Seed-stage RevOps stack — hygiene, outbound, and call capture under $1,000/month

The cheapest RevOps stack published on ooligo is gtm-engineering-stack, and it states ~$40K-$65K per year in its own cost section. For a 25-person company that is not a line item, it is the entire GTM tooling budget plus the marketing budget. So the first RevOps hire at a seed or Series-A company reads every stack page, finds nothing copyable, and rebuilds the same five workflows from scratch.

This is that stack, priced for the company that actually exists: 20 people, three sellers, roughly $470 a month.

The shape: HubSpot Sales Hub Starter is the system of record, Apollo runs outbound and pays for the contact data, Fathom captures every call, n8n connects the four, and Slack is where the output gets seen. Four of the five have a free tier that does real work. One of them has an AI story you should ignore.

How the pieces fit

• HubSpot Starter buys the object model, not the AI. List price is $20/seat/month, currently discounted to $7 for new customers on a limited-time 65%-off promotion — budget the $20, because the promo is the surprise on renewal, not the savings. Sales Hub Free caps you at 2 users, which is why this stack starts at Starter. Starter includes 500 HubSpot Credits a month, and three properties of those credits decide the argument: they expire monthly, they do not roll over, and they are not additive across hubs — a multi-product customer gets the single highest allotment, not the sum. HubSpot’s Prospecting Agent burns 100 credits per recommended outreach for one lead. That is five leads a month before you are buying credits at $9 per 1,000 on annual billing. Do the prospecting in Apollo and let HubSpot be the database.

• Apollo is the outbound engine and the data budget on one invoice. Basic is $49/seat/month annual ($69 month-to-month), Professional $79 ($99). Apollo has collapsed its old separate email, mobile, and export buckets into one credit: Basic grants 30,000 credits per seat per year upfront, Professional 48,000. An email address costs 1 credit, a phone number 8, and the US dialer meters at 2 credits per minute. Credits do not roll over. Basic gives one mailbox per user and 250 sends per day, which at three sellers is a deliverability guardrail rather than a ceiling.

• Fathom’s free tier is unusually load-bearing, and one cap decides your tier. Team is $15/user/month annual with a 2-user minimum — cheaper than the individual Premium SKU at $16, which is worth a second read before you buy the wrong one. Free gives unlimited recording and transcription, with advanced summaries capped at the first 5 calls each month. The constraint that matters: CRM sync is limited to 3 users per email domain on Free, Premium, and Team alike, lifting only at Business ($25/user/month annual). Writing summaries into named CRM fields is Business-only.

• n8n is the part that turns four subscriptions into a stack. Cloud Starter is €20/month billed annually (€24 month-to-month) for 2,500 executions, 5 concurrent runs, unlimited seats, and unlimited active workflows. An execution is one run of an entire workflow no matter how many steps it has. Self-hosted Community is free indefinitely under the Sustainable Use License, which permits internal business use. Check the node inventory before you plan: HubSpot and Slack have official nodes and official triggers; Apollo is a verified community node (n8n-nodes-apollo.apollo) that an instance owner must install and an admin can disable; Fathom has no node at all.

• Slack is the review surface, and its free tier is where this stack breaks first. Pro is $7.25/user/month billed annually. Free retains only 90 days of history and allows 10 app installations — HubSpot, Fathom, n8n, and Apollo is four of them before anyone adds a calendar bot. Workflow Builder is paid-plans-only. Conversation summaries come with any paid plan; the advanced AI set starts at Business+ ($15/user/month annual).

Named handoffs

1. Apollo sequence gets a positive reply → HubSpot contact and deal are created or updated through Apollo’s native sync, so the CRM is not a second data-entry job for the rep who booked the meeting.
2. Meeting ends → Fathom fires its “New meeting content ready” webhook → n8n receives it. Build this one first. Fathom’s tiering makes every other route awkward: Zapier and Make are personal-use-only on Free and Premium, but API keys and webhooks are included on every plan, so the n8n path works from the free tier upward and ignores the automation gate entirely.
3. n8n writes the summary and action items onto the HubSpot deal → then posts the same summary into a #deals channel. Both steps use official nodes. Fathom’s own CRM sync covers half of this, but not past three users per domain.
4. Monday scheduled run → n8n queries HubSpot for deals with no next activity or a close date in the past → posts a named-owner digest to Slack. Hygiene that arrives in the channel gets fixed; hygiene that lives on a dashboard does not. See weekly-pipeline-report-skill and crm-hygiene.
5. Rep replies in the Slack thread (Slack Trigger node) → n8n updates the deal field. The loop closes in the tool the rep already has open.

