Automate Client Follow-Ups: What Free Tiers Actually Do

Forgotten follow-ups are the most expensive habit in a solo business. Not because any single one matters, but because the deals you lose to silence never show up in any report. They just quietly don't happen.

Automating them is worth doing. (We previously called it "the highest-ROI thing most solopreneurs can build". We never measured a return, let alone ranked one.) The problem is that almost every guide to it — including the version of this article we published in April — describes a build that doesn't work.

We rechecked ours in August 2026 against HubSpot's and Make's own documentation, and found three separate reasons the original build can't be constructed. Not stale prices. Steps that fail when you try them.

The good news: the $9/month figure we quoted — Make Core billed annually; $10.59 month to month — was never the problem. The corrected build is cheaper — most solo businesses can run it free. It just looks nothing like what we drew.

The Three Things That Don't Work

If you've tried to build this and got stuck, it probably wasn't you.

1. HubSpot's free CRM cannot send sequences. Sequences are a Sales Hub Professional feature — $90/seat/month annual, $100 monthly, plus a one-time $1,500 onboarding fee. Our previous version said the free tier "lets you set up sequences." It doesn't, and never did.

2. Make cannot wait three days. Make's Sleep module maxes out at 300 seconds — five minutes — and a scenario is capped at roughly 40 minutes of execution. Our old Automation 1 said "wait 3 days, then check, then wait 4 more days." You'd need about 864 chained Sleep modules and the scenario would die long before that.

3. HubSpot free can't tell you how long a deal has been in a stage. The obvious fix for #2 is a daily check for deals that entered a stage N days ago. That needs HubSpot's stage calculated properties — "Date entered current stage" and "Time in current stage" — and HubSpot's own docs put those on Professional and Enterprise only.

So the CRM can't sequence, the automation tool can't wait, and the timing data you'd need to work around either one is paywalled.

That sounds like a dead end. It isn't — you just have to stop expecting the CRM to do it.

Which Emails to Automate

Before any tooling, the same rule as before, because it still holds.

Automate these:

• Proposal follow-ups (day 3, day 7, day 14)
• Post-project check-ins
• Payment reminders on overdue invoices
• Monthly check-ins with active clients

Never automate these:

• Anything after something went wrong
• Negotiation replies
• Referral requests that need to feel personal

If the email is the same 80% of the time regardless of the client, automate it. If it needs genuine thought about that specific person, write it yourself.

Three Builds That Work

Option 1: Brevo free — the one most solopreneurs should pick

The thing nobody recommends, because it isn't a CRM: an email platform with real automation on its free plan.

Brevo's free tier includes marketing automation workflows for up to 2,000 contacts, with a 300 emails per day send limit and contact storage up to 100,000. You build a visual workflow — trigger, wait three days, check, send — and it runs. No Make, no CRM, no workaround.

Two honest caveats. The 300/day is a hard daily wall, not a monthly pool you can spend in one burst — irrelevant at solopreneur volume, fatal if you're blasting a list. And free-plan emails carry Brevo branding you can't remove.

Worth noting the contrast: Mailchimp removed automation from its free plan. A basic automated welcome email there now requires paying.

For most solo businesses sending a handful of follow-ups a day, this is the answer, and it's free.

Option 2: HubSpot free + Make — if you want the CRM

Keep HubSpot free as the CRM. Accept that it stores things and does not automate them. Make owns the timing.

The architecture that actually works is not "wait, then send." It's stamp a due date, then check daily:

1. Scenario A (trigger): Make watches HubSpot deals. When one lands in "Proposal Sent", Make writes a follow-up due date — today plus 3 — into its own data store. Make's free plan includes one data store (1 MB), which is plenty for a solo pipeline.
2. Scenario B (daily): Runs once a day. Reads the data store, finds anything due today, re-checks the deal's current stage in HubSpot, and if the deal hasn't moved, sends the email and stamps the next due date.

That's two active scenarios — exactly what Make's free plan allows. No delay modules, no chaining, nothing that hits the 40-minute ceiling.

The re-check in step 2 is the important bit. It's what stops a follow-up going to someone who replied yesterday.

Cost: $0 on Make free. Move to Core at $9/month billed annually ($10.59 monthly) when you want a third scenario or exceed 1,000 credits — Core lifts active scenarios to unlimited and credits to 10,000.

One thing that surprised us: HubSpot's API works fine on the free plan. Private apps get 100 requests per 10 seconds and 250,000 per day. The free tier is genuinely open to automation — it just won't do the automating itself.

Option 3: Pay HubSpot — named so you can rule it out

Sales Hub Professional, $90/seat/month annual ($100 monthly, plus $1,500 onboarding), gives you native sequences inside the CRM.

For a solo business this is almost never the right call. We're listing it so the comparison is honest: sequences in HubSpot are real, they're just not free, and the gap between $0 and $1,080 a year is not a rounding error.

Step 1: Your Pipeline

Whichever option you picked, the stages are the same:

1. New Lead — someone reached out
2. Proposal Sent — you've sent a quote
3. Negotiating — back and forth on terms
4. Won — project starts
5. In Progress — work happening
6. Completed — delivered
7. Lost — no, or silence

In HubSpot: Settings → Objects → Deals → Pipelines. Five minutes. Note that HubSpot free gives you one pipeline, which is fine for a solo business but worth knowing before you plan two.

