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The Gist
- Fast reversal. HubSpot announced a July 1 terms change allowing customer enrichment data to be shared across accounts, then fully reversed it by July 5 after sustained backlash, especially on LinkedIn.
- Opt-out was the flashpoint. Customers objected most to being automatically enrolled rather than asked, with critics arguing the plan treated customer-built CRM data as HubSpot's to redistribute.
- Leadership owned it publicly. Co-founder Dharmesh Shah and chief product officer Duncan Lennox both acknowledged the rollout was a mistake, with Lennox committing to opt-in-only data changes going forward.
- Reaction wasn't uniformly negative. Some users and partners saw legitimate intent behind the plan, framing the failure as one of communication rather than concept.
- No revised plan yet. HubSpot hasn't said if or when it will bring back a modified version of the enrichment feature.
HubSpot customers spent the lead-up to the Fourth of July and inside the holiday weekend complaining loudly on LinkedIn about HubSpot's July 1 terms of service update to "help customers prospect in a more trusted, effective way."
The company changed its mind four days later in a HubSpot Community post titled, "We got this wrong, and we are fixing it."
"What the hell is HubSpot thinking?" asked Gabe Larsen, CRO at Atonom, in a July 5 post, the day HubSpot announced it made a mistake in the HubSpot Community and canceled its original July 1 terms of service agreement changes.
"Imagine sending your customers an email that basically says: 'Thanks for spending years building your CRM. We might use your data to make our product better for everyone else. You're opted in by default,'" wrote Larsen. "Seriously?"
Larsen went on:
- I bought the software
- I imported the contacts
- I cleaned the data
- I enriched the records
- I paid my team to maintain it
"And now you're telling me the default is that my database helps improve yours? Somewhere along the way, SaaS companies forgot who the customer is."
Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot co-founder and CTO, responded directly to Larsen on LinkedIn: "You are right. We made a mistake and have taken steps to correct it."
What Did HubSpot's Original Notice to Customers Say?
Larsen was responding to this notice from HubSpot:
"As we continue to improve our product and services, we're making updates to our enrichment features and the choices you can make about your data. You are receiving this email because you have used HubSpot's enrichment features.
On August 4, 2026, HubSpot is expanding its data discovery and intelligence features to bring more robust and reliable data to our customers. To power these tools, enrichment data such as business contact details, employer information, and email deliverability signals, may be shared with other customers.
As always, you have complete control over your settings. You can review or modify your Data Enrichment settings any time. To ensure your data is not collected and shared by HubSpot moving forward, you can opt out of your data being used for AI model training and stop using enrichment features before August 4. To turn off automatic enrichment, simply ensure your settings are 'OFF.'"
Why Did HubSpot Customers Resist the Terms of Service Changes?
Customers immediately took to LinkedIn to vent.
HubSpot customer Matt Zelasko of the The Tom Delonge of RevOps, posted late last week, "HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) quietly announced something yesterday that seems...significant. And a little shocking."
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Jon Dick, chief customer officer at HubSpot, tried to get ahead of the backlash in a post before the official reversal, writing that customers "are still in control of your data. What's in your portal is still yours. Your CRM data, notes, deals, call recordings, custom fields, and internal content are never part of enrichment and are never shared. And if you don't want to use or participate in enrichment, you can turn it off at any time. We believe in customer choice."
The reassurance didn't hold. On July 5, Duncan Lennox, chief product and technology officer at HubSpot, posted on LinkedIn: "Last week, we announced changes to our terms of service that we should not have rolled out the way we did. We made a mistake, and we're reverting those changes completely."
Lennox expanded on the reversal in a longer HubSpot Community post titled "We got this wrong, and we are fixing it."
"Nothing matters more to us than the trust of our customers, and with our recent terms of service update we let you down," Lennox wrote. "We are sorry about that. We will not move forward with the terms of service changes we communicated on July 1, 2026."
Lennox said the intent behind the original announcement was a vision the company internally called "Trusted Prospecting" — using a continuously refining, shared enrichment dataset to move outbound away from "generic lists and spray-and-pray campaigns" and toward outreach that "make outreach feel timely and useful, not like spam."
Where the company said it erred was transparency. "Even though our intent was to work with 'business card-level' professional details in a shared enrichment dataset, the way we rolled this out made it feel like the relationship you have with your CRM (and with HubSpot) was changing underneath you," Lennox wrote. "That's on us and we are sorry."
