HubSpot Breeze Intelligence vs Clearbit: Did the Acquisition Kill Clearbit?
Short version: Clearbit standalone is functionally sunsetted, the data graph is intact inside HubSpot as Breeze Intelligence, and your migration choice depends on whether HubSpot is already in your stack. This page walks the timeline (Nov 2023 acquisition → April 2024 standalone discontinued for new customers → Nov 2024 Breeze Intelligence rebrand → June 2025 unified HubSpot Credits → April 2026 outcome pricing pivot), the credit pricing math, what you actually lose vs gain in the rebrand, when ZoomInfo / Apollo / Cognism is the structurally right alternative instead of Intelligence, and the operator-grade migration playbook.
By Nick French · Founder, StackSwap · 10yrs B2B SaaS GTM (BDR → AE → Head of Revenue) · Methodology →
Affiliate link · StackSwap earns a commission if you sign up for HubSpot Breeze Intelligence via this page (no extra cost to you). We only partner with tools we'd recommend anyway. · Editorial standards →
Standalone Clearbit
Sunsetted
April 2024 for new customers
Rebranded as
Breeze Intelligence
Inbound 2024 launch
Pricing
$45-$700 / mo
100 → 10K credits
Requires
Paid HubSpot CRM
no longer standalone
TL;DR
The timeline (what actually happened)
1
November 2023
HubSpot acquires Clearbit.
Deal announced November 2023, closed shortly after. Clearbit kept operating as a standalone product line through 2024 while HubSpot integrated the data graph into the portal. Existing Clearbit standalone customers continued on legacy contracts with API + Reveal + form-shortening access unchanged.
2
April 2024
Clearbit standalone discontinued for new customers.
HubSpot stopped selling Clearbit standalone to new customers in April 2024. New prospects who wanted the Clearbit data graph had to go through HubSpot CRM. Existing standalone customers kept their contracts through renewal, but the writing was on the wall.
3
September 2024 (Inbound)
Rebrand: Clearbit becomes Breeze Intelligence.
At Inbound 2024, HubSpot announced the rebrand — Clearbit's enrichment + Reveal + form shortening + intent signals folded into the new Breeze Intelligence product inside the portal. Same underlying data graph, different delivery surface. Pricing: $30/mo per 100 credits at launch, ladder up to 10K credits.
4
June 2025
Credits merged into unified HubSpot Credits.
Breeze Intelligence credits unified with all other HubSpot AI Credits (Breeze Prospecting Agent + Customer Agent + Content Agent + Data Agent + Intelligence) into one pool. Pricing standardized: $45/100, $150/1K, $700/10K. Operationally simpler; forces you to allocate credits across the agent suite consciously.
5
April 2026
Outcome pricing pivot across the Breeze suite.
HubSpot pivoted Breeze Prospecting Agent and Breeze Customer Agent to outcome-based pricing ($1 per qualified lead, $0.50 per resolved conversation). Intelligence remained on credit-based pricing — enrichment doesn't map cleanly to an "outcome" the way agent execution does. The credit model is now stable for the foreseeable future.
What you lose moving from Clearbit standalone to Breeze Intelligence
Standalone positioning
Clearbit-without-HubSpot is gone
Intelligence requires a paid HubSpot portal. If you ran Clearbit specifically because you wanted a B2B data layer with no CRM commitment (CDP-first stack, multi-vendor CRM environment, vendor-independence stance), that option no longer exists.
API surface
Custom Clearbit API integrations need rewrite
Programmatic Reveal lookups, custom enrichment workers, CDP pipelines built against Clearbit's API endpoints need to be rewritten against HubSpot's API. Most teams complete the rewrite in 2-4 weeks; teams with deep custom integrations should plan longer.
Renewal disruption
Legacy contract end-dates force a decision
If you're a current Clearbit standalone customer, your contract renewal forces a binary choice: migrate to Breeze Intelligence inside HubSpot, or jump to a different vendor. There is no 'extend Clearbit standalone' path.
Pricing model shift
From contract-based to credit-based
Old Clearbit standalone was typically $12K-$36K/yr annual contracts with negotiated volume terms. Breeze Intelligence is credit-based at published rates — predictable for normal use, painful if you have spiky enrichment patterns (e.g., onboarding a large list once a quarter).
What you gain
Native HubSpot integration
Auto-enrichment on contact / company creation
No more API plumbing — auto-enrichment rules fire on contact / company creation and write directly to HubSpot properties. The old Clearbit-to-HubSpot integration required Zapier or custom workers; that tax is gone.
Form shortening
Progressive profiling at the form layer
Native form shortening with Breeze Intelligence — fewer fields per visit, fill rates stay high, additional fields auto-populate from Intelligence on subsequent submissions. This was a separate Clearbit product (Reveal Forms); now it's bundled.
