As a firm owner for over a years, I depend on software program and automation to enhance procedures and deliver results. So when GoHighLevel emerged on the scene couple of years back, it certainly captured my attention What Are The Charges For GoHighLevel.
The idea was appealing– an all-in-one customer monitoring system with marketing, sales, and solution tools integrated with each other. As a business owner always aiming to streamline and scale my organization, it felt like a desire come to life on paper. That wouldn’t want a solitary service that does it all?
But in this comprehensive GoHighLevel evaluation, I’ll take you inside my disastrous journey of attempting (and falling short) to switch over to this popular new software application. You’ll learn:
If you’re considering whether GoHighLevel is right for your very own service requirements, with any luck you can gain from my uncomfortable errors and inflated assumptions.
Spoiler: I do NOT advise GoHighLevel. If you require a CRM, start with this checklist of best CRMs instead. I use Keap.
Some GoHighLevel Alternatives
If you’re searching for a sales, marketing, and project monitoring option to GoHighLevel, then below are a few we recommend.
Backstory: Why I Considered Changing from Keap
To comprehend what attracted me to GoHighLevel in the first place, you need context concerning my previous arrangement. For over 5 years I had actually been happily relying upon Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) to meet all my client administration and automation requirements.
I located Keap user-friendly to utilize and it took care of every little thing I required– CRM, email marketing, sales funnels, membership sites, and client assistance.
Keap’s CRM and sales and marketing automation are created to help small companies keep their clients while adding new ones effortlessly. Automate follow-ups with e-mails and messages, guaranteeing leads and clients get the best messages at the right time. Use website and social media sites types to improve lead follow-up, and handle your development with easy consultation organizing and lead monitoring. Boost sales with automated pricing estimate, invoicing, and settlement processing, maximizing your time. With Keap, local business can conserve 10 hours each week and increase profits by 39%. Beginning with a 14-day free trial, no charge card called for.
Why we like Keap
Keap uses a detailed customer connection management (CRM) and marketing automation solution customized for local business and entrepreneurs. We value Keap’s focus on improving sales processes and supporting customer relationships through effective automation tools. The system’s all-in-one strategy combines CRM, e-mail marketing, invoicing, and task management, making it especially eye-catching for organizations aiming to settle their tech pile.
Essentially, it just functioned dependably with marginal difficulty or upkeep needed. My open and click-through rates were wonderful (like 35% great). Automations ran smoothly with no problems.
So why in the world was I lured to uproot my entire functional structure from a system that functioned to attempt something unproven and untried?
In knowledge I can confess I obtained seduced by the alarm telephone call of “shiny item disorder”. You recognize the sensation: when every person’s talking about a brand-new tool that will certainly transform your service … The yard often looks greener on the other side, and I asked yourself whether GoHighLevel might minimize rubbing factors that I would certainly found out to tolerate throughout the years with Keap.
I withstood initially, yet a few even more aggravations led me to assume maybe it was time for a modification.
The Investment: Migrating My Agency to GoHighLevel
Earlier this year I chose to take the plunge. I registered for HighLevel’s Company plan at $297/month, spending significantly more than the $97/month starter price.
This had not been a decision I took lightly. I understood changing systems was going to call for migrating all my Keap information and basically rebuilding my whole technology infrastructure from the ground up making use of all of the GoHighLevel integrations offered.
Here’s a review of just a few of the initiative required:
- Manually exporting 20,000+ e-mail subscriber records
- Recreating loads of automations and workflows
- Moving customer profiles, notes, and project data to the new CRM
- Reconfiguring my Stripe invoicing integration
- Setting up landing pages, promotions, and sales funnels throughout once more
- Learning a totally foreign UX and interface design
All in, I spent around 30-40 tedious hours of setup job transitioning whatever over– as well as dealing with shed efficiency throughout the switch.
However ultimately, it was a calculated investment I agreed to make. I figured some temporary discomfort would certainly settle with GoHighLevel offering a better long-lasting solution for my service, Dripify. Oh exactly how incorrect I was …
It only took me about a month of hands-on usage to understand I had made a huge blunder. The concerns began accumulating swiftly, till it reached a point I needed to reduce my losses and switch back to Keap completely.
Allow’s go through the nightmarish troubles I came across.
Safety And Security Issues & Lots of Vermin
Provided GoHighLevel positioned itself as an all-in-one automation platform, I took care to thoroughly recreate every workflow from my old Keap account.
These consisted of sequences for onboarding new email subscribers, onboarding new customers, automating follow-ups for webinar registrations, sending occasion suggestions, taking care of membership expiries and much more.
Whatever seemed to be operating penalty … up until unexpectedly it wasn’t. One early morning, I awoke to locate 171 entirely unnecessary e-mails had actually been sent to individuals that ought to NOT have obtained them. This occurred three days in a row, with a different set of 160 people each day.
