Question from Reddit user:
Need suggestion for transferring deal file attachments from Bigin to HubSpot
Looking for a few suggestions without having to build the API myself.Let me know.
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
Since Bigin does not have a native, out-of-the-box integration with HubSpot that handles file attachments, you have two non-API options – using a third-party workflow tool like Zapier or Make, or using a specialized migration service.
However, since middleware tools can often be unreliable or expensive for high volume file transfers, and migration services are usually one-time, the most excellent and surprisingly cost-effective long-term solution is actually a custom integration using the HubSpot API and the Bigin APIs orchestrated through a small, serverless function on a platform like Google Cloud Platform.
This API approach is the only way to guarantee the complex, multi-step process of file migration, where you must first download the file from Bigin, then upload it to HubSpot’s file manager, and finally attach it to the correct deal or note record.
The long answer is:
Relying solely on general middleware tools like Zapier or Make for transferring file attachments is generally unreliable and expensive for large-scale data migration or real-time sync.
This is because transferring an attachment is not a single-step data record sync, but a three-step technical process: first, your integration needs to call the Bigin APIs to download the file or get its URL; second, it needs to call the HubSpot API (specifically the Files API) to upload that file into the HubSpot File Manager; and third, it needs to call the HubSpot API again to create an association, typically by creating a Note object with the file’s ID and then associating that Note to the correct Deal record.
General middleware often struggles to manage this sequence of steps correctly and can quickly become costly due to the number of tasks or operations required for each file.
An excellent and surprisingly cheap alternative is to use a server-side solution leveraging the HubSpot API and the Bigin APIs.
You can host a simple, custom script (using minimal code) on a serverless platform like Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Functions) or a containerized environment like Stape.
This solution is cheap because serverless functions only charge you for the time the code is actively running, often amounting to mere dollars a month for most small to medium businesses.
You can trigger this function either on a schedule to perform bulk transfers or by setting up a webhook in Bigin to trigger it whenever a deal is updated with a new attachment, providing an efficient, highly reliable, and custom-controlled data pipe for your file attachments that bypasses the limitations and recurring subscription costs of off-the-shelf third-party tools.
Google Tag Manager itself isn’t directly involved in this server-to-server file transfer, but the entire server-side architecture principle is what makes this API-based solution technically superior and economically viable for ongoing synchronization.
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