As a firm owner for over a decade, I count on software and automation to streamline procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it absolutely captured my interest GoHighLevel Cost.
The concept was attractive– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and service tools incorporated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my organization, it looked like a desire come true on paper. That wouldn’t want a solitary solution that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my devastating journey of attempting (and stopping working) to change to this popular brand-new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own organization demands, with any luck you can pick up from my uncomfortable blunders and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this list of finest CRMs rather. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and project administration alternative to GoHighLevel, after that below are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my customer management and automation requirements.
I found Keap intuitive to use and it handled whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription websites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small businesses maintain their clients while including brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and customers receive the best messages at the correct time. Usage internet site and social networks forms to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy appointment scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides an extensive customer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation option tailored for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on improving sales procedures and nurturing client relationships with effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one strategy integrates CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it specifically attractive for businesses looking to combine their tech pile.
For the most part, it just functioned accurately with minimal hassle or maintenance needed. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% terrific). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I tempted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that functioned to try something unproven and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the siren telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You know the sensation: when everyone’s speaking about a brand-new tool that will reinvent your business … The turf often looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel may reduce rubbing points that I would certainly learned to endure for many years with Keap.
I withstood at first, but a couple of even more irritations led me to think possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Migrating My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to take the plunge. I signed up for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing dramatically greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I took lightly. I recognized changing systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap data and basically rebuilding my entire tech facilities from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s a summary of just several of the effort needed:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving client accounts, notes, and task information to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface layout
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of arrangement work transitioning everything over– in addition to dealing with lost productivity during the button.
However ultimately, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel providing a better lasting solution for my business, Dripify. Oh just how wrong I was …
It just took me concerning a month of hands-on use to understand I had made a large blunder. The issues began piling up promptly, till it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish issues I came across.
Safety Issues & Several Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email clients, onboarding brand-new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, managing membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating fine … up until instantly it wasn’t. One morning, I woke up to discover 171 completely irrelevant e-mails had been sent to individuals that ought to NOT have received them. This happened 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 people each day.
I anxiously attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. Yet the trouble continued.
When I seriously connected to their assistance group, they vaguely declared “server issues” were at fault. Yet this explanation didn’t make any feeling, considering that the errors continued occurring each early morning like clockwork unrelated to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failing was totally unacceptable and just really did not help my business. I have hundreds of calls counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unreliable, just how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these issues …
Irritating UX
Coming from Keap where every little thing was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt steep and complicated.
Straightforward jobs like modifying workflows involved digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Secret settings were unexplainably spread in entirely various sections. Moving in between features felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I imply by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 different settings panels to handle general, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to gain access to each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As someone that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined item all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared concentrated on packing in every feature imaginable, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly realized the small cost tag came with pricey compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Cost
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling points is the cost effective rate for access to numerous features. However I promptly learned this inexpensive base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with erratic fees for core capability. Suddenly my charge card declarations had unclear $10 fees from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you get billed every single time you send out an email with their web servers. So for high volume individuals, this added up to thousands of bucks in unforeseen expenses.
In between these per-email charges and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing dramatically MORE than my Keap plan.
The low price tag was alluring, but simply not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open rates plummet practically overnight after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement regularly hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I moved their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a pitiful 9% open price.
Despite just how much I optimized my sending methods or attempted every repairing trick, I could hardly push open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Cost.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and emails instantly had terrible interaction. The only point I could assume that would be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, hidden costs, broken features, and horrible user interface, I had finally reached my restriction …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a huge mistake. The disadvantages dramatically exceeded any type of benefits.
No software program is perfect, but the large quantity of issues was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to take care of vital features effectively or believe a supplier has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing significant time, money, and effort moving.
So I made the hard phone call to turn around course and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. However in knowledge, it taught me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stay with what works. Do not disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Veterinarian declares completely. Marketing hype around new software typically covers bigger underlying defects. Deep due persistance is necessary.
- Pick simplicity over features. Properly designed devices should make your work life simpler, not extra complicated and unpleasant.
- Openness constructs trust. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues ruins trust fund.
- Seek impartial testimonials. Pleased assistance evaluates imply less if extreme concerns indicate inadequate total usability.
- Perfection is impossible. No single solution can flawlessly satisfy every one-of-a-kind service demand. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over change. Step-by-step improvements typically outweigh risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In other words, I discovered to be a lot more cynical of “also good to be true” marketing cases and much less attracted by the allure of shiny brand-new things. The tools you utilize daily must make trust fund through openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.