I frantically attempted fixing and restoring the automation from square one. But the trouble lingered.
When I desperately connected to their assistance team, they slightly asserted “server problems” were at fault. However this explanation didn’t make any type of feeling, because the errors proceeded occurring each morning like clockwork unassociated to any downtime.
In my mind, this enormous failure was totally undesirable and just really did not benefit my business. I have hundreds of calls relying upon my automated campaigns running efficiently.
So if GoHighLevel was mosting likely to be totally unstable, just how could I leave mission-critical workflows and sensitive client information to their innovation?
The unintuitive user interface only worsened these concerns …
Irritating UX
Originating from Keap where everything was smooth and instinctive, GoHighLevel’s learning contour felt steep and complex.
Easy jobs like editing and enhancing workflows included digging with menu systems that were all over the place. Key settings were unexplainably spread in entirely different sections. Moving in between features really felt disjointed or complex.
I’ll tell you what I mean by talking about their funnel builder as an example. There were 3 separate settings panels to handle general, specific, and item setups. Yet for some crazy factor, the links to accessibility each of these core settings were spread out on contrary sides of the screen. What!?
As a person who values tidy, thoughtful design, this seriously irritated me.
It strengthened that GoHighLevel still seemed like a work-in-progress instead of a sleek product all set for prime-time usage. Their top priorities appeared focused on stuffing in every feature imaginable, with poor use as a second thought.
And talking features, I soon realized the low price tag featured pricey compromises …
Deceptive Pricing What Are The Charges For GoHighLevel
Among GoHighLevel’s largest selling points is the affordable price for access to a lot of features. Yet I quickly learned this inexpensive base price was deceitful.
They nickle-and-dimed individuals with erratic costs for core functionality. Instantly my credit card declarations had vague $10 costs from GoHighLevel here and there.
As it turned out, you obtain billed every single time you send an e-mail with their web servers. So for high quantity individuals, this added up to hundreds of dollars in unexpected costs.
Between these per-email costs and paying added for deliverability add-ons like Mailgun, my “cost effective” GoHighLevel registration wound up costing significantly greater than my Keap plan.
The reduced price tag was alluring, but just not reasonable in practice. This bait-and-switch left a negative preference in my mouth.
Email Rates Suffered
The last dealbreaker was seeing my very carefully nurtured e-mail open prices plunge nearly over night after changing to GoHighLevel.
Formerly, my target market involvement consistently hit 35-40% open prices in Keap month after month. But once I migrated their records over to GoHighLevel, performance tanked quickly to a useless 9% open rate.
No matter how much I enhanced my sending techniques or tried every repairing trick, I can barely push open prices back into the teens– still a 50%+ decrease from my previous standards What Are The Charges For GoHighLevel.
Let me repeat: my exact same target market and emails all of a sudden had horrible interaction. The only point I can believe that would certainly be triggering this was whatever was occurring behind the scenes at GoHighLevel. For an agency so depending on email marketing, this was a big deal.
In between the debilitating deliverability problems, concealed fees, busted features, and awful user interface, I had finally reached my limitation …
Why I Stop GoHighLevel after 37 Days
Just 45 days after migrating my company to GoHighLevel, I knew I had made a substantial mistake. The disadvantages substantially surpassed any type of benefits.
No software is best, but the large quantity of problems was beyond appropriate.
At the end of the day, software boils down to trust. If I can not trust it to handle critical functions capably or believe a vendor has my benefits in mind, then it’s time to leave– even after spending considerable time, money, and initiative migrating.
So I made the tough call to turn around course and return back to Keap completely just weeks after going done in on GoHighLevel. Let’s discover what I picked up from this ordeal.
Key Takeaways: What I Learned From My GoHighLevel Mistake
My time with HighLevel can be summed up as a pricey accident. However in hindsight, it instructed me a couple of vital lessons:
- Stick to what works. Do not distress what’s functioning unless something is definitively far better across the board. Modification brings danger.
- Vet asserts extensively. Marketing hype around brand-new software application frequently obscures bigger underlying flaws. Deep due persistance is essential.
- Select simpleness over features. Properly designed tools need to make your job life simpler, not more difficult and messy.
- Transparency develops trust. Nontransparent pricing, unethical reseller terms, and finger-pointing to evade issues destroys trust.
- Seek honest evaluations. Pleased support evaluates indicate less if excessive issues indicate poor general usability.
- Excellence is impossible. No solitary service can perfectly fulfill every special company need. Locate the least-bad fit.
- Evolution over revolution. Incremental improvements usually surpass risky wholesale reinvention of what currently functions fine.
Simply put, I discovered to be much more doubtful of “too great to be true” marketing cases and less tempted by the attraction of shiny new objects. The devices you make use of daily ought to make count on via openness and performance, not glossy advertising.