Question from Reddit user:
Is there a way to trigger a subscription in Hubspot for new clients who sign up on a third-party platform, specifically Kajabi? We would like our payments to continue to flow through Kajabi and not use a Hubspot payment link for a variety of workflow and client access reasons.
We have Stripe payment processing and Stripe data integration set up with our Hubspot account, but it does not appear that we can even set up a subscription in our Hubspot account or trigger other product purchases without using the Hubspot payment link. Is that accurate?
Or is there a workaround we are not seeing?Ā
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
Your understanding is generally accurate – to fully leverage HubSpot’s built-in subscription and Commerce features, the payment typically needs to flow through a HubSpot Payment Link.
However, you can absolutely trigger a highly functional “virtual subscription” in HubSpot when payments occur on Kajabi, and your existing Stripe integration isn’t enough because it usually only syncs transactions, not the underlying subscription product or recurring logic you need.
The best workaround is to use Kajabi’s webhooks or API to send detailed subscription data to a middleware, which then uses the HubSpot API to create a Contact, update a custom “Subscription Status” property, and create a recurring Deal or a Custom Object to represent the subscription.
The long answer is:
The suggestions to use Zapier or other middleware with Kajabi’s webhooks are excellent first steps, but if your goal is a resilient, low-cost, and scalable solution that reliably syncs complex subscription data, a custom API-driven approach is superior.
Relying on simple, off-the-shelf Zapier workflows can become expensive as your volume grows, and they often lack the fine-grained control needed to handle subscription events like failures, cancellations, or upgrades seamlessly.
The most effective and ultimately cheapest long-term solution involves leveraging the Kajabi API and the HubSpot API with a simple server-side setup.
Instead of Zapier, you can use a custom webhook endpoint hosted on a minimal platform like Google Cloud Platform or within a server-side tagging environment like Stape (which is cheap and efficient).
When a client signs up or renews on Kajabi, Kajabi sends a webhook payload to your custom endpoint.
This endpoint’s script then uses the HubSpot API to perform several crucial actions: first, it creates or updates the Contact; second, it creates a new Deal in a specific “Subscriptions” pipeline and sets the Deal Type to “Recurring Revenue”; and most importantly, it creates a Custom Object named “Kajabi Subscription” to hold all the recurring details (next billing date, subscription ID from Kajabi, current status, etc.).
This replicates the functionality of a native HubSpot subscription without using the HubSpot Payment Link.
This API-to-API communication is cheap because you only pay for the minimal server resources to execute the code, not a per-task middleware fee.
It is an excellent solution because it gives you perfect data mapping control, allows you to immediately trigger HubSpot workflows based on the Custom Object status, and uses the HubSpot API to create a recurring revenue model within your CRM reporting, achieving your goal of tracking subscriptions without disrupting your Kajabi payments.
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