agent pause until your next monthly reset. If you have bought capacity packs, HubSpot can automatically upgrade you to the next pack, and admins can turn on pay-as-you-go overages instead. Unused credits do not roll over.
Is the HubSpot prospecting agent worth it?
It is worth testing if you have clean ICP data, clear personas and more known accounts or leads than your team can work. It is less suited to high-volume cold outbound, where the per-lead price and sending from reps' own inboxes become limits. Measure it against your best existing sequence before you scale it.