Lennox reiterated that CRM data — "your contacts, notes, deals, call recordings, custom fields, and customer records" — belongs to the customer and "should not be used without your permission, and never in ways you don't expect." He committed that any future enrichment capability using customer data "will be fully and transparently opt-in," with clear communication "early, clearly, and across multiple channels" before any changes affecting customer data.
HubSpot also on July 6 updated its "Understand opt-out notices for HubSpot's enrichment dataset" page, but it's unclear exactly what it updated.
Customers and Partners: Trust, Transparency and the Cost of an Opt-Out Default
The reaction across LinkedIn split between relief at the reversal and skepticism about how the plan got as far as an email announcement in the first place. One observer called the original move one of "desperation" in reaction to being one of the "key SaaSpocalypse victims":
Customer Trust Is the Issue Here
Larsen, whose post kicked off much of the visible backlash, argued the episode exposed a deeper misunderstanding of the CRM relationship.
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"The most valuable asset inside a CRM isn't the software," he wrote. "It's the trust that what's inside belongs to the business paying the bill. Burn that trust once, and good luck getting it back. If I were sitting in that boardroom, this email never gets sent."
An Attempt to Make CRM Data 'Richer and More Useful'
Not everyone read bad intent into the original plan.
Fruzsina Peti, founder at Growthly, who said she's used HubSpot for nearly a decade, noted that automatic company enrichment was once the default experience on the platform, before enrichment credits existed.
"To me, this felt more like an attempt to move back towards that original vision of making CRM data richer and more useful," Peti wrote, while acknowledging why customers who'd invested in proprietary data through tools like Clay, Apollo, ZoomInfo or Cognism were protective of it.
She floated an alternative: reward customers who voluntarily contribute enrichment data with additional credits rather than opting them in by default. Peti also credited HubSpot's response: "They listened to the community, acknowledged they got the communication wrong, and decided to rethink the rollout. Admitting a mistake publicly isn't easy, especially for a company of that size."
'One of the Biggest Customer Backlashes I've Ever Seen in the HubSpot Ecosystem'
Bryan Byler, a HubSpot partner, framed the backlash as a case study in how transparency can backfire on execution.
"HubSpot has always built its reputation on transparency," Byler wrote. "Instead of quietly changing a backend policy that many customers may never have noticed, they chose to tell everyone exactly what was changing. Ironically, that transparency created one of the biggest customer backlashes I've ever seen in the HubSpot ecosystem." He called the Sunday, July 5, reversal a harder test of customer-centricity than agreeing with a popular roadmap decision: "It's much harder to change direction after you've already announced a strategy, invested engineering resources, communicated it publicly, and then have to admit ... 'We got this wrong, and we're fixing it.'"
HubSpot Should Pay Us for Customer Data
Zain Jaffer, founder at Blazel, was less forgiving of the underlying idea even after the reversal. Reacting to the original notice before HubSpot pulled back, Jaffer questioned the economics of the plan outright: "They're basically going to take all your precious contact data and then resell it," he wrote, pointing to the opt-out (rather than opt-in) structure and the fact that HubSpot would end up "with the richest and most accurate contact data in the industry" using data verified by its own customers.
"Contact data can sell for up to $1 per record," Jaffer wrote. "Shouldn't they be paying us for this data rather than outright just taking it?"
HubSpot has not said when or whether it will return with a revised version of its enrichment plans, only that any future changes affecting customer data will be opt-in and communicated in advance.
"We still believe that there is a better, more effective way to prospect than the status quo," Lennox wrote in the HubSpot community. "But we have to earn your trust as we build it together."
The Mob Won, But Customers Still Lost
Perry Nalevka, CEO of Penguin Strategies, a HubSpot partner, cited Melissa Rosenthal's post that said, "read what the apology doesn't really say. It reverses the terms and not the strategy. The shared dataset is still coming, with better consent UX and a better comms plan. Which is fine, honestly. Plenty of customers would trade business card level data for dramatically better prospecting. That's a defensible value exchange. It just has to be offered, visibly, with the price tag showing."
"This is coming back with clearer opt-in controls and better communication," Nalevka wrote. "Same idea, better packaging. So all the outrage really bought was time."
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