As a company owner for over a years, I depend on software application and automation to enhance procedures and provide results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it certainly caught my attention GoHighLevel Pricing Plans.
The concept was enticing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and service devices integrated together. As a business owner constantly wanting to streamline and scale my business, it seemed like a desire happened theoretically. Who would not want a single option that does it all?
Yet in this comprehensive GoHighLevel review, I’ll take you inside my disastrous trip 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 business requirements, hopefully you can learn from my unpleasant blunders and blew up expectations.
Looter: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, begin with this listing of finest CRMs instead. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re seeking a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, after that here are a few we suggest.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To understand what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you require context regarding my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to satisfy all my client management and automation demands.
I located Keap intuitive to make use of and it dealt with everything I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and customer assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to assist small businesses maintain their customers while including brand-new ones easily. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and customers get the appropriate messages at the right time. Usage internet site and social media types to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with very easy visit organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, small businesses can save 10 hours each week and rise earnings by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.
Why we like Keap
Keap supplies a detailed consumer partnership management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s focus on improving sales procedures and supporting consumer relationships through powerful automation tools. The system’s all-in-one approach combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially eye-catching for services seeking to settle their technology stack.
For the most part, it just functioned dependably with minimal fuss or maintenance called for. My open and click-through rates were fantastic (like 35% excellent). Automations ran efficiently without concerns.
So why on earth was I attracted to uproot my entire functional foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unproven and untested?
In knowledge I can admit I got seduced by the siren call of “glossy item disorder”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s discussing a new tool that will change your organization … The yard commonly looks greener beyond, and I questioned whether GoHighLevel may decrease rubbing points that I would certainly discovered to tolerate for many years with Keap.
I stood up to in the beginning, yet a few more frustrations led me to believe maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, investing dramatically more than the $97/month starter cost.
This had not been a choice I ignored. I knew switching systems was mosting likely to call for migrating all my Keap data and basically reconstructing my whole technology infrastructure from scratch using every one of the GoHighLevel integrations readily available.
Below’s an overview of simply some of the effort required:
- By hand exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating lots of automations and workflows
- Moving client profiles, notes, and task data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe billing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promos, and sales funnels throughout once again
- Learning a completely foreign UX and interface design
All in, I invested around 30-40 laborious hours of setup job transitioning every little thing over– and also taking care of lost productivity during the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated financial investment I wanted to make. I figured some short-term pain would settle with GoHighLevel giving a far better long-lasting option for my organization, Dripify. Oh exactly how wrong I was …
It just took me about a month of hands-on use to recognize I had actually made a huge mistake. The concerns started piling up promptly, until it reached a point I had to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Let’s go through the horrible issues I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Several Bugs
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to diligently recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These included series for onboarding new email customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion suggestions, handling membership expirations and much more.
Every little thing appeared to be working penalty … until suddenly it wasn’t. One early morning, I woke up to locate 171 completely unnecessary emails had actually been sent out to users that ought to NOT have actually received them. This took place three days straight, with a different batch of 160 individuals daily.
I frantically tried repairing and rebuilding the automation from scratch. However the trouble lingered.
When I frantically connected to their support team, they vaguely claimed “server concerns” were responsible. But this description really did not make any type of sense, since the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any downtime.
In my mind, this huge failing was completely inappropriate and simply really did not work for my organization. I have hundreds of calls relying on my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be entirely unreliable, how could I hand over mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive interface just worsened these problems …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve felt steep and complex.
Simple tasks like editing and enhancing workflows involved digging through food selection systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in completely various sections. Moving between features felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I imply by talking about their funnel builder as an instance. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle general, specific, and item configurations. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to gain access to each of these core settings were expanded on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously upset me.
It enhanced that GoHighLevel still felt like a work-in-progress rather than a polished item prepared for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with bad usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I quickly understood the low price tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Pricing Plans
One of GoHighLevel’s most significant selling factors is the affordable rate for accessibility to a lot of features. But I promptly learned this affordable base expense was misleading.
They nickle-and-dimed customers with occasional charges for core capability. All of a sudden my credit card statements had obscure $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed every time you send out an email with their servers. So for high volume customers, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email fees and paying extra for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “budget friendly” GoHighLevel subscription wound up setting you back significantly MORE than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, however simply not sensible in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The final dealbreaker was seeing my meticulously supported e-mail open rates plummet virtually overnight after switching to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my target market engagement continually struck 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I moved their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked instantaneously to a useless 9% open price.
No matter just how much I enhanced my sending out methods or tried every fixing method, I can hardly push open rates back right into the teens– still a 50%+ decline from my previous standards GoHighLevel Pricing Plans.
Let me repeat: my exact same audience and e-mails instantly had dreadful interaction. The only thing I could think that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For a company so dependent on e-mail marketing, this was a big deal.
Between the debilitating deliverability concerns, concealed costs, busted features, and terrible user interface, I had actually ultimately reached my limitation …
Why I Give up GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after moving my firm to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a massive blunder. The disadvantages considerably exceeded any advantages.
No software is ideal, but the sheer volume of troubles was beyond acceptable.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to trust. If I can not trust it to deal with vital features effectively or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the challenging phone call to reverse program and return back to Keap totally just weeks after going all in on GoHighLevel. Let’s explore what I gained from this fiasco.
Secret Takeaways: What I Picked up from My GoHighLevel Error
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a costly misadventure. Yet in knowledge, it taught me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stay with what works. Don’t upset what’s functioning unless something is definitively much better across the board. Adjustment brings danger.
- Vet declares extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software program usually obscures larger underlying defects. Deep due diligence is important.
- Pick simpleness over features. Well-designed devices should make your work life easier, not much more challenging and untidy.
- Openness constructs trust. Opaque pricing, shady reseller terms, and finger-pointing to escape problems ruins count on.
- Look for impartial testimonials. Delighted assistance examines indicate much less if excessive problems suggest bad general use.
- Excellence is impossible. No single solution can flawlessly satisfy every distinct company requirement. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Development over revolution. Incremental renovations normally exceed risky wholesale reinvention of what already functions fine.
In short, I found out to be much more unconvinced of “too good to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the attraction of glossy new things. The tools you use daily ought to make trust through transparency and efficiency, not slick advertising.