As an agency owner for over a decade, I count on software and automation to streamline procedures and supply outcomes. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it certainly caught my interest GoHighLevel Developer.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer administration platform with marketing, sales, and service devices incorporated together. As a business owner always looking to simplify and scale my service, it felt like a desire come true theoretically. That wouldn’t desire a single service that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my dreadful trip of attempting (and failing) to switch to this popular brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business requirements, ideally you can pick up from my unpleasant blunders and blew up assumptions.
Looter: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you need a CRM, start with this checklist of ideal CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job management option to GoHighLevel, then right here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Switching from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context about my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my customer monitoring and automation requirements.
I found Keap user-friendly to utilize and it handled everything I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership websites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are made to help small companies keep their customers while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with emails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the correct time. Use internet site and social media forms to improve lead follow-up, and manage your development with very easy visit organizing and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated estimating, invoicing, and payment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours weekly and rise earnings by 39%. Begin with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on enhancing sales processes and nurturing consumer connections with powerful automation devices. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for organizations wanting to consolidate their tech stack.
Generally, it just functioned accurately with very little difficulty or upkeep called for. My open and click-through prices were excellent (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without 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 confess I obtained seduced by the siren call of “glossy item disorder”. You understand the sensation: when everybody’s discussing a brand-new device that will change your organization … The turf usually looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel could lower rubbing factors that I ‘d found out to endure over the years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, yet a couple of more aggravations led me to assume possibly it was time for an adjustment.
The Investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Previously this year I determined to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Firm plan at $297/month, investing substantially greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I knew switching over systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically restoring my whole technology framework from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s a summary of simply a few of the initiative called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving customer accounts, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around once again
- Learning a totally foreign UX and user interface style
All in, I spent around 30-40 laborious hours of setup work transitioning everything over– not to mention managing shed efficiency during the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a computed financial investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term discomfort would settle with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-term option for my organization, Dripify. Oh how wrong I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had made a large mistake. The issues started piling up rapidly, until it reached a factor I had to cut my losses and switch back to Keap totally.
Allow’s walk through the horrible problems I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Numerous Bugs
Given GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to meticulously recreate every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These included sequences for onboarding brand-new e-mail clients, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending out occasion pointers, handling subscription expirations and a lot more.
Every little thing appeared to be operating fine … till suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 totally unnecessary e-mails had been sent to users who need to NOT have actually obtained them. This happened 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals every day.
I frantically tried repairing and restoring the automation from square one. But the trouble continued.
When I desperately reached out to their support group, they slightly declared “server problems” were to blame. Yet this description didn’t make any type of sense, considering that the mistakes proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this substantial failure was entirely undesirable and simply didn’t help my business. I have thousands of get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be entirely unstable, how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just intensified these issues …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where whatever was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and difficult.
Straightforward jobs like editing workflows involved digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably scattered in completely different areas. Relocating in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 different setups panels to manage total, specific, and item arrangements. Yet for some insane reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As someone who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a polished item prepared for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature imaginable, with poor use as an afterthought.
And speaking of features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag included pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing GoHighLevel Developer
Among GoHighLevel’s biggest marketing points is the budget friendly rate for access to numerous features. But I rapidly discovered this cheap base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic charges for core performance. All of a sudden my charge card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you obtain billed every single time you send out an e-mail via their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this amounted to hundreds of dollars in unexpected prices.
In between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration ended up costing considerably MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, but simply not realistic in practice. This bait-and-switch left a poor taste in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices drop virtually over night after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement regularly hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
No matter just how much I optimized my sending out methods or tried every fixing method, I could hardly nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Developer.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had terrible interaction. The only point I could assume that would certainly be causing this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability problems, hidden costs, busted features, and awful user interface, I had actually lastly reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I recognized I had made a huge error. The disadvantages substantially outweighed any benefits.
No software program is best, however the large quantity of problems was past acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to take care of important features competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after investing substantial time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around training course and return back to Keap entirely just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I picked up from this fiasco.
Trick Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly ill fortune. However in knowledge, it educated me a couple of essential lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings risk.
- Vet asserts thoroughly. Marketing hype around new software application commonly obscures larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools must make your work life easier, not much more difficult and untidy.
- Transparency builds trust. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade troubles destroys count on.
- Seek impartial reviews. Pleased assistance reviews suggest less if excessive problems imply inadequate total use.
- Perfection is difficult. No single option can flawlessly meet every distinct business requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over change. Incremental enhancements typically exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In other words, I discovered to be much more hesitant of “also great to be true” marketing claims and much less tempted by the allure of glossy brand-new objects. The devices you utilize daily should make count on via openness and efficiency, not slick advertising.