Welcome back to The Hypha Wire!

Presumably, you know by now that Taylor Swift has announced her latest album on the New Heights podcast, smashing records everywhere:

“By Thursday afternoon, Wednesday night’s talk had already been seen more than 11.7 million times on YouTube. But that’s only a fraction of its circulation — clips distributed on Instagram, TikTok, X and elsewhere have received more than 400 million views, and the episode was also available for streaming on audio platforms.”

If only all podcast hosts could have Taylor on their pods!

After she revealed the album (“The Life of a Showgirl”), brands and content creators were quick to jump in on the fun, offering their take on the cover art.

I wanted to share a few of my favorites, because times are a little rough out there, and having fun, global social media moments are enough to lighten the mood (if for a time). Enjoy!

The original:

Taylor Swift laying in water wearing a shiny silver corset and sparkly orange text 'The Life of a Showgirl'

Paddington Bear holding an umbrella and a suitcase floating, with sparkly orange text 'The Life of a Show Bear.'

Po the red Teletubbie in water with sparkly orange text 'The Life of A Po-Girl'

Sesame Street's Elmo on stage doing jazz hands with sparkly orange text, 'The Life of a Showmonster'

-Sage Levene, VP of Marketing, Hypha HubSpot Development

Open Mic

Working Around HubSpot Workflow Custom Code Action Limitations

By Zack Lyons, Integrations Developer, Hypha HubSpot Development

A workflow automation interface with a trigger for contact enrollment that activates when a record is created, followed by a custom code action step that can "supercharge your workflow code actions."

If you or a client use Operations Hub Pro and leverage custom code actions, you can make connections to your other applications, process large batches of HubSpot records using the API, and build out behavior your team needs to automate.

There are some limitations that you may encounter during your development, which can be frustrating and challenging to work around. Let’s discuss some of those limitations and a few ways to mitigate them that we’ve figured out at Hypha.

HubSpot API Rate Limit

A pricing table for Private Apps API limits across different HubSpot product tiers, with rate limits ranging from 100-250 requests per 10 seconds and daily limits from 250,000 to 1,000,000 requests per account. The table also indicates that API limit increases can be purchased for additional capacity beyond the base subscription limits.

When using the HubSpot API, there are limitations. Regular endpoints have a burst limit of 100-250 requests per 10 seconds. The Search endpoints have a rate limit of 5 requests per second. This can be frustrating when 10,000+ records are enrolled at once, when you turn on a new workflow, and your custom code actions start hitting those limits and throwing errors. HubSpot actually returns the number of requests left to you in the current 10-second interval, and you can use that in your code to make decisions!

JavaScript code that implements rate limiting for HubSpot API requests, checking the "x-hubspot-ratelimit-secondly-remaining" header and pausing execution when fewer than 5 requests remain. The code includes an async function that fetches contact data from the HubSpot API using axios with proper authentication headers.

In the Node.js code above, we see that the HubSpot response headers object has a property called “x-hubspot-ratelimit-secondly-remaining” that indicates the number of requests remaining before we start receiving rate limit errors. In the code block above, we see that if we are almost out of requests, we can pause for a beat to let that burst (or “secondly”) limit reset.

Note: As of August 13, 2025 there is a HubSpot beta for rate-limiting code actions from the UI, which may be worth experimenting with!

Mitigate Rate Limits Using Multiple Private Apps

Another option at your disposal is the creation of multiple private apps. Each private app you create in your HubSpot settings yields a new API key, with its own API limit. One possible solution to hitting rate limits is to create two or even three private apps and use them in tandem in your workflow. For example, in a single custom code action, you may use:

Private App A’s API key for fetching Contacts in your Hub
Private App B’s API key for fetching relevant Companies in your Hub
Private App C’s API key for associating the Contacts and Companies that should be paired

This solution effectively triples your rate limit with little setup, albeit being a little cobbled together.

Breaking Your Custom Coded Actions Into Two Actions via Callback

According to the documentation, “Custom code actions must finish running within 20 seconds and can only use up to 128 MB of memory. Exceeding either of these limits will result in an error.”

This can be a problem when you have a large batch of records to process. When you’re up against the clock, it can be useful to break the steps into multiple custom code actions!

A workflow with two sequential custom code steps: the first searches for contacts meeting certain conditions and aggregates their IDs, while the second updates those contacts via API. The workflow steps are connected with plus icons indicating the sequential flow between actions.

By splitting the work up between two or more actions you can extend that 20 second & 128 MB limit for processing. But how do we pass data from one action to another? Using the callback feature of your custom code actions, you can stringify your data and pass it to a callback for the next code block to use:

A code editor with JavaScript code for fetching a big contacts list and defining data outputs, including an enumeration for execution state (with options like "Succeeded", "Failed", etc.) and a string output for "contactList". Below the code is a "Data outputs" section where developers can define the data type and name of outputs from their custom code.

In the image above we take a list of Contact ID’s and provide them to the callback’s “outputFields” object in a new property called “contactList” (or whatever variable name is appropriate for your use case). Then in the next code action, under “Choose data variable,” select “Action outputs” and you’ll see your contactList data that you output from the previous code action!