Intent overlay
Buying-intent signals on the contact graph
Intent topics surface as alerts to AE + RevOps inside the portal, tied to actual contact + company records. Old Clearbit had intent but it lived in a separate dashboard — Intelligence wires it into the timeline where the signal is actionable.
Unified credits
One credit pool across Breeze agents
Intelligence credits, Prospecting Agent credits, Content Agent credits, Data Agent credits — all in one pool. Operationally simpler and gives you allocation flexibility (burn more on enrichment one quarter, more on prospecting the next).
Breeze agent context
Agents act on enriched data automatically
Breeze Prospecting + Customer Agents pull enrichment from Intelligence without separate integration. The agent's research step gets firmographic + technographic + intent context for free — a meaningful quality lift vs running agents on un-enriched records.
Old Clearbit had minimum-volume commitments that priced out small teams. Intelligence at $45/100 credits has no floor — you can run small-volume enrichment without a five-figure annual commitment.
Solo founder / 1-2 person team running small inbound volume
1,000 credits
$150
~1,000 enrichments
10-25 rep B2B SaaS team with steady inbound flow
10,000 credits
$700
~10,000 enrichments
50-150 rep mid-market team replacing Clearbit standalone at ~$12K-$36K/yr
Credit consumption: ~1 credit per contact enrichment, 1 per company enrichment, more for advanced firmographic + technographic + intent signals. Intelligence credits pool with all other Breeze AI credits as of June 2025 — allocate across enrichment + prospecting + customer + content agents.
When NOT to migrate to Breeze Intelligence
Outbound prospecting
ZoomInfo or Apollo for mobile + intent depth
If Clearbit was your outbound database — you exported lists, pushed them to sequences, and the mobile-number coverage + Streaming Intent mattered — ZoomInfo (enterprise) or Apollo (SMB-mid-market) earn the premium. Intelligence is inbound-focused; outbound use cases hit ceiling fast.
EU compliance
Cognism for GDPR-grade EU coverage
If you sell into EU and Clearbit's standalone-vendor GDPR posture was load-bearing, Cognism is the structurally right successor. HubSpot is SOC2 + GDPR compliant, but the additional layer of running enrichment inside a US-headquartered CRM may trigger procurement friction for EU-heavy motions.
Power-user orchestration
Clay for waterfall enrichment + custom logic
If you ran Clearbit alongside other enrichment vendors with custom waterfall logic (try ZoomInfo first, fall back to Clearbit, fall back to Apollo), Clay is the power-user replacement. Intelligence is single-vendor enrichment — no waterfall, no custom orchestration, no third-party data layering.
CDP / no-CRM stack
Cognism or Apollo for standalone B2B data
If your stack is Snowflake + dbt + Segment + reverse-ETL with no CRM (or with Salesforce / Pipedrive instead of HubSpot), running Intelligence forces you to add HubSpot — a meaningful architecture decision. Cognism or Apollo's standalone API is the right shape for that motion.
Inventory your Clearbit usage. Export the list of contact + company properties Clearbit populates today. Identify which are load-bearing (used in workflows, sales playbooks, reports) vs nice-to-have. The load-bearing ones drive the migration spec.
Audit custom API integrations. List every system that calls the Clearbit API directly (CDP pipelines, custom enrichment workers, programmatic Reveal lookups). Each one needs a rewrite plan against the HubSpot API. Estimate 2-4 weeks of engineering depending on integration count.
Activate Breeze Intelligence inside HubSpot. Sign up via our link (Breeze Intelligence credits add to your existing HubSpot subscription). Start with the 1K-credit tier ($150/mo) for testing — burn-rate will tell you whether to step up to 10K credits ($700/mo) before going live.
Configure auto-enrichment rules. Set Intelligence to fire on contact + company creation. Map firmographic + technographic + intent properties to HubSpot custom properties (mirror your old Clearbit field map). Test on a small segment first.
Migrate form shortening. If you ran Clearbit Reveal Forms, configure Breeze Intelligence form shortening on your top 5 conversion forms. Progressive profiling rules transfer cleanly; expect a 1-2 day calibration period for fill-rate baselines.
Cut over intent signals. Configure Intelligence intent topics to match your old Clearbit intent dashboard. Route alerts to AE + RevOps inside the portal (not a separate Bombora-style dashboard).
Sunset Clearbit standalone at renewal. Do NOT cancel mid-contract — let the legacy Clearbit standalone contract run through renewal, then sunset. Running both in parallel for 30-60 days catches edge-case property gaps before they break downstream reports.
Update playbooks + dashboards. Sales playbooks referencing Clearbit properties → update to point at the Intelligence-populated HubSpot properties. Reports + attribution dashboards → re-validate the data lineage.
