From Legacy Apps to Platform Speed: Building with the New Developer Platform

At INBOUND 2025, HubSpot delivered one of its most ambitious rollouts yet—over 200 updates across the platform. From smarter CRM experiences to the launch of the Data Hub for centralized, AI-ready datasets, the spotlight was on how developers can build faster, smarter, and more scalable solutions inside HubSpot.

For those of us who live in the developer trenches, though, one set of updates stood out as a real game changer: the overhaul of the HubSpot CLI (hs). Not only did HubSpot introduce brand-new commands like hs project migrate, hs project add, and hs mcp setup, but they also refined existing commands to reduce friction in daily workflows. As the HubSpot Developer Advocacy team has written before, tools are everything—and this release proves they’re committed to making HubSpot a first-class development environment.

At SimpleEvents.io, our mission has always been to keep pace with HubSpot’s APIs and developer advancements so our users can run events seamlessly inside HubSpot. Thanks to these new CLI upgrades and the introduction of app home, which is in public beta, we were able to:

• Migrate our app to the new platform in hours instead of days.
• Launch our new App Home experience, bringing Custom Workflows, Telemetry, and configuration into one central place.
• Supercharge our local development loops with the new MCP setup.

The result? We went from release day to a fully migrated, app home-enabled, locally optimized build in just one week. This article walks through the key CLI commands—hs project migrate, hs project add, and hs mcp setup—and shows how they helped SimpleEvents.io ship faster while unlocking brand-new value for our users.

hs project migrate – Moving Faster Than Ever

The new hs project migrate command is one of the most impactful changes introduced in the HubSpot CLI. It allows developers to seamlessly move an existing public app into the new HubSpot Project (2025.2) structure. By consolidating app configuration, assets, and integrations into one place, migration brings consistency and simplicity to how apps are built and maintained.

At SimpleEvents, this was a breakthrough moment. Before migrating, our workflow was scattered across multiple tools and platforms:

• Custom workflow actions were deployed via Postman collections.
• Telemetry integration required a one-off cURL POST request.
• CRM Cards, webhooks, and scoping were managed separately inside location configuration files.

This fragmented process made updates slow and tedious. A typical update cycle took two hours just to confirm everything was deployed correctly—on top of development and testing. Worse, it introduced plenty of opportunities for human error: deploying to the wrong app, missing a webhook config, or forgetting a telemetry update.

After migrating with hs project migrate, all of that friction disappeared. Everything—CRM Cards, Webhooks, Custom Workflow Actions, Telemetry, and more—now lives inside a single directory. Updates are unified, version-controlled, and can be launched within minutes of passing tests. No more switching between Postman, cURL, and HubSpot’s UI; it’s all in one consistent developer experience.

Before vs. After Migration

For SimpleEvents, this shift transformed our release velocity. What once felt like a multi-step deployment puzzle is now a single streamlined process, letting us focus on building features instead of babysitting deployments.

hs project add – Expanding with Ease

The new hs project add command is deceptively simple, but incredibly powerful. Run it in the terminal, and you’re prompted with a set of features you can instantly add to your app: Cards ✅, Settings Page ✅, and most importantly, Home ✅. Select “Home,” and the CLI scaffolds out a fully functional App Home page built in React—ready for you to customize with HubSpot’s UI Components.

For SimpleEvents.io, this made adding the new App Home effortless. No risky copy-paste jobs. No piecing together boilerplate code. Just one command, and we were off and running. Within hours, we had a central dashboard inside HubSpot where our users could see a real-time report of how their marketing events were performing.

This addition was a game changer for our product. Instead of scattering insights across multiple CRM Cards or workflows, App Home became a single point of truth inside a customer’s HubSpot account. From there, users could get instant visibility into event registrations, attendance, and engagement—all without leaving the HubSpot interface they already live in.

And this is just the beginning. Down the road, we plan to expand the App Home to allow users to create and manage events directly from that screen. 🤯 For developers, hs project add isn’t just about scaffolding code—it’s about removing barriers so we can focus on building experiences that deliver value faster.

hs mcp setup – Supercharging Local Development

The hs mcp setup command introduces Model Context Protocol (MCP) support directly into the HubSpot developer workflow. MCP allows your local environment to “talk” with your AI-powered coding assistant, giving it extra context and instructions to streamline development. Once enabled, the HubSpot MCP server can help with:

• Learning how to use the HubSpot CLI
• Searching HubSpot documentation
• Creating a project
• Adding app features
• Adding content assets (themes, templates, and modules)
• Validating local project files
• Uploading a project
• Deploying a project

For SimpleEvents.io, this was a massive accelerator. After running hs mcp setup and rebooting Cursor, we hit the ground running. With just two prompts, Cursor and the local MCP tooling built out our first App Home page module. It understood our existing CRM Card architecture, knew where we wanted to take the App Home experience, and leveraged the right HubSpot UI Components to bring it to life.

From there, iteration was effortless. We made a quick update to our API, and within minutes 💥 our Home page was updated and ready to launch. The feedback loop between “idea” and “working feature” shrank to near real-time.

And the best part? This all happened while we were at INBOUND 2025. From the moment the new platform changes were announced, we went from zero to a fully built and tested app home screen in just two days.

For developers, this isn’t just about speed—it’s about confidence. With MCP in place, we know our workflows are guided, validated, and AI-assisted, which frees us up to focus on creating value instead of fighting with setup or boilerplate.

Conclusion

The INBOUND 2025 releases made it clear: HubSpot is serious about empowering developers. For SimpleEvents.io, the new CLI commands and App Home feature weren’t just incremental improvements—they completely reshaped how we build, test, and launch.

• With hs project migrate, we unified our app into a single project, eliminating hours of fragmented updates and reducing errors.
• With hs project add, we seamlessly launched a fully functional App Home, giving our users a centralized, React-powered experience inside HubSpot.
• With hs mcp setup, we unlocked AI-assisted local development, collapsing iteration cycles into hours and giving our team the confidence to ship fast.

The outcome? From the day HubSpot announced the new platform changes at INBOUND, we went from migration → App Home → launch in just one week. What used to take us days of tedious back-and-forth now takes minutes, freeing us to focus on what really matters: delivering better event management for our users.

HubSpot’s investment in developer tooling is paying dividends. If you haven’t already, explore the latest CLI commands and App Home functionality—they might just transform your workflow the way they transformed ours.