Beacon
Scheduled Sep 20, 2026Landing pages, forms and nurture on your own domain.
Replaces
- HubSpot Marketing Hub · HubSpot, Inc. — $3,600 per org per month (Enterprise), about $43,200/yr at 400 seats
- Adobe Marketo Engage · Adobe Inc. — no published list price
Rented, per year
$43,200
HubSpot Marketing Hub list price at 400 seats.
Owned, per year
$7,440
AWS infrastructure only. Azure is $11,280.
Build
11 weeks
2 engineers. To parity on the core features above, including migration of contacts, form history, scoring rules and active nurture programmes from HubSpot or Marketo.
Difficulty
4/5
Substantial. Compliance or realtime depth involved.
Reference organisation: 250,000 stored contacts of which 40,000 marketable, 60 landing pages, 400,000 form and page sessions a month, single region, prod + non-prod. 3-year Compute Savings Plan on Fargate / 3-year reservation on Container Apps. Aurora minimum 0.5 ACU. Front Door Premium on Azure, CloudFront plus WAF Bot Control on AWS. Campaign email delivery is billed separately through Dispatch and is not included here. Figures are infrastructure only and exclude the build.
What it is
Beacon is marketing automation and gated content: landing pages, forms, progressive profiling, lead scoring, nurture programmes, and authenticated partner and customer portals, all served from your own domain and your own database. It is aimed at B2B marketing teams whose contact database has outgrown the tier they bought, where the bill now moves with the size of the list rather than the value of the programme. Beacon separates the marketable audience from the stored audience, because storing a lapsed lead should cost you fractions of a cent, not a pricing tier.
Why this one stops making sense
- HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise lists at $3,600 a month and includes 10,000 marketing contacts. Contacts above that are sold in blocks, so the cost of the system rises with database size rather than with output.
- Adobe publishes no price for Marketo Engage at all. Every one of the four packages routes to a sales consultation, which means the only benchmark you have at renewal is your own last invoice.
- The distinction between a contact you email and a contact you merely store is a billing construct. In Postgres it is a boolean.
- Landing pages and forms are the most SEO-sensitive and most bot-exposed surface you own, and they sit on someone else's CDN behind someone else's WAF rules.
- Lead scoring models are the accumulated judgement of your marketing team over years. They live in a proprietary rules engine with no version history and no test harness.
What ships
- Landing pages and templates built as components, versioned in git, deployed as static output
- Forms with progressive profiling, conditional logic, and known-visitor pre-fill
- Lead scoring with explicit, versioned, testable rules and a visible score history per contact
- Nurture programmes: wait steps, branches, goals, exit criteria and suppression rules
- Authenticated partner and customer portals sharing the same contact model
- Marketable-versus-stored contact states so retention costs nothing
- UTM, first-touch and multi-touch attribution stored as immutable event rows
- A/B testing on pages, forms and nurture branches with fixed-horizon significance reporting
- Bidirectional sync with Relay or an existing CRM over a documented change-feed
- Consent and preference centre with per-purpose GDPR lawful-basis tracking
Data model
Stack
- frontend
- Next.js 15 App Router — static export for public pages, dynamic for the portal and admin
- backend
- NestJS on Node 22 — an admin API and a separate, minimal public-intake service
- database
- PostgreSQL 16, with touch events in a monthly-partitioned table
- cache
- Redis 7 for form definitions, known-visitor lookups and rate limiting
- queue
- BullMQ for scoring, programme execution, sync and page publication
- auth
- OIDC for staff via the customer IdP; passwordless magic-link plus optional social for portal users
- search
- PostgreSQL tsvector across contacts, assets and pages
- ai
- Optional subject-line and page-copy variants, and lead-fit scoring, through an LLM gateway
Parity, honestly
What we match, and what we do not.
The rows marked No are the important ones. If one of them is the reason you bought HubSpot Marketing Hub, keep buying it — and we will tell you that on the first call rather than the fifth month.
