The HubSpot commerce stack: strengths and limitations
HubSpot's Commerce Hub offers several valuable features for businesses managing quotes, invoices, and payments. The platform provides basic CPQ functionality, allowing sales teams to create quotes without leaving the CRM. Native invoicing supports one-time payments with embedded payment collection through Stripe or HubSpot Payments. For recurring revenue, HubSpot offers subscription management with automated invoice generation.
These capabilities serve many businesses well, particularly those with straightforward pricing models, limited product catalogs, and simple monthly or annual subscriptions. The native tools integrate seamlessly with HubSpot's CRM data, requiring no additional setup for basic use cases.
However, as documented across various HubSpot community forums and integration marketplaces, businesses encounter significant limitations when their needs evolve beyond basic scenarios. HubSpot's native invoicing currently supports only one-time line items, with recurring billing requiring workarounds through the subscriptions feature. The platform lacks native support for usage-based pricing models, which have become increasingly popular in SaaS. Complex pricing scenarios, including tiered structures, prepaid credits, or hybrid models combining subscription and usage components, push the boundaries of what HubSpot's native tools can handle.
Revenue recognition automation remains limited, creating challenges for finance teams managing compliance. Multi-currency support, while available, lacks the depth needed for truly global operations. Perhaps most critically, as businesses scale past a few hundred customers, the manual intervention required to manage billing exceptions, handle custom pricing, and reconcile payments becomes a significant operational burden.
Enter Hyperline: purpose-built for modern revenue operations
Founded in Paris in 2022 by Lucas Bédout and Clément Garbay, former engineering leaders at Spendesk, Hyperline was created specifically to solve the billing complexities that modern B2B SaaS companies face. The platform has since raised €13.6 million (approximately $14 million) from Index Ventures and other prominent investors and now serves over 150 technology businesses worldwide.
What sets Hyperline apart is its comprehensive approach to revenue management combined with deep, native integration with HubSpot. Rather than forcing businesses to choose between their CRM and sophisticated billing capabilities, Hyperline provides both.
The Hyperline–HubSpot integration: native experience, advanced capabilities
Hyperline's HubSpot integration goes far beyond typical third-party connections. The platform offers seamless, bidirectional synchronization of HubSpot companies, quotes, subscriptions, and invoices, enabling effortless data transfer without manual effort or technical configuration.
Embedded UI within HubSpot
One of Hyperline's most powerful features is its dedicated component that embeds directly into HubSpot company pages. This allows revenue teams to create quotes, assign and manage subscriptions, view customer details, and access invoices, all using Hyperline's full-featured interface without ever leaving the CRM.
This embedded experience means sales and operations teams can maintain HubSpot as their primary tool while leveraging Hyperline's advanced capabilities. There's no context switching, no duplicate data entry, and no workflow disruption.
Automatic custom object management
Upon connecting a HubSpot account, Hyperline automatically configures the necessary custom fields and objects. The integration creates custom objects for quotes, subscriptions, and invoices, establishing the data structure needed to sync billing information seamlessly. These custom objects sync automatically with Hyperline's API, ensuring data consistency across platforms.
The system intelligently handles synchronization direction: businesses can choose one-way or bidirectional sync for customer data and determine which HubSpot companies to import into Hyperline. For granular control, Hyperline creates a “Sync to Hyperline” checkbox field on HubSpot company objects, allowing selective synchronization.
Enhanced quote-to-cash flow
Recent updates to the integration have expanded synchronization capabilities significantly. Hyperline now pushes detailed quote information including line items and coupon details, subscription data with full product information and promotional codes, and comprehensive invoice details with line-item breakdowns, all synchronized automatically to HubSpot.
This deep integration ensures that sales teams working in HubSpot have complete visibility into billing status, while finance teams using Hyperline can see the full customer context from the CRM.
Where Hyperline excels beyond HubSpot native tools
- Advanced pricing model support
While HubSpot's native tools handle basic flat-rate and simple tiered pricing, Hyperline was built from the ground up to support any pricing model. The platform natively handles usage-based billing with real-time metering, seat-based pricing with automated synchronization from customer databases, prepaid credit systems with autonomous top-ups, hybrid models combining multiple pricing components, complex tiered structures including volume-based and graduated pricing, and custom enterprise contracts with negotiated terms.
For HubSpot users adopting usage-based pricing, increasingly common in SaaS, Hyperline provides capabilities that simply don't exist in HubSpot's native stack. The platform processes usage data through APIs or database connectors with sub-second latency, handling millions of events instantly. Companies can connect directly to PostgreSQL, MongoDB, BigQuery, or Snowflake databases for automated consumption tracking.
- True usage-based billing infrastructure
HubSpot's documentation explicitly states that invoices support only one-time line items, with recurring billing requiring the subscriptions feature as a workaround. Usage-based pricing isn't supported natively at all.
Hyperline, by contrast, is usage-native. The platform ingests raw usage data through database connectors, API calls, or CSV files, then runs calculations automatically to determine the correct invoice amount for each customer. Real-time consumption tracking provides both administrators and end customers with clear visibility into usage patterns.
The platform includes a native credits ledger for prepaid models, automated seat-based billing that syncs with user databases, and flexible usage product configurations that support any value metric businesses want to track. - Revenue recognition automation
Finance teams using HubSpot for billing often face challenges with revenue recognition—the accounting process of matching revenue to the period it's earned. While HubSpot provides basic revenue analytics for tracking MRR and ARR, automated revenue recognition requires either manual processes or additional integrations.
Hyperline automates revenue recognition to ensure compliance and enable faster book closing. The platform breaks down revenue by plan, product, or billing period using advanced reporting capabilities. Real-time dashboards track key metrics including ARR, MRR, and cash flow without waiting on data exports or manual reconciliation. - Global operations and compliance
For businesses operating internationally, Hyperline provides capabilities that extend far beyond HubSpot's native support. The platform generates compliant invoices in over 100 countries, with templates that meet local regulatory requirements. Invoices render in real-time in more than 10 languages with proper localization. The system includes compliant templates for every country in the EU and US, and supports e-invoicing wherever it's available.
As an EU-based company, Hyperline handles all client data in accordance with GDPR and other European regulations while maintaining enterprise-grade security (SOC 2 certified, with ISO 27001 in progress). - Payment orchestration
While HubSpot integrates with Stripe and offers HubSpot Payments, managing multiple payment providers across different regions or payment methods remains complex. Hyperline acts as a payment orchestrator, providing a unified interface to interact with Stripe, Mollie, GoCardless, Airwallex, and other processors.
This orchestration layer makes it easier to use different payment providers depending on customer location or preferred payment method without juggling multiple dashboards or managing separate integrations. The platform also offers smart retry logic for failed payments and automated dunning management to reduce involuntary churn. - Complex subscription management at scale
HubSpot's subscription features handle basic recurring billing scenarios, but as businesses scale beyond a few hundred customers, limitations emerge. Community forums reveal users struggling with automated invoice generation via workflows, managing custom billing cycles for enterprise customers, and handling subscription modifications without breaking billing continuity.
Hyperline was designed to handle these scenarios from day one. The platform enables subscription updates (adding or removing products) without creating new subscriptions, supports pro-rata calculations for mid-cycle changes, allows customization of pricing and payment intervals to match sales negotiations, and provides flexibility in charging updates immediately or including them on the next invoice.