As a firm proprietor for over a years, I rely upon software and automation to simplify operations and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene few years back, it most definitely caught my attention GoHighLevel OAuth 2.0 API.
The idea was attractive– an all-in-one client administration system with marketing, sales, and solution devices integrated with each other. As an entrepreneur always looking to streamline and scale my company, it appeared like a dream come true theoretically. That would not want a single solution that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip of trying (and stopping working) to change to this popular brand-new software application. You’ll discover:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own business needs, with any luck you can pick up from my unpleasant errors and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this checklist of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and task administration choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Switching Over from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel to begin with, you need context concerning my previous setup. For over 5 years I had been happily counting on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap intuitive to utilize and it dealt with whatever I needed– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and client support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to aid small businesses keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers obtain the right messages at the right time. Use site and social media sites types to simplify lead follow-up, and manage your growth with simple appointment scheduling and lead tracking. Boost sales with automated quoting, invoicing, and repayment processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours per week and increase profits by 39%. Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a thorough consumer relationship monitoring (CRM) and marketing automation remedy tailored for local business and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on enhancing sales procedures and nurturing consumer partnerships through powerful automation devices. The platform’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task administration, making it especially eye-catching for businesses looking to settle their tech stack.
For the most part, it just functioned dependably with minimal hassle or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were excellent (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly without any problems.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my whole functional foundation from a system that worked to try something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I got attracted by the alarm phone call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the feeling: when every person’s talking about a new tool that will reinvent your company … The lawn frequently looks greener beyond, and I wondered whether GoHighLevel could decrease rubbing factors that I would certainly discovered to endure throughout the years with Keap.
I resisted initially, however a couple of even more stress led me to assume maybe it was time for a change.
The Financial investment: Moving My Firm to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to start. I enrolled in HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a choice I ignored. I recognized changing platforms was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and essentially restoring my entire tech framework from the ground up making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Right here’s an overview of just several of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ email customer documents
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and task information to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels around once more
- Learning an entirely international UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tiresome hours of setup work transitioning every little thing over– not to mention dealing with lost performance throughout the button.
But eventually, it was a calculated investment I wanted to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly repay with GoHighLevel giving a better lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a huge blunder. The issues began piling up rapidly, till it got to a factor I had to reduce my losses and change back to Keap completely.
Let’s walk through the horrible problems I experienced.
Protection Issues & Many Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to meticulously recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail subscribers, onboarding new clients, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event tips, taking care of membership expiries and far more.
Every little thing seemed to be operating penalty … till unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to find 171 totally unnecessary emails had been sent out to customers that must NOT have actually obtained them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a various set of 160 people daily.
I frantically attempted fixing and rebuilding the automation from square one. Yet the problem lingered.
When I frantically reached out to their assistance team, they vaguely claimed “web server concerns” were to blame. Yet this description really did not make any kind of feeling, given that the errors proceeded taking place each morning like clockwork unrelated to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this massive failure was totally inappropriate and simply didn’t work for my company. I have countless get in touches with counting on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be completely unstable, how could I delegate mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their technology?
The unintuitive interface just compounded these problems …
Discouraging UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour really felt high and complex.
Simple jobs like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Trick setups were unexplainably spread in completely different areas. Moving in between features felt disjointed or confusing.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by discussing their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate setups panels to handle overall, individual, and product setups. Yet for some crazy reason, the web links to accessibility each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the display. What!?
As a person that values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously annoyed me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress rather than a sleek item all set for prime-time use. Their concerns appeared focused on cramming in every feature imaginable, with bad use as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the low cost tag included costly concessions …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel OAuth 2.0 API
One of GoHighLevel’s largest marketing factors is the cost effective rate for access to a lot of features. However I promptly discovered this inexpensive base cost was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with sporadic fees for core capability. Instantly my charge card statements had unclear $10 costs from GoHighLevel occasionally.
As it turned out, you get charged whenever you send out an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity customers, this added up to thousands of bucks in unanticipated expenses.
Between these per-email fees and paying added for deliverability attachments like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel subscription ended up setting you back substantially greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, however just not practical in practice. This bait-and-switch left a bad taste in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously nurtured e-mail open rates drop virtually over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market interaction consistently struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. Once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked immediately to a pitiful 9% open price.
Regardless of just how much I maximized my sending out methods or attempted every repairing trick, I might barely nudge open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel OAuth 2.0 API.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails suddenly had terrible interaction. The only thing I could think that would be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so depending on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the crippling deliverability concerns, concealed charges, broken features, and awful user interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my agency to GoHighLevel, I understood I had made a massive error. The cons considerably outweighed any advantages.
No software program is excellent, but the sheer volume of problems was past appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application boils down to count on. If I can’t trust it to handle important features competently or think a supplier has my best interests in mind, then it’s time to walk away– even after investing considerable time, cash, and initiative migrating.
So I made the challenging call to reverse training course and return back to Keap totally simply weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this debacle.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey accident. However in hindsight, it taught me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t disturb what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Modification brings threat.
- Veterinarian claims completely. Marketing hype around new software application typically covers larger underlying imperfections. Deep due persistance is crucial.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools ought to make your job life simpler, not a lot more complex and messy.
- Openness builds count on. Opaque pricing, questionable reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins trust.
- Look for honest reviews. Happy assistance assesses indicate less if extreme concerns imply inadequate general functionality.
- Excellence is difficult. No single service can completely satisfy every distinct company requirement. Find the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over change. Incremental renovations commonly outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
In other words, I learned to be extra hesitant of “as well great to be true” marketing insurance claims and less lured by the allure of shiny brand-new objects. The tools you make use of daily ought to gain trust with transparency and performance, not glossy advertising.