| Capability | HubSpot Marketing Hub | Ours | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landing pages and templates | Yes | Yes | Ours are React components in your repository, reviewed like code. |
| Forms with progressive profiling | Yes | Yes | — |
| Lead scoring | Yes | Yes | Rules are versioned and diffable, and every score change records which rule fired. |
| Nurture and drip programmes | Yes | Yes | — |
| Unlimited stored contacts at no incremental licence cost | No | Yes | Storage is measured in gigabytes, not in pricing tiers. |
| Multi-touch attribution reporting | Yes | Yes | Raw touch events are retained, so you can change the model retrospectively. |
| Partner and customer portals | Partial | Yes | HubSpot and Marketo both need additional products for authenticated portals. Beacon uses the same identity and contact model. |
| App marketplace with 1,500+ integrations | Yes | No | HubSpot's marketplace is a real asset and this is a genuine gap. We build the integrations you use, properly. If your operations team lives in fifteen HubSpot apps, this replacement is not for you. |
| Bundled CRM, CMS, ticketing and payments in one licence | Yes | No | HubSpot's bundle is why teams tolerate the price. Beacon is a marketing system that talks to Relay and Frontdesk; it is not a suite in one login. |
| Adobe Experience Cloud integration and shared audiences | Yes | No | If Marketo is chosen because it shares audiences with Adobe Experience Manager and Real-Time CDP, replacing it breaks that and you should not do it. |
| Vendor-managed sending reputation for nurture email | Yes | Partial | Beacon hands campaign delivery to Dispatch, which means you own IP and domain reputation. That is an advantage at volume and a liability in the first ninety days. |
| Prebuilt template and asset gallery | Yes | No | You get a design system and six templates built for your brand, not a gallery of nine hundred. |
| Bot and spam protection on public forms | Yes | Yes | Cloud WAF plus rate limiting and a hashcash challenge. See the Azure note on which Front Door tier this requires. |
| GDPR consent and preference centre | Yes | Yes | Lawful basis is stored per purpose per contact, with the timestamp and the source form. |
Reference architecture
Built twice, on purpose.
Every application in Techtons ships with a production architecture for AWS and one for Azure, using the same diagram grammar so you can read them side by side. Your cloud, your account, your bill.
Amazon Web Services
- Compute
- ECS Fargate for the admin API, portal and workers; a separate small Fargate service for public form intake
- Data
- Aurora Serverless v2 PostgreSQL, ElastiCache Redis
- Storage and edge
- S3 for static page output and assets, CloudFront in front of both
- Identity
- Cognito — one user pool for staff federated to the IdP, a second pool for portal users
- Observability
- OpenTelemetry to CloudWatch and X-Ray; form conversion and intake latency as SLOs
- Infrastructure as code
- Terraform, one module per environment
Services
The decision worth arguing about
Landing pages are compiled to static HTML in S3 and served from CloudFront, and the form endpoint is a separate Fargate service with its own security group, its own database role, and write access to exactly two tables. The non-obvious part is that a form submission does not write a contact — it writes a raw submission row and a queue message, and a worker resolves identity, applies scoring and updates the contact a moment later. This exists because the public intake path is the one surface an attacker can reach without credentials, and because a campaign launch puts 50,000 people on a page in ten minutes; neither should be able to touch the contact table directly. The trade-off is that lead creation is eventually consistent, typically two to five seconds, which breaks the pattern where a thank-you page immediately shows a personalised next step. We handle it with a short client-side poll against the submission ID, and we tell marketing teams about it before they design the page rather than after.
Microsoft Azure
- Compute
- Container Apps for admin, portal, intake and workers; Static Web Apps for the compiled public pages
- Data
- PostgreSQL Flexible Server, Azure Cache for Redis
- Storage and edge
- Blob Storage for assets, Front Door for edge, caching and WAF
- Identity
- Entra ID for staff, Entra External ID for portal and partner users
- Observability
- Azure Monitor and Application Insights
- Infrastructure as code
- Bicep, azd-compatible layout
Services
The decision worth arguing about
The Azure shape forces a decision AWS lets you defer: Front Door Standard supports custom WAF rules but not Microsoft's managed rule sets or bot protection, and both of those only appear on Premium. Public marketing forms are exactly the workload that needs managed bot rules — the traffic is anonymous by design, the incentive to stuff a form is high, and a poisoned contact database is expensive to clean. So we specify Front Door Premium here, and it is the single largest line in the Azure bill: roughly $330 a month base against roughly $35 for Standard, before request charges. On AWS the equivalent capability is AWS WAF with the Bot Control managed rule group at about $10 a month plus $1 per million requests, bought à la carte on top of a CloudFront distribution that costs nothing to keep. That difference — around $300 a month for the same protective posture — is most of the gap between the two cost figures below, and it is worth knowing before you pick a cloud for a public-facing marketing system.
Sources
Every price on this page, with the page we read it from and the date we read it.
| Product | Plan | List price | Checked | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot Marketing Hub | Enterprise | $3,600 / org/month | 2026-09-05 | www.hubspot.com/pricing/marketing Billed annually, includes 10,000 marketing contacts and 5 core seats, plus a one-time $7,000 onboarding fee. Professional lists at $800 per month with 2,000 contacts and a $3,000 onboarding fee. |
| Adobe Marketo Engage | Growth / Select / Prime / Ultimate | Not published | 2026-09-05 | business.adobe.com/products/marketo/pricing. Adobe publishes no list price for Marketo Engage. All four packages show a 'Get pricing' call to action and route to a sales consultation. |
Should you still be paying for HubSpot Marketing Hub?
Two weeks, fixed price. We audit what you actually use, map it against Beacon, cost the replacement on your own AWS or Azure account, and give you a delivery plan. If the honest answer is to keep the licence, that is what the report will say.