As an agency proprietor for over a years, I count on software and automation to improve procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it absolutely captured my focus Can I Use GoHighLevel without Stripe.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one client monitoring platform with marketing, sales, and solution devices incorporated with each other. As a business owner always looking to streamline and scale my business, it appeared like a desire happened on paper. Who would not desire a solitary service that does it all?
Yet in this in-depth GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic journey of trying (and failing) to switch to this prominent new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your own business needs, ideally you can pick up from my excruciating mistakes and inflated assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I utilize Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and job administration option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a few we advise.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you require context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been gladly relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to fulfill all my customer management and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to utilize and it managed everything I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to assist small companies keep their clients while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, making sure leads and clients receive the appropriate messages at the right time. Use site and social media sites types to streamline lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy consultation scheduling and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment handling, liberating your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours per week and boost income by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap offers a comprehensive consumer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation option customized for small companies and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing customer connections with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one approach incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially attractive for companies seeking to settle their tech stack.
For the most part, it simply functioned reliably with marginal difficulty or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% excellent). Automations ran smoothly without any issues.
So why in the world was I attracted to uproot my whole functional structure from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s speaking about a new tool that will certainly transform your company … The yard typically looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might decrease friction factors that I ‘d discovered to endure for many years with Keap.
I resisted at first, yet a couple of more aggravations led me to think possibly it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Company to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I made a decision to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I knew switching over platforms was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and essentially restoring my entire tech infrastructure from scratch utilizing every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Here’s an overview of just several of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail customer records
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels all over again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of configuration job transitioning every little thing over– not to mention taking care of shed performance during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a computed investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly pay off with GoHighLevel providing a better long-lasting service for my business, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a huge error. The problems began piling up swiftly, until it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Allow’s walk through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Protection Issues & Numerous Vermin
Offered GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation system, I took care to thoroughly recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding brand-new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion reminders, managing subscription expirations and much more.
Everything seemed to be working penalty … till all of a sudden it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to find 171 entirely irrelevant e-mails had been sent to individuals that should NOT have gotten them. This happened three days in a row, with a different batch of 160 people each day.
I frantically tried troubleshooting and rebuilding the automation from square one. However the problem lingered.
When I seriously connected to their support team, they vaguely claimed “web server issues” were responsible. Yet this explanation didn’t make any kind of sense, because the errors proceeded happening each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was entirely inappropriate and simply really did not benefit my business. I have thousands of contacts counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely undependable, how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer data to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface only intensified these problems …
Discouraging UX
Coming from Keap where everything was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and challenging.
Straightforward tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably scattered in entirely various sections. Moving in between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to handle general, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to access each of these core setups were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product prepared for prime-time use. Their top priorities seemed concentrated on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with bad use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon understood the low cost tag featured expensive concessions …
Deceptive Pricing Can I Use GoHighLevel without Stripe
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant marketing factors is the inexpensive rate for accessibility to so many features. Yet I swiftly learned this low-cost base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional charges for core functionality. Instantly my bank card declarations had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get billed each time you send out an email with their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to numerous bucks in unanticipated expenses.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration wound up setting you back dramatically greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was appealing, however simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my carefully supported e-mail open prices plummet almost overnight after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement continually hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pitiful 9% open rate.
Regardless of how much I enhanced my sending out practices or attempted every troubleshooting technique, I can barely nudge open rates back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous benchmarks Can I Use GoHighLevel without Stripe.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had dreadful engagement. The only thing I might assume that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed charges, broken features, and terrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after migrating my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial blunder. The disadvantages significantly exceeded any kind of benefits.
No software program is best, but the sheer quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software program comes down to trust fund. If I can not trust it to manage vital functions properly or believe a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the difficult call to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I gained from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Gained from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as an expensive misadventure. Yet in hindsight, it instructed me a few essential lessons:
- Adhere to what works. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program typically covers larger underlying problems. Deep due diligence is crucial.
- Choose simpleness over features. Well-designed devices ought to make your job life easier, not a lot more complicated and messy.
- Transparency develops count on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles ruins trust fund.
- Look for objective evaluations. Happy assistance evaluates imply less if extreme problems suggest bad general use.
- Excellence is difficult. No single option can flawlessly meet every distinct business demand. Find the least-bad fit.
- Development over transformation. Step-by-step improvements normally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Simply put, I discovered to be a lot more skeptical of “as well great to be true” marketing claims and less lured by the appeal of shiny new objects. The devices you use daily need to gain trust fund through openness and performance, not glossy advertising.