It seems like support teams are always under the gun. Customers want answers yesterday, and the number of support tickets just keeps going up. Trying to manage every conversation and keep service quality high is a tough balancing act. It’s no wonder so many businesses are looking at AI tools that can plug right into their helpdesks.
HubSpot’s own solution is the Breeze in Conversations Inbox, an AI agent built to handle frontline support and take some weight off your team. But is it the right tool for you? This guide will give you a straight-up look at its features, what it really costs, its biggest drawbacks, and what it takes to set it up, so you can make an informed call.
What is HubSpot’s Breeze in Conversations Inbox?
When you hear about using Breeze in Conversations Inbox, what people are really talking about is the Breeze Customer Agent. Think of it as an AI chatbot that operates within HubSpot’s own messaging platform, the Conversations Inbox. Unlike old-school chatbots that make you click through a bunch of menus, this agent uses modern AI to understand and answer questions like a person would.
So, how does it know what to say? The agent learns from your company's existing content, like knowledge base articles, website pages, and blog posts. It’s designed to handle questions typed in plain English, which is a huge improvement over the rigid, rule-based bots we’re all used to.
A screenshot of the HubSpot AI Agent interface, illustrating how the Breeze in Conversations Inbox works.Because it’s a native HubSpot tool, it works across every channel you’ve hooked up to your inbox, whether that’s live chat, email, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp. The goal is to have a single AI brain managing the first wave of questions, no matter where they come from.
Key features of Breeze in Conversations Inbox
The Breeze Customer Agent has a few main tricks up its sleeve, all aimed at automating simple tasks and helping your human agents move faster.
24/7 automated support and lead qualification
The agent's primary role is to be your first line of defense. It can answer common customer questions around the clock, long after your team has logged off for the day. This is perfect for handling the usual stuff, like checking an order status or explaining basic product features.
It’s not just for support, either. The agent can also help with sales by asking questions to see if a visitor is a good lead. Based on their answers, it can do things like book a meeting on a sales rep's calendar or send the conversation over to the right person.
An example of a HubSpot chatbot greeting, which is part of the Breeze in Conversations Inbox functionality.AI-generated responses and conversation summaries
Breeze can also act as a sidekick for your human agents. When an agent is in a chat, Breeze can suggest replies based on the conversation and what it finds in your knowledge base. This can help speed things up and get new team members comfortable more quickly.
It also automatically writes up summaries of calls and chats. Instead of an agent spending five minutes typing out notes after a long call, Breeze gives them a short summary. This makes it easier to pass conversations between team members and cuts down on a lot of admin work.
Seamless escalation and routing
No AI is perfect, and Breeze is built to know its limits. If it gets a question it can’t answer or a customer just asks to speak with a human, it’s designed to hand the conversation over to a live agent without any fuss.
It can also create a support ticket and route it to the right team or person inside HubSpot. This helps make sure that complicated or urgent issues actually get to someone who can solve them.
The true cost and limitations of Breeze in Conversations Inbox
While the features sound good on paper, a closer look shows some pretty big downsides when it comes to cost, flexibility, and overall performance. You’ll want to know about these before you jump in.
The high plan requirements and hidden fees
First things first: you can't just tack the Breeze Customer Agent onto any HubSpot account. You have to be on a Professional or Enterprise plan. These plans start at about $450 a month, and that's not even counting the mandatory one-time $1,500 onboarding fee HubSpot hits new Pro or Enterprise customers with.
A screenshot of HubSpot's pricing tiers, highlighting the high plan requirements for the Breeze in Conversations Inbox.That high price tag immediately locks out most small businesses and startups who are doing just fine on HubSpot's Free or Starter plans. You're forced into a massive, expensive upgrade just for one feature. In contrast, modern tools like eesel AI are designed for everyone. They integrate with any HubSpot plan, letting you add powerful self-serve AI without having to change your entire CRM subscription.
The unpredictable credit-based pricing model
Even if you’re on the right plan, the costs don't end there. HubSpot has a confusing credit system where one AI conversation uses 100 credits. Pro plans give you 3,000 credits (which is only 30 free conversations a month), while Enterprise plans give you 5,000 credits (or 50 conversations).
After you use up that small allowance, every extra conversation costs you about $1.00.
Let that sink in for a minute. A pretty normal volume of 300 chats a month would cost you an extra $270 on top of your already pricey subscription. The cost isn't just high; it's also hard to predict. Your credits don't roll over, and if you have a busy month, HubSpot might automatically bump up your monthly subscription, a change that's famously difficult to reverse.
This is a completely different world from the straightforward pricing you'd find with a platform like eesel AI. With eesel AI, you get a generous flat rate with no extra fees per conversation. You don't get penalized for being successful and having a high volume of chats, and you could end up saving over 90% compared to what HubSpot charges.
Lack of customization and control
HubSpot’s AI agent is basically a "black box." You can give it a general role like "Support" and a tone like "Friendly," but that’s pretty much where your control ends. You can’t feed it custom instructions or set up specific rules for it to follow.
For instance, you can't tell the bot, "If someone says 'refund,' ask for their order number right away and create a high-priority ticket." It has to try and figure this out from your knowledge base, which often doesn't work. For any business with specific processes, this lack of control is a huge problem.
This is an area where a platform like eesel AI really stands out. It gives you a fully customizable workflow engine, so you have fine-grained control to shape the AI's persona, define the exact steps it can take, and tell it precisely which tickets to automate.
