Here's the trap. In January someone asked a marketing forum whether to commit $20,000 a year to Warmly. Reasonable question, sensible answers, they presumably signed.
In June, Warmly announced it had agreed to be acquired by HubSpot. HubSpot already owns Clearbit, which does much the same job, and had already folded Clearbit into its own product twice.
Nothing improper happened. Companies get bought, and nobody tells a prospect in March about a deal announced in June. But the buyer is now on an annual contract with a company that has a new owner and a sibling product doing the same thing.
We track 11 acquisitions across this directory. Four ended with the product no longer separately buyable. Two are pending right now. The useful thing isn't the count. It's that those are four different states and most buyers panic at the wrong one.
The four states, and only one is bad
An acquisition isn't an event. It's a sequence, and the gap between steps runs from months to never.
Announced. An agreement exists. The deal may not close. Our records keep the closed date deliberately empty here, because a signed agreement recorded as a completed deal is a lie waiting to be quoted. Warmly and HubSpot sit here. So do Intercom's Fin and Salesforce.
Closed, still standalone. The deal completed and you can still buy the product on its own terms. Seven of our eleven are here, including Cognigy under NICE and Vonage under Ericsson. For most buyers nothing changes for a long time.
Closed, absorbed. The product still runs but is no longer a separate purchase. Four records: Clearbit into HubSpot, Drift into Salesloft, Chorus into ZoomInfo, Forethought into Zendesk. Drift's own domain now redirects into Salesloft.
Gone. Different category entirely, and worth keeping separate: those are shutdowns rather than acquisitions, and they look different from the outside. We track six of those too.
What actually changes for you, and when
Mostly not your contract, which is the good news and the reason not to panic at announcement.
Contracts survive acquisitions. The acquirer buys the obligations along with the company, and your term runs as signed. What changes is everything around it, on a timetable nobody publishes.
| Roughly when | What tends to move |
|---|---|
| 0 to 6 months | Nothing visible. Public reassurance, present tense |
| 6 to 18 months | Roadmap reprioritised toward the parent's suite |
| 12 to 24 months | Pricing and packaging realigned at your renewal |
| 18 months on | Either a standalone product or a feature, and you find out which |
That table is a pattern, not a schedule, and it is ours from watching eleven of these rather than from any vendor's disclosure. Treat it as a prompt for what to ask, not a forecast.
The tell worth learning is tense. Our record on the Warmly deal notes that the commitment to leave contracts and pricing unchanged is written in the present tense. "Pricing is unchanged" is a description of today. "Pricing will be unchanged through your current term" is a commitment. Vendors are careful about this and buyers rarely notice.
Why do comparison sites still list absorbed products?
Because almost none of them has a field for it.
A best-of list is a snapshot with no expiry. Clearbit was absorbed into HubSpot in December 2023 and again in June 2025, when its credits became generic HubSpot credits and the name was retired. It still appears on alternatives lists as a thing you can buy.
The same is true of Drift and Chorus. Each is recorded here with a closed date and a flag saying it is no longer standalone, and that flag exists precisely because the ranking pages don't carry one.
What to do about it
Four things, and the first is the only one that must happen before you sign.
- Ask for pricing protection through your term in writing, in the future tense. Not "is unchanged". "Will not change through the term ending [date]." One sentence, and it costs the vendor nothing to give if they mean it.
- Check whether the acquirer already owns a competitor. This is the strongest single predictor of absorption, and it is a five-minute check. HubSpot owning Clearbit is exactly why the Warmly deal is worth a question rather than a shrug.
- Export your data now and confirm the export is complete. Not because anything is wrong, but because the cheapest moment to discover an export is partial is while everyone still answers support tickets promptly.
- Diarise your renewal window, not the acquisition date. Nothing about the deal changes your obligations. The renewal is where repricing and repackaging arrive, and the window is usually earlier than people expect.
So what happens to your contract?
It survives. That's the honest answer and it's duller than the worry, because the acquirer bought your obligations along with everything else.
What doesn't survive reliably is the roadmap, the packaging and the price you renew at, and none of those move at announcement. They move at your renewal, which is the date to be watching rather than the press release.
So the correct reaction to "our vendor got acquired" is one email asking for a written commitment in the future tense, one export, and a calendar entry. Not a migration.