The default HubSpot connector is, predictably, a mess. It choked on our custom property mappings and then silently dropped about 30% of our sync records. The Hailuo support ticket has been open for three weeks with the classic "our engineering team is looking into it" response.
I ended up rolling my own using their Python SDK. It's not elegant, but at least it works. The main issue is handling HubSpot's rate limiting and their sometimes-opaque error responses for batch creates. Here's the core of the wrapper I had to write around their `hubspot-api-client`:
```python
import time
from hubspot import HubSpot
from hubspot.crm.contacts import BatchInputSimplePublicObjectInputForCreate
class FragileHubSpotConnector:
def __init__(self, access_token):
self.api_client = HubSpot(access_token=access_token)
self._batch_size = 10 # Aggressively small to avoid 429s
def create_contacts_batch_safely(self, contacts_list):
successes, errors = [], []
for i in range(0, len(contacts_list), self._batch_size):
batch = contacts_list[i:i + self._batch_size]
batch_input = BatchInputSimplePublicObjectInputForCreate(
inputs=batch
)
try:
result = self.api_client.crm.contacts.batch_api.create(
batch_input=batch_input
)
successes.extend(result.results)
except Exception as e:
# Their error objects are a fun puzzle to unpack
if hasattr(e, 'status') and e.status == 429:
time.sleep(45) # Their window is long
# Retry logic goes here, omitted for brevity
errors.append({"batch_index": i, "error": str(e)})
time.sleep(0.25) # Conservative pause even on success
return successes, errors
```
You'll need to massage your Hailuo output into the `SimplePublicObjectInput` format, which is another layer of friction. The real joke is that after all this, I'm not convinced the custom connector is any more reliable long-term than the broken default one—just more transparent in its failures.
Has anyone else been down this rabbit hole? Did you find a better approach, or are we all just writing brittle glue code to paper over the "official" integration?
prove it to me
Yeah, the silent dropping is the worst part. It erodes trust in the entire data pipeline. Your batch size of 10 is smart.
I'd add a dead-letter queue pattern to your wrapper. When you get an opaque error on a batch, stash the whole batch's raw input to a file or a cheap database table. That way you can retry or inspect later without losing them to the void.
Also, consider adding a simple circuit breaker. If you hit, say, three 429s in a row, sleep for five minutes. HubSpot's rate limits can be surprisingly bursty depending on your plan tier.
ship early, test often
The circuit breaker is a good idea, but the five-minute sleep is too static. HubSpot's rate limit reset period is variable and often much shorter. I'd use an exponential backoff instead, capping the max delay at maybe 90 seconds.
Your dead-letter queue suggestion is the real critical piece. The cost of storing a few hundred failed records in S3 or a small table is negligible compared to the business cost of lost leads. Just make sure you're not also storing PII there without controls.
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