As a company owner for over a years, I rely upon software application and automation to enhance procedures and deliver outcomes. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene few years back, it definitely caught my interest GoHighLevel Lifetime Deal.
The idea was enticing– an all-in-one customer management platform with marketing, sales, and solution tools incorporated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my service, it felt like a dream happened on paper. Who wouldn’t want a single solution that does it all?
However in this thorough GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my devastating trip of attempting (and falling short) to change to this preferred brand-new software program. You’ll discover:
If you’re thinking about whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, hopefully you can learn from my uncomfortable blunders and pumped up assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re looking for a sales, marketing, and job management option to GoHighLevel, after that right here are a couple of we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had been gladly counting on Keap (previously Infusionsoft) to meet all my client monitoring and automation requirements.
I discovered Keap instinctive to make use of and it dealt with whatever I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are designed to help local business keep their clients while adding new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and texts, ensuring leads and customers obtain the best messages at the right time. Use web site and social media kinds to simplify lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing quote, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small companies can save 10 hours weekly and increase earnings by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no bank card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap provides a thorough customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation remedy customized for small businesses and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting customer connections with powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy incorporates CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and job monitoring, making it specifically attractive for services looking to consolidate their technology stack.
Generally, it simply functioned reliably with very little difficulty or upkeep required. My open and click-through prices were wonderful (like 35% wonderful). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untested?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the siren phone call of “glossy object syndrome”. You understand the sensation: when everyone’s discussing a brand-new device that will transform your organization … The yard frequently looks greener on the other side, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel might decrease rubbing factors that I would certainly learned to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I stood up to initially, but a few even more irritations led me to assume maybe it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I determined to start. I signed up for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing significantly greater than the $97/month starter expense.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I recognized changing systems was going to need moving all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my entire tech facilities from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an overview of just some of the effort called for:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Relocating customer profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning a completely international UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning whatever over– and also taking care of lost performance during the switch.
However inevitably, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some short-term pain would certainly settle with GoHighLevel supplying a better long-term option for my service, Dripify. Oh how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on use to realize I had actually made a large error. The problems began accumulating rapidly, till it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch over back to Keap totally.
Let’s walk through the horrible issues I ran into.
Protection Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed 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 new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending out event pointers, taking care of subscription expiries and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating fine … till suddenly it had not been. One early morning, I woke up to find 171 completely pointless emails had been sent out to users that must NOT have obtained them. This took place 3 days in a row, with a different batch of 160 individuals each day.
I anxiously attempted troubleshooting and restoring the automation from the ground up. Yet the problem continued.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they slightly asserted “server issues” were to blame. However this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, considering that the errors continued occurring each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this huge failure was completely undesirable and just really did not help my company. I have thousands of get in touches with relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be absolutely undependable, just how could I turn over mission-critical workflows and delicate customer data to their innovation?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these concerns …
Aggravating UX
Coming from Keap where whatever was smooth and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt high and complex.
Easy tasks like editing and enhancing workflows included digging through menu systems that were all over the place. Secret setups were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Relocating between features really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll tell you what I mean by speaking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle general, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful layout, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a polished product all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature under the sun, with inadequate functionality as a second thought.
And talking features, I quickly recognized the low cost tag featured expensive compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Lifetime Deal
Among GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the economical price for access to many features. But I swiftly learned this inexpensive base cost was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed users with sporadic costs for core performance. Suddenly my charge card declarations had vague $10 fees from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it ended up, you get charged every time you send out an email through their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to thousands of bucks in unexpected costs.
In between these per-email fees and paying additional for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “affordable” GoHighLevel membership wound up costing substantially MORE than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, yet simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad preference in my mouth.
Email Fees Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported e-mail open prices drop almost over night after switching over to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market involvement constantly struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a pathetic 9% open rate.
Regardless of just how much I enhanced my sending practices or tried every troubleshooting method, I might barely nudge open prices back right into the teenagers– still a 50%+ decline from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Lifetime Deal.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails all of a sudden had awful engagement. The only thing I could think that would certainly be causing this was whatever was taking place behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a firm so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability issues, hidden charges, damaged features, and horrible interface, I had actually lastly reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial blunder. The cons significantly surpassed any advantages.
No software application is perfect, however the sheer quantity of troubles was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software program boils down to count on. If I can not trust it to manage essential features capably or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after investing substantial time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging phone call to turn around program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I learned from this ordeal.
Trick Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a costly misadventure. But in knowledge, it taught me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Adhere to what jobs. Don’t upset what’s working unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Vet claims completely. Marketing buzz around new software application usually covers larger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Pick simplicity over features. Well-designed tools ought to make your job life easier, not much more challenging and untidy.
- Transparency develops count on. Opaque pricing, dubious reseller terms, and finger-pointing to avert troubles ruins depend on.
- Seek objective reviews. Satisfied assistance reviews mean much less if extreme problems imply poor general functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single service can flawlessly fulfill every special organization requirement. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental renovations normally outweigh dangerous wholesale reinvention of what already functions penalty.
In short, I found out to be more skeptical of “also good to be real” marketing insurance claims and much less tempted by the attraction of shiny new items. The tools you use daily ought to earn count on via transparency and efficiency, not glossy advertising.