A HubSpot custom code action configuration interface with sections for secrets, properties, and code editing, alongside a data variable chooser panel that displays action outputs including a "contactList" variable. The interface allows users to build custom logic using the HubSpot Client v11 API and access data from previous workflow actions.

Hopefully these techniques can help you squeeze a little extra horsepower out of your Workflow Custom Code actions! And if there’s anything we left out, reach out and let us know what techniques your team is using to make the most out of your Hubs.

Second Hand News

Digiday: Despite the hype, publishers aren’t prioritizing GEO ➜

Generative engine optimization (GEO) isn’t being prioritized by many. My take: There’s plenty of room for trial, error, and experimentation before full-scale disruption. Better to be on the train earlier than later.

“Eventually, this shift will come irrespective of publishers’ feelings. And when it does, they’ll have no choice but to reassess where GEO fits into the mix. In fact, some publishers are already doing just that.”

Woman saying 'We must continue to adapt'

Exploding Topics: The Hidden AI Workforce: 29% of Employees Pay for Their Own AI Tools While Bosses Provide No Training ➜

AI tools are here, and they’re not going away. It behooves businesses to develop policies around the tools and their role in the workplace—whether that is to embrace them or ban them. And if it’s the former, training should absolutely be provided to encourage employees to learn how to work with these tools, not against them.

“Our survey of more than 1,000 AI users reveals a workplace rushing to adopt AI, but failing to properly support it. There’s a shadow army of AI-powered employees working without oversight, and in many cases, without permission.”

Max from New Amsterdam saying, 'We're all gonna work together.'

The Hypha Logomark—a tree with leaves and roots

Hypha Highlights

HIPAA Support in HubSpot- What You Need to Know

HubSpot rolled out HIPAA-support features in 2024—marking a pivotal development for healthcare providers, insurance companies, and other organizations handling Protected Health Information (PHI).

For years, these groups were effectively locked out of using one of the most popular CRMs due to regulatory limitations. With new compliance tools, HubSpot has opened the door to a unified, modern CRM experience—under very specific conditions.

This guide outlines what HIPAA support in HubSpot actually means, what’s included in the Business Associate Agreement (BAA), and how to configure the platform correctly to stay compliant. If your organization works with PHI and is exploring CRM or marketing automation platforms, understanding these details is essential before moving forward.

Read: HIPAA Support in HubSpot: What You Need to Know ➜

HubSpot Hacks

Fall 2025 HubSpot Academy Bootcamp registration is now open! Make sure to register soon, they’ll fill up quickly.

AI in Action

News, updates and tools from the AI industry.

Your weekly AI roundup:

Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has raised $30 million for his new AI startup, Parallel Web Systems, which builds infrastructure specifically for AI agents to search and analyze web information. The company’s “deep research” API aims to solve a bottleneck; helping AI agents gather reliable, cited information from the web with confidence scores.

Meta is facing calls for congressional investigation after Reuters revealed internal policies that explicitly allowed the company’s AI chatbots to engage in inappropriate conversations with children. What this means for the AI industry: as companies rush to deploy conversational AI at scale, the lack of robust federal oversight is creating massive liability risks.

Big Tech’s AI data center boom is driving up electricity bills for everyone, with residential rates already climbing 30% since 2020 and projected to rise another 8–25% by 2030 in data center-heavy regions. The core issue: While Amazon, Google, and Microsoft consume massive amounts of power for AI training, they’re pushing utilities to spread grid upgrade costs across all customers rather than paying the full price themselves. As tech giants become dominant energy players, the hidden infrastructure costs of the AI revolution are being quietly passed down to consumers through higher utility bills.

Cover to Cover

The titles team Hypha can’t get enough of.

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic

“From ‘brainrot’ memes and incel slang to the trend of adding ‘-core’ to different influencer aesthetics, the internet has ushered in an unprecedented linguistic upheaval. We’re entering an entirely new era of etymology, heralded by the invisible forces driving social media algorithms. Thankfully, Algospeak is here to explain. As a professional linguist, Adam Aleksic understands the gravity of language and the way we use it: he knows the ways it has morphed and changed, how it reflects society, and how, in its everyday usage, we carry centuries of human history on our tongues.”

How can we help you?

Case Study: Salesforce to HubSpot Migration

An EdTech company faced a critical challenge: their customer data was scattered across Salesforce, Jira, QuickBooks, and various disconnected tools, creating operational blind spots and limiting their growth potential. With a cutover deadline looming, they needed to migrate 33,000+ contacts while preserving the complex institutional relationships that make educational sales unique—without disrupting ongoing business operations.

Through meticulous planning and custom API development, Hypha successfully unified their fragmented tech stack onto the HubSpot platform. The four-month migration delivered on schedule with zero data loss, transforming their manual processes into systematic workflows that scale with their business.

Is your tech stack holding your team back? Contact Hypha to discover how we can unify your systems and unlock operational efficiency through strategic HubSpot implementation.

Read the Full Case Study ➜

Thanks for reading! See you next week! -Team Hypha

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