HubSpot private apps after 26 October: what stops and what keeps working

From 26 October 2026, a HubSpot portal created before 28 September can no longer create a new legacy private app. Portals created on or after 28 September lost the option that day. It has been described this week as HubSpot killing private apps, which overstates it: the apps already in your portal keep running.

The change is small on the day and larger over the next year, because it is the first visible step in a timeline that runs to September 2027. The date that breaks something outright is 4 December, when the old Pipelines API stops responding.

What stops on 26 October

HubSpot is removing the ability to create new legacy, non-Project private apps through the account settings. Nothing else changes that day. Its changelog notice says existing legacy private apps are not affected at this time, and it gives no end date for them.

A legacy private app is the token most in-house integrations have run on for years. Someone creates an app in the portal settings, ticks the scopes it needs, copies the access token and pastes it into whatever has to talk to HubSpot. After 26 October that route is closed for anything new, and HubSpot sends new in-account integrations to Service Keys instead.

Where the private apps in your portal came from

Private apps rarely arrive with a ticket or a document. A token usually sits behind something somebody built once to solve a specific problem. It might be a custom form on the website that writes straight into HubSpot, a nightly sync into a data warehouse, a script that moves a deal when an invoice is paid, or an n8n or Make scenario calling the API directly. The person who created it may have left, and the token keeps working with whatever scopes they ticked at the time.

Each of those tokens is a standing key into your CRM, and the list of them is often the least-reviewed page in the portal. If you open it and nobody can say what an app is for, find that out before anyone migrates anything. It is the ownership gap we wrote about in nobody owns the shape of the system, and the access side sits in marketing operations security.

Service Keys, the replacement

Service Keys are created under Settings, Integrations, Service Keys, and they do the same job for integrations inside your own account. HubSpot lists what they add over the old tokens: scoped access, built-in activity logging, a 7-day grace period when you rotate a key, and visibility limited to admins by default. They are supported on HubSpot's Projects-based developer platform from version 2026.09.

For an operations lead the activity log and the rotation window are the parts worth having. One shows what a key has been doing, and the grace period gives you seven days to update whatever depends on a key after it is rotated. Integrations that need webhooks are a separate case, and HubSpot points those to its guide for creating an app on the same platform.

The dates behind it

On 15 September HubSpot published the full timeline and opened a 12-month migration window. For a portal running its own integrations, three dates matter more than Monday.

• 4 December 2026 is the hard stop. HubSpot sunsets the Pipelines API v1 and says the v1 endpoints will stop responding, so anything that reads or edits pipelines and stages through v1 has to move to a newer version before then.
• In March 2027, Projects version 2025.2 and older become unsupported, and support for the v4 APIs ends on 30 March.
• September 2027 brings the v1 to v3 APIs and both kinds of legacy app to unsupported status.

Unsupported is HubSpot's word for no more bug fixes, reliability improvements or security updates. The notice does not say those calls stop working in September 2027. It does mean that when one of them breaks, nobody at HubSpot is going to fix it, and for an integration writing into your CRM every night that is reason enough to move.

What to do this month

Start with the list. Open the private apps in your portal settings and write down, for each one, what it feeds, who built it, which scopes it holds and whether anyone still uses it. Some will turn out to be dead, and those can go.

Then look for Pipelines v1 calls, since 4 December is the only date here with a hard stop. Ask whoever maintains each integration, or search the code and the automation tools for the v1 pipelines endpoints.

From 26 October, build anything new on a Service Key. The existing apps can move over the next eleven months in whatever order the risk suggests, starting with the ones that write data rather than read it. Where those integrations also lean on Operations Hub features such as data sync or custom code, our Operations Hub guide covers what you are paying for.

If the list comes back long and nobody owns it, that is a HubSpot management question more than a developer one. It is easier to settle now, while every integration still works, than in the week one of them stops.

Common questions