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Eko needed HubSpot to become the source of truth for operational entities, but HubSpot API based integration repeatedly broke their engineering workflow and amplified operational overhead as the company scaled.
With Stacksync, Eko synced HubSpot into a standard MySQL database, kept CI/CD and branching practices intact, and removed HubSpot specific code from the product so teams could ship faster with less risk.
Eko builds interactive product visuals for e-commerce, connecting physical capture workflows to a cloud platform that powers content, testing, and optimization. As Eko expanded enterprise partnerships and scaled factory operations, CRM data became tightly coupled to billing milestones, onboarding, and downstream workflows.
For years, Eko ran two parallel tracks:
When Eko had fewer customers and larger custom deals, onboarding after a deal was signed was manageable. Teams would copy a few fields from HubSpot into an internal admin interface.
As volume and complexity increased, the manual handoff stopped being a small task and became a coordination system with real failure modes.
It was not only copy and paste. It was the operational management layer required to keep two systems aligned:
Eko tried to automate onboarding with the HubSpot API. The first attempt was painful enough that the lesson stayed with the team.
"Hubspot is a pain in the ass because you rely on Hubspot and there's no easy way to get the data into the different environments."Yuval Hofshy, CTO at Eko
The core issue was not that APIs are bad. It was the mismatch between HubSpot constraints and the development standards Eko had built over years.
Eko invested heavily in infrastructure that helps teams ship safely and quickly:
Databases fit this model naturally. HubSpot does not.
To safely test write-back flows, developers need a sandbox. In practice, sandboxes create gaps:
That mismatch forces engineers into mocks and partial testing, then pushes risk into production.
As Eko’s business expanded, operations and commercial terms became tightly coupled.
The business terms lived in HubSpot, while execution happened across internal systems.
Eko chose a CRM-centric model:
This is where the HubSpot API problem returned, now as a mission-critical scaling constraint.
Eko adopted Stacksync to work with HubSpot through a standard database interface.
"In our code base there is no Hubspot SDK or package or anything. It just doesn't exist."Yuval Hofshy, CTO at Eko
Instead of wiring HubSpot API calls into product code, Eko synced HubSpot objects into MySQL and treated that mirror like any other internal database.
Eko configured sync for production, then cloned the database containing HubSpot data for dev environments.
This removed several recurring pain points:
Eko evaluated multiple options and focused on what matters when integration becomes operational infrastructure.
Eko’s perspective was simple: the solution should remove the problem, not create a new engineering project.
Engineering friction is visible. Operational risk is often hidden until scale makes it expensive.
If deal terms affect billing milestones, factory work, entitlements, or provisioning, misalignment between systems can cause:
As the company grows, manual sync adds:
Reducing manual sync is not only about efficiency. It is about building a calmer operating system for growth.
Eko shared two forward-looking needs that appear when sync becomes mission-critical.
Real-time sync is the foundation. The next layer is reacting to events safely, such as:
Teams need sync health to integrate with the same observability stack they use for other production services.
"Instead of struggling with the Hubspot... we can focus on our core technology."Yuval Hofshy, CTO at Eko
A practical starting point is routing logs and failure signals into centralized monitoring so incident triage follows existing DevOps workflows.
If your team is feeling HubSpot integration pain or CRM-driven manual overhead, this approach is replicable.
If HubSpot integration is slowing product development, forcing spreadsheet-heavy coordination, or blocking CRM-centric operations, a database-centric sync model can remove the friction without sacrificing engineering standards.
Stacksync makes HubSpot usable through the database patterns your team already trusts, so you can scale operations while keeping engineering focused on differentiated work.
Book a demo to see how this integration pattern would apply to your HubSpot objects, write-back flows, and operational systems.
