We left the middle man
We left to get control. The markup was an accident. Nobody has run the experiment we are about to run.
Push is mandatory and HubSpot cannot do it, so we were already paying two vendors — the only live question was whether it collapsed to one. The decider was not the stack and it was not the money. Through HubSpot we could not govern which individual got which email against our own definition of who they are. The money turned out to be the accident.
I spent years telling people to buy the layer. I never once looked up what the layer was buying.
THE STACK
Two vendors before we chose one
Push notifications are not optional for us and HubSpot does not send them, so a second vendor was already in the plan. That changes the question. It was never whether to add something, it was whether this collapses to one door or stays at two, and once it is phrased that way the incumbent has to justify the seat rather than inherit it.
GOVERNANCE
The decider
We could not govern which individual got which email against our own definition of who they are. Not who HubSpot thinks they are, and not a list we maintain twice. Our record knows what machine someone owns, what they have bought, what they have not. A platform that cannot be told that, in those terms, at send time, is a platform we are writing around rather than working in.
THE EVIDENCE
Why the bet is reasonable, and why nobody can prove it
The clean experiments are about shallow personalisation and the effect is small. The best of them, a randomised field study across millions of emails, put a first name in the subject line and moved opens from 9.05% to 10.80% and leads from 0.39% to 0.51%. Its own argument is that this works because the name carries no information — it buys attention, not relevance — and a later replication could not reproduce even that. The large numbers are vendor data. Segmented campaigns get twice the clicks, but a sender chooses which campaigns to segment, and they choose the ones with a clear audience and a real offer. The honest end of the range is a consultancy's 10 to 15 per cent. So the study for what we are actually doing — the email assembled from what we know rather than poured into a template — has not been run. That is not a hole in the argument. Almost nobody can run it, because almost nobody holds the data in one place at send time. You cannot buy the study because you cannot buy the capability.
THE MARKUP
The part nobody checks
We did not move for the money, and I want to be honest that we found it on the way out. But it is the part most people will recognise. Nearly every service that does this is sending through the same infrastructure we went direct to, and the gap between what the layer charges and what the pipe underneath charges is not a percentage. It is orders of magnitude. The layer is real work. It is not that much work.