Step 2: The Templates

Proposal follow-up 1 — day 3:

Subject: Quick question about the proposal

"Hi [First Name], just wanted to check in on the proposal we sent over on [date]. If you have any questions about the scope, timeline, or pricing, we're happy to walk through it together. No rush — just want to make sure it didn't get buried in your inbox."

Proposal follow-up 2 — day 7:

Subject: Still interested in [project type]?

"Hi [First Name], following up one more time on the [project type] proposal. We've had a few new projects come in and want to make sure we can still hold the timeline we discussed. Let us know either way — even a quick 'not right now' is helpful so we can plan accordingly."

Proposal follow-up 3 — day 14, final:

Subject: Closing the loop

"Hi [First Name], this is the last follow-up about the [project type] proposal. We completely understand if the timing isn't right — priorities change. We'll keep your info on file, and if you'd like to revisit this in the future, just reply to this email anytime. Wishing you the best with your projects."

Post-project — 3 days after delivery:

"Hi [First Name], now that the [project type] has been delivered, we wanted to check in. Is everything working as expected? Any adjustments needed? We want to make sure you're 100% happy with the result."

Payment reminder — 3 days past due:

"Just a heads up — invoice #[number] for [amount] was due on [date]. Sometimes these slip through the cracks. Here's the payment link: [link]"

On the day-3 / day-7 / day-14 spacing: we're not going to dress this up with statistics. Every reply-rate figure circulating about follow-up cadence comes from cold-outreach vendors measuring first contact with strangers — one large first-party dataset we checked reports a 0.59% reply rate on the first email. That's a different activity from following up with someone who asked you for a proposal, and importing those numbers here would be dishonest. So treat the spacing above as a starting point, not a tested result, and adjust it to your own sales cycle. (This used to say "the cadence above is what we use". We can't document that, so it's gone.)

Step 3: The Compliance Part Nobody Mentions

Automated follow-ups are commercial email, and CAN-SPAM has no B2B exemption and no exemption for "but it looks like a personal email."

What this means in practice:

• If your first email has an unsubscribe link and the second one in the same sequence doesn't, that's a violation. Be consistent across the whole sequence.
• Opt-outs must stay functional for 30 days and be honoured within 10 business days.
• Transactional and relationship messages are treated differently. A post-project check-in that services an existing engagement is not the same as a promotion. But the moment you bolt a referral request onto it, the promotional content can become dominant — which is a decent argument for keeping referral asks as separate, hand-written emails anyway.

This isn't legal advice, and if you're operating at scale or outside the US it's worth an hour with someone who does that for a living.

Step 4: The Sending Limits That Bite

Two ceilings on the actual delivery, both easy to hit and neither obvious.

Gmail caps you at 500 messages a day on a free account, 2,000 on Google Workspace, per sending address. Cross it and sending locks for up to 24 hours. At solopreneur volume you won't — unless a loop misfires, which is exactly when you'd want a cap.

Make's Google connection expires. OAuth tokens on a Google Cloud app left in testing status expire every few days, and the symptom is a scenario that silently stops working. Moving the app to production status fixes it. This is the single most common reason these builds quietly die.

If you're using Brevo instead, its 300/day free limit is the equivalent wall.

Step 5: Personalise Without Making It Obvious

Use merge fields. First name, project type, relevant dates. "Hi [first name], following up on the website redesign proposal" reads as personal. "Hi, following up on our proposal" reads as a robot.

Vary send times. Add a random 1–3 hour offset. Emails landing at exactly 09:00 every time announce themselves.

Write like you talk. Short paragraphs, contractions, casual. Read each template aloud; if it sounds like a template, rewrite it.

Never send on weekends. Restrict to Monday–Friday in the schedule.

Common Mistakes

Don't skip the re-check. Nothing damages trust faster than a follow-up arriving after someone already replied. In Option 2 that's the stage re-check in Scenario B; in Brevo it's an exit condition on the workflow. Whichever tool, it isn't optional.

Don't over-automate. Three follow-ups on a proposal is enough.

Don't automate apologies. If something went wrong, write it yourself.

Test with your own address first. Run the whole sequence to yourself before pointing it at a client. Check the timing, the merge fields, all of it. One broken automation can cost you a relationship.

Expect to maintain it. Free tiers change — this article is evidence of that — and OAuth tokens expire. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar to send yourself a test through the live system once a quarter.

An AI step inside any of these scenarios sends client data to the model provider every time it runs, which is a transfer most people never count as one — what your plan permits, and where the exposure actually sits, is the companion to this guide.

For the rest of the automation picture, we compared the two main tools in Zapier vs Make, tested whether the free plans hold up in Zapier Free vs Make Free and Is Zapier Free Actually Usable?, and built five starter automations step by step in our Make tutorial. If HubSpot free is your CRM, its real ceilings are in HubSpot Free CRM vs Notion and the best free CRM comparison. For everything else a solo stack needs, see the 2026 solopreneur AI stack and running a business entirely on free tiers.

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This article was rebuilt in August 2026 after we found that the original build could not be constructed. Every plan limit, price and API constraint here was verified against HubSpot's, Make's, Brevo's and Google's own documentation; where we had published something wrong, the correction is stated in the text rather than quietly removed. Links marked "Paid link" earn us a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you; no other link here pays us — how we make money.