At 2,500 executions, n8n Starter gives you about 80 workflow runs a day. Three sellers taking 15 meetings a week, plus a Monday digest and reply handling, uses a fraction of it.

Cost baseline

A 20-person company, three sellers, five CRM seats, everything on annual billing:

• HubSpot Sales Hub Starter, 5 seats — $100/month at list ($35 on the new-customer promo)
• Apollo Basic, 3 seats — $147/month
• Fathom Team, 5 seats — $75/month
• n8n Cloud Starter — €20/month (n8n publishes EUR only; there is no USD price on its pricing page)
• Slack Pro, 20 users — $145/month

That is ≈ $467/month plus €20, or roughly $5,900 a year — against the $40K-$65K the gtm-engineering-stack costs the same-sized team. Slack is the largest line, and note what drives it: headcount, not revenue motion. Every new engineer raises your RevOps bill.

Hidden costs to plan for: 8-15 hours of n8n build time for the five handoffs above and 2-3 hours a month of maintenance; Apollo credit burn if reps dial, at 2 credits a minute; HubSpot credit overages at $9 per 1,000.

Variations, and the rule for each swap

• Self-host n8n instead of Cloud. Community edition is free with no execution quota and no concurrency cap, which saves €240 a year. Rule: take it only if a named person owns the container and the upgrade cadence. If the answer is “the RevOps hire will sort it out,” pay the €20 — an automation that fails silently costs more than the invoice. Do not reach for n8n’s Start-up Plan here either; at €333/month it is discounted Business, and it is eight times this stack’s entire automation line.
• Fathom Business instead of Team. Rule: the trigger is the fourth CRM-syncing user on your email domain, not team size. Below that, route the extra people through the n8n webhook path, which has no per-user cap.
• Apollo Professional instead of Basic. Professional lifts the 250-a-day send cap and unlocks unlimited Google and Microsoft mailboxes plus 5 SMTP. Rule: if you are adding domains and inboxes to raise volume, you have outgrown this stack’s outbound line — that is cold-email-infrastructure-stack, not an upgrade path.
• HubSpot Professional. $90/seat/month plus a required one-time $1,500 onboarding fee. Rule: that fee alone is three months of this entire stack, so move only when a named requirement forces it — HubSpot’s Customer Agent, for one, needs Professional.

What this stack does not replace

• An enrichment layer. Apollo’s database is your enrichment. No waterfall, no research agents, no fallback provider. When you need those, you are shopping gtm-engineering-stack.
• Cold-email infrastructure. Secondary domains, warmup, and inbox rotation are a separate build with separate economics.
• A forecast. HubSpot Starter gives you a pipeline, not a number that survives a board meeting — see revenue-forecasting-stack.
• A dial floor. There is no parallel dialing here. Apollo’s power dialer is not in any base tier; it is the Advanced Dialer add-on at $119/team/month annual, and a staffed dial floor is outbound-calling-stack.
• A warehouse or CDP. If the source of truth needs to sit outside the CRM, that is warehouse-native-gtm-stack.
• The hire. Five n8n workflows with no owner become five silent failures within a quarter. This stack assumes one person whose name is on it.

When this is the right pick — and when it isn’t

Right: 10-40 employees, two to five sellers, one deal motion, no Salesforce contract, a first RevOps hire who can build in a visual tool but is not an engineer, and a tooling budget under $1,000 a month.

Wrong: you already run Salesforce, where migration cost dwarfs the savings; product usage is your primary buying signal, which is pls-product-led-sales-stack; procurement or a security review will be run against your vendors, because Slack Pro and HubSpot Starter are not built to clear one; or you have more than roughly ten sellers, at which point the per-seat lines stop being the cheap part.

If you are still deciding what the first hire should own before they pick tools at all, start with what-is-revops and revops-tech-stack.