As a company proprietor for over a decade, I rely on software application and automation to streamline procedures and supply results. So when GoHighLevel arised on the scene couple of years back, it definitely captured my attention GoHighLevel Rest API.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer management system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As a business owner constantly looking to streamline and scale my service, it looked like a dream happened on paper. That wouldn’t desire a single option that does it all?
But in this thorough GoHighLevel testimonial, I’ll take you inside my tragic trip of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this popular new software. You’ll find out:
If you’re taking into consideration whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own company requirements, with any luck you can learn from my uncomfortable mistakes and pumped up expectations.
Spoiler: I do NOT suggest GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this listing of ideal CRMs rather. I make use of Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring choice to GoHighLevel, then here are a couple of we advise.
Backstory: Why I Took Into Consideration Changing from Keap
To recognize what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous configuration. For over 5 years I had been happily relying on Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation needs.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it managed every little thing I required– CRM, e-mail marketing, sales funnels, subscription sites, and customer support.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are developed to aid small businesses keep their customers while adding brand-new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, ensuring leads and customers obtain the appropriate messages at the correct time. Usage website and social networks kinds to streamline lead follow-up, and manage your growth with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, freeing up your time. With Keap, small companies can conserve 10 hours each week and rise income by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no bank card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a thorough customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation solution tailored for small companies and business owners. We appreciate Keap’s concentrate on simplifying sales procedures and nurturing customer partnerships through effective automation tools. The platform’s all-in-one technique combines CRM, email marketing, invoicing, and task monitoring, making it especially eye-catching for organizations aiming to settle their technology stack.
Essentially, it just worked reliably with marginal fuss or maintenance needed. My open and click-through rates were terrific (like 35% great). Automations ran efficiently without issues.
So why on earth was I lured to uproot my entire operational foundation from a system that worked to attempt something unverified and untried?
In hindsight I can admit I obtained attracted by the alarm telephone call of “shiny object disorder”. You know the feeling: when everyone’s talking about a new tool that will change your service … The lawn typically looks greener beyond, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might minimize friction factors that I ‘d found out to tolerate over the years with Keap.
I withstood in the beginning, however a couple of even more frustrations led me to think perhaps it was time for a modification.
The Financial investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Agency plan at $297/month, investing considerably greater than the $97/month starter cost.
This wasn’t a decision I ignored. I understood switching over systems was mosting likely to need moving all my Keap information and basically restoring my entire tech framework from square one making use of every one of the GoHighLevel integrations available.
Right here’s a review of just a few of the initiative called for:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail client documents
- Recreating dozens of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and job data to the brand-new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe payment integration
- Establishing landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout again
- Learning a completely international UX and interface style
Done in, I invested around 30-40 tiresome hours of arrangement job transitioning everything over– and also handling shed performance throughout the switch.
Yet inevitably, it was a calculated investment I was willing to make. I figured some temporary pain would certainly repay with GoHighLevel offering a better long-lasting solution for my organization, Dripify. Oh just how incorrect I was …
It only took me concerning a month of hands-on usage to recognize I had actually made a big blunder. The concerns began accumulating swiftly, till it got to a factor I needed to cut my losses and change back to Keap entirely.
Let’s walk through the horrible troubles I encountered.
Protection Issues & Lots of Bugs
Given GoHighLevel placed itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I made sure to thoroughly recreate each and every single workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of series for onboarding new e-mail customers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar enrollments, sending event pointers, managing membership expiries and much more.
Whatever seemed to be working penalty … until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely pointless emails had actually been sent to customers who must NOT have gotten them. This occurred 3 days straight, with a different set of 160 individuals every day.
I desperately attempted fixing and reconstructing the automation from scratch. But the trouble lingered.
When I desperately connected to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “web server concerns” were to blame. However this explanation didn’t make any sense, because the errors proceeded taking place each early morning like clockwork unconnected to any kind of downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failing was entirely inappropriate and just didn’t work for my company. I have hundreds of contacts relying upon my automated campaigns running smoothly.
So if GoHighLevel was going to be absolutely unstable, exactly how could I entrust mission-critical workflows and sensitive customer information to their modern technology?
The unintuitive user interface only intensified these problems …
Frustrating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was seamless and intuitive, GoHighLevel’s learning curve really felt steep and difficult.
Easy jobs like editing workflows included digging via menu systems that were all over the place. Key setups were unexplainably scattered in totally different areas. Moving between functions really felt disjointed or complicated.
I’ll inform you what I indicate by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to manage general, private, and item arrangements. Yet for some crazy reason, the links to accessibility each of these core setups were spread out on opposite sides of the screen. What!?
As somebody who values clean, thoughtful style, this seriously upset me.
It reinforced that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress as opposed to a refined product all set for prime-time use. Their concerns seemed focused on packing in every feature under the sun, with bad usability as a second thought.
And speaking of features, I soon understood the small cost tag included costly compromises …
Misleading Pricing GoHighLevel Rest API
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling factors is the economical rate for access to many features. Yet I promptly learned this low-cost base expense was deceptive.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with sporadic costs for core capability. Suddenly my credit card statements had obscure $10 charges from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it ended up, you get billed whenever you send an e-mail through their servers. So for high quantity customers, this amounted to numerous bucks in unanticipated prices.
In between these per-email costs and paying additional for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “economical” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The low sticker price was tempting, but 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 thoroughly supported e-mail open prices plummet practically over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Previously, my audience involvement consistently hit 35-40% open rates in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their documents over to GoHighLevel, efficiency tanked promptly to a worthless 9% open price.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending out techniques or tried every fixing technique, I could hardly push open rates back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous criteria GoHighLevel Rest API.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had terrible interaction. The only point I could believe that would be creating this was whatever was happening behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so based on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the crippling deliverability concerns, hidden charges, damaged features, and horrible interface, I had ultimately reached my limit …
Why I Quit GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Simply 45 days after moving my company to GoHighLevel, I understood I had actually made a substantial blunder. The disadvantages drastically surpassed any kind of benefits.
No software application is perfect, but the large volume of troubles was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software application comes down to count on. If I can not trust it to handle vital features competently or think a vendor has my benefits in mind, after that it’s time to walk away– even after investing substantial time, money, and effort migrating.
So I made the hard contact us to turn around program and return back to Keap entirely simply weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Allow’s explore what I gained from this ordeal.
Secret Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Blunder
My time with HighLevel can be summarized as a pricey ill fortune. Yet in hindsight, it showed me a couple of crucial lessons:
- Stay with what jobs. Don’t distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively better across the board. Adjustment brings threat.
- Veterinarian asserts completely. Marketing hype around brand-new software frequently obscures larger underlying flaws. Deep due diligence is necessary.
- Select simplicity over features. Well-designed devices must make your job life less complicated, not more challenging and unpleasant.
- Transparency constructs depend on. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade problems damages trust.
- Seek honest testimonials. Happy support assesses suggest much less if excessive concerns imply inadequate total functionality.
- Perfection is difficult. No single service can perfectly fulfill every one-of-a-kind service demand. Discover the least-bad fit.
- Advancement over revolution. Step-by-step enhancements generally outweigh high-risk wholesale reinvention of what currently functions penalty.
Simply put, I learned to be more cynical of “too good to be true” marketing insurance claims and much less attracted by the appeal of shiny new things. The tools you utilize daily ought to make count on via openness and efficiency, not glossy advertising.