--- title: "Lead scoring sits on US$39 to US$90 CRM seats, not the US$9 entry plan" summary: "Where three CRMs’ pricing pages first list lead scoring and forecasting, the four funnel numbers worth tracking, and Zoho’s rupee tiers, as of September 2026." url: https://www.thetechbag.com/blog/best-practices-setting-up-monitoring-sales-funnels format: Note desk: "SaaS & business software" published: 2025-05-13 facts_checked: 2026-09-30 author: TechBag (The TechBag Journal) tags: ["sales funnel","CRM","lead scoring","forecasting","Freshsales","Pipedrive","HubSpot","Zoho CRM","DPDP","GST"] cover: https://www.thetechbag.com/blog/covers/best-practices-setting-up-monitoring-sales-funnels.png --- # Lead scoring sits on US$39 to US$90 CRM seats, not the US$9 entry plan *Where three CRMs’ pricing pages first list lead scoring and forecasting, the four funnel numbers worth tracking, and Zoho’s rupee tiers, as of September 2026.* Note · SaaS & business software · By TechBag · Published 2025-05-13 · Facts checked 2026-09-30 · Canonical: https://www.thetechbag.com/blog/best-practices-setting-up-monitoring-sales-funnels A small company can draw its sales funnel on the cheapest plan of any mainstream CRM. It cannot ask that plan which leads are worth a call. Lead scoring, the feature that turns a list of names into a queue, starts at US$39 a seat a month in Freshsales, US$59 in Pipedrive and US$90 in HubSpot, against entry seats of US$9 and US$14.[1][2][3] That gap, not the shape of the funnel, is the decision a startup actually faces. ## Four numbers are the whole of monitoring The 2023 version of this post listed a dozen things to track. In practice a team of five to twenty sellers needs four: leads by source, conversion from each stage to the next, days spent in each stage, and a forecast of what closes this month. The first three come from any CRM that records stages with dates; a spreadsheet can do them for a while. The fourth, and the habit of working the best leads first, are where the plans divide. Our view Our view: define the stages before buying anything. Five stages with a written exit rule each (“demo booked”, not “interested”) will tell you more than any scoring model fed with vague stages. ## Where the plans split **Figure: Lead scoring sits on seats priced at more than four times each CRM’s cheapest plan** *US$ per seat per month, annual billing: the cheapest plan against the first plan whose pricing page lists lead or contact scoring, September 2026* | | Cheapest plan | First plan with lead scoring | Change | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Freshsales | 9 | 39 | 333% | | Pipedrive | 14 | 59 | 321% | | HubSpot Sales Hub | 0 | 90 | – | Source: Freshsales, Pipedrive and HubSpot Sales Hub pricing pages · as of September 2026 · entry plans are Freshsales Growth, Pipedrive Lite and HubSpot's free tools (two users); scoring plans are Freshsales Pro, Pipedrive Premium and HubSpot Sales Hub Professional, which also carries a one-time US$1,500 onboarding fee Forecasting does not follow the same line. Pipedrive puts forecast reports in Growth at US$39, a tier below its scoring; Freshsales keeps “forecasting insights” for Enterprise at US$59; HubSpot places scoring and forecasting together in Professional.[1][2][3] Zoho CRM is the exception that prices in rupees: forecasting, multiple pipelines and web forms are in Standard at about ₹800 a user a month, and its Zia predictions in Enterprise at about ₹2,400.[4][5] TechBag countTechBag count Scoring seat divided by entry seat, from the list prices above: Freshsales 39 ÷ 9 = 4.3×; Pipedrive 59 ÷ 14 = 4.2×. On Zoho the step from Standard to Enterprise is ₹2,400 ÷ ₹800 = 3×. The order follows each vendor’s business model. A per-seat CRM earns most by moving a team up a tier, and scoring is the feature a sales manager asks for once the lead list outgrows one person’s memory. Buy the entry plan, run the four numbers for a quarter, and upgrade only the seats that need the queue. ## If you are buying this in India Only Zoho prints a rupee price; the others list US$, and an Indian company buying through a reseller pays 18% GST on top.[6] Five Freshsales Pro seats are US$2,340 a year before GST; five Zoho Standard seats are ₹48,000, or ₹56,640 with GST. A web form that captures a lead collects personal data, so the consent wording on it falls under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023; the DPDP Rules were notified on 13 November 2025 and their substantive duties apply from 13 May 2027.[7] Write the notice into the form now, while the funnel is small. How we did this Figures as of 30 September 2026 Plan names, prices and the tier at which scoring and forecasting first appear were read from each vendor’s pricing page; Pipedrive’s from an archived copy dated 26 September 2026, the rest from the live pages, which match the prices on TechBag’s own Freshsales and HubSpot pages for September. HubSpot’s feature table does not label every column, so its tier for scoring is read from the table’s order and from HubSpot’s Professional plan description. Zoho prices are the “about” figures on TechBag’s Zoho CRM page. Salesforce is left out because its edition line-up on the live page differs from the one we could date. The five statistics in the 2023 post were not traced to a dated primary study and are dropped. Multiples are TechBag arithmetic. Spotted an error? Write to us; corrections are published at the foot of the piece. Sources 1. [Freshworks, Freshsales pricing (Growth, Pro, Enterprise)](https://www.freshworks.com/crm/pricing/) — September 2026 2. [Pipedrive, pricing (archived copy)](https://www.pipedrive.com/en/pricing) — 26 September 2026 3. [HubSpot, Sales Hub pricing](https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/sales) — September 2026 4. [Zoho, Zoho CRM pricing and editions](https://www.zoho.com/crm/zohocrm-pricing.html) — September 2026 5. [TechBag, Zoho CRM intel page (INR editions)](https://www.thetechbag.com/zoho/zoho-crm) — September 2026 6. [India Briefing, GST on online information and database access services](https://www.india-briefing.com/news/tax-digital-services-oidar-in-india-gst-applicability-and-compliance-22465.html) — updated 29 September 2023 7. [DPDP Rules 2025, commencement timeline](https://legismith.com/dpdp-rules-2025-timeline/) — notified 13 November 2025 Related on TechBag: the [Freshsales page](https://www.thetechbag.com/freshworks/freshsales) and the [HubSpot Sales Hub page](https://www.thetechbag.com/hubspot/hubspot-sales-hub) carry the plans in this note; the [catalogue](https://www.thetechbag.com/browse-products) lists every CRM we quote in INR. **Disclosure.** TechBag is a software reseller: it earns a margin when a reader buys through it, including from vendors named here. The analysis is TechBag’s own; no vendor paid for or saw this piece before publication. Facts are labelled reported, TechBag count or our view. Go deeper on TechBag - [Freshsales intel page](https://www.thetechbag.com/freshworks/freshsales) — Growth, Pro and Enterprise, and where contact scoring starts - [HubSpot Sales Hub intel page](https://www.thetechbag.com/hubspot/hubspot-sales-hub) — seats, tiers and the Professional onboarding fee - [The catalogue](https://www.thetechbag.com/browse-products) — every CRM TechBag quotes in INR with GST