Inconsistent quality and heavy reliance on your knowledge base
According to some early user feedback, the quality of answers from Breeze can be a bit of a coin toss, with some users calling the experience "mostly poor." The issue is that the agent’s performance is completely tied to how good your knowledge base is. You need a perfectly organized, complete, and up-to-date set of articles for it to work well.
A view of the HubSpot Knowledge Base, which is critical for the performance of the Breeze in Conversations Inbox.Let's be honest, most companies don't have that. Help articles are often unfinished, out of date, or written as long essays instead of the simple Q&A format that Breeze needs. This can lead to the AI "hallucinating" (making stuff up) or just giving up, which only makes customers more frustrated.
eesel AI approaches this differently by training on your past support tickets. From the get-go, it learns your brand’s voice, understands the common problems people face, and knows the solutions that have actually worked. It can even spot gaps in your knowledge base and draft new articles for you based on successful ticket resolutions.
How to set up and optimize Breeze in Conversations Inbox
If you have access to Breeze and you're ready to deal with its limitations, setting it up is pretty simple. Getting it to work well, though, is a different challenge.
The setup process
The initial setup is just a few steps:
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In your HubSpot portal, go to Breeze AI > Customer Agent and click to create a new agent.
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Give it a name, pick a role (like Support or Sales), and choose a personality.
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Add your content sources. This is the key part: you'll link your Knowledge Base and specific URLs from your website or help center.
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Assign the agent to one of your chatflows.
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Set up rules for what happens when the bot can’t answer a question.
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Use the preview mode to ask it a few test questions before you let it loose on your customers.
The Chatflows setup screen in HubSpot, relevant to the Breeze in Conversations Inbox setup process.Best practices and the challenge of ongoing maintenance
That list might look easy, but even HubSpot’s own case studies admit that it can take weeks of tweaking to get good results. Success with Breeze means your team will have to constantly groom and update your knowledge base. You’ll probably have to rewrite articles into a short, FAQ style just to feed the AI.
You’ll also need to keep an eye on the "unanswered questions" report and constantly write new content to fill the gaps. It's a serious and ongoing time commitment.
This is where you can really appreciate a tool built for how teams actually work. For example, eesel AI's powerful simulation mode lets you test your AI setup against thousands of your real past tickets. You can see exactly how it will perform and what your automation rate will be before it ever talks to a customer. It takes all the guesswork out of the process.
A better way to bring AI to your HubSpot inbox
HubSpot's Breeze in Conversations Inbox is a handy, built-in tool, but its high costs, inflexibility, and heavy maintenance needs make it a tough choice for most teams. It really only makes sense for large companies that are already on HubSpot's top plans, have very basic support needs, and have a budget that can handle surprise fees.
For everyone else, especially teams on any HubSpot plan who need more power, control, and a reasonable price, a specialized AI integration is a much better way to go.
| Feature | HubSpot's Breeze in Conversations Inbox | eesel AI |
|---|---|---|
| HubSpot Plan Requirement | Professional or Enterprise only | Works with any HubSpot plan (including Free and Starter) |
| Pricing Model | High monthly fee + expensive, unpredictable per-conversation credits | Simple, flat-rate pricing with no per-conversation fees |
| Customization & Control | "Black box" with minimal control (only role and tone) | Fully customizable workflow engine for fine-grained control |
| Knowledge Source | Relies entirely on a perfect, up-to-date knowledge base | Learns from past support tickets, brand voice, and successful resolutions |
| Setup & Optimization | Requires constant knowledge base grooming and manual tweaking | Powerful simulation mode to test performance before launch |
| Best For | Large enterprises with basic needs and a large, flexible budget | Teams of all sizes on any HubSpot plan needing power and control |
eesel AI was built for this exact scenario. It's a powerful AI platform that you can connect to your existing HubSpot integration in minutes. You get full control over what you automate, clear and predictable pricing, and an AI that learns from all your knowledge, including your most important asset: your past customer conversations.
Final thoughts
While Breeze gives some HubSpot users a native way to try out AI, its limitations can quickly lead to more work and unpredictable bills. To really automate your support and let your team focus on the important stuff, it pays to look at a solution that gives you the control and smarts your business actually needs.
Frequently asked questions
It's HubSpot's AI agent, the Breeze Customer Agent, designed to operate inside your HubSpot Conversations Inbox. It handles frontline support and lead qualification by understanding and responding to natural language questions.
Your team can expect 24/7 automated support for common questions, AI-generated response suggestions for human agents, and automatic conversation summaries. It also handles seamless escalation to live agents or ticket creation.
To use Breeze, you must be on a HubSpot Professional or Enterprise plan, which starts around $450/month, plus a mandatory $1,500 onboarding fee for new Pro/Enterprise users. Beyond that, there's a credit-based system where additional conversations cost about $1.00 each after a small allowance.
Customization is quite limited; you can set a general role and tone. It acts as a "black box" where you cannot feed it custom instructions or set specific rules for handling unique scenarios.
The quality can be inconsistent and is heavily reliant on the perfection of your knowledge base. It requires well-organized, complete, and up-to-date articles, and may "hallucinate" if content is insufficient.
Initial setup is a few steps in your HubSpot portal, linking content sources and assigning the agent. However, ongoing maintenance is significant, requiring constant grooming and updating of your knowledge base for good performance.