FAQ
Did HubSpot kill Clearbit?+
Functionally, yes — Clearbit standalone is sunsetted for new customers and the product is rebranded into Breeze Intelligence inside HubSpot. The acquisition closed November 2023; HubSpot stopped selling Clearbit standalone to new customers in April 2024; the rebrand to Breeze Intelligence shipped at Inbound September 2024; and credits merged into the unified HubSpot Credits system in June 2025. Existing Clearbit standalone customers still on legacy contracts can keep using the product through their renewal date — after that, the only path forward is Breeze Intelligence inside a paid HubSpot portal.
Is the underlying data still the same?+
Same data graph, different surface. Breeze Intelligence runs on the Clearbit data infrastructure HubSpot acquired — the same firmographic + technographic + intent signals + Reveal IP-to-company mapping that powered standalone Clearbit. What changed is the delivery layer: instead of a standalone enrichment API + Reveal pixel + form-shortening as separate products, you get all three folded into the HubSpot portal as auto-enrichment rules + Smart CRM properties + native form shortening + intent overlays on contact / company records. If you cared about Clearbit's data quality, the quality is intact. If you cared about Clearbit's standalone-vendor positioning (no HubSpot dependency), that's gone.
What's the pricing math vs old Clearbit?+
Breeze Intelligence pricing as of June 2025: $45/mo per 100 credits, $150 per 1,000 credits, $700 per 10,000 credits (merged into the unified HubSpot Credits system). Credit consumption: 1 credit per contact enrichment, 1 per company enrichment, more for advanced enrichment + intent signals. Old Clearbit standalone was typically $12K-$36K/yr depending on volume — Breeze Intelligence at the $700/10K tier roughly maps to that range for mid-volume usage but with the underlying portal requirement (you need a paid HubSpot CRM to use Intelligence). The net economics are similar for HubSpot natives and worse for teams who only wanted Clearbit standalone without a HubSpot commitment.
Can I keep using my Clearbit API after migration?+
Through your legacy contract renewal date, yes — API access continues for existing standalone customers. After renewal, the migration path is to Breeze Intelligence inside HubSpot, which exposes the same enrichment capabilities through the HubSpot API + workflows + auto-enrichment rules rather than the legacy Clearbit endpoints. Teams running custom Clearbit API integrations (CDP pipelines, custom enrichment workers, programmatic Reveal lookups) need to rewrite against the HubSpot API or accept the productized auto-enrichment surface. That's the meaningful breaking change.
Should I migrate or jump to ZoomInfo / Apollo / Cognism instead?+
Honest answer: depends on what Clearbit was doing for you. If Clearbit was your inbound-enrichment + form-shortening layer (the inbound use case), Breeze Intelligence is the cleanest migration — you keep the data graph, get tighter HubSpot integration, and lose nothing structural. If Clearbit was your outbound prospecting database (you exported lists and pushed them to sequences), ZoomInfo or Apollo earn the premium — both have deeper mobile-number coverage + Streaming Intent for outbound. If Clearbit was your B2B data layer for a CDP / analytics pipeline (no HubSpot), Cognism or 6sense fit the standalone-vendor positioning better. The migration choice is fundamentally about whether HubSpot is in your stack — Breeze Intelligence assumes yes.
What does Breeze Intelligence include that standalone Clearbit did not?+
Three meaningful additions: (1) Native form shortening with progressive profiling — fewer fields per visit, fill rates stay high, additional fields auto-populate from Intelligence on subsequent submissions; (2) Auto-enrichment rules tied to HubSpot workflows — enrichment fires on contact / company creation and writes directly to HubSpot properties without API plumbing; (3) Intent-signal overlay on the same contact graph — buying-intent topics surface as alerts to AE + RevOps inside the portal, not as a separate Bombora dashboard. The cost is the loss of Clearbit standalone positioning and the requirement to run on HubSpot CRM.
How long does a Clearbit → Breeze Intelligence migration take?+
Most teams complete the technical migration in 1-2 weeks — export contact + company records with Clearbit-enriched fields, map fields into HubSpot custom properties, activate Breeze Intelligence auto-enrichment, replace standalone Clearbit API calls with HubSpot API equivalents, and sunset the Clearbit standalone contract at renewal. The harder lift is rewriting custom Clearbit API integrations (CDP pipelines, programmatic Reveal lookups, custom enrichment workers) — that's typically 2-4 weeks depending on integration count. Teams running Clearbit purely through the HubSpot-integrated path already have the migration mostly done.
Does Breeze Intelligence work without HubSpot CRM?+
No — Intelligence requires a paid HubSpot portal. That's the meaningful change from Clearbit standalone, which was a standalone vendor relationship. If you're a HubSpot customer, Intelligence is additive and natural. If you used Clearbit specifically because you didn't want a HubSpot commitment, the migration path is to a different vendor (Cognism for EU compliance, ZoomInfo for enterprise, Apollo for outbound, Clay for power-user orchestration) — not to Intelligence.