Transcription
All right, so a question I get all the time is: Katon, yeah, the high-level plan is $97, $297, $497, but what happens once I sign up? Aren't there a ton of hidden fees?
I totally understand this trepidation with starting with high-level because these fees can add up. But the beautiful part about this is that HighLevel isn't charging us for anything; they're not getting charged extra. So they're able to keep their monthly fees super low, comparatively to other CRMs of their caliber, and just bill us based on usage for each one of the C categories that I'm going to talk about today. And then again, we can pass that on to our customers. So really, all we end up paying is $97, $297, or $4.97 a month. And if you're doing things right, HighLevel is not costing you anything because you're reselling it, you have a few affiliates on board, or whatever, and it's making you money, not costing you money.
Now, as we're going through this video, if you want to check what your fees have been in previous months and sort by sub-account to see what the breakdown is of each one inside of those sub-accounts, you can go to agency-level settings, billing, and then look at your wallet. The way that this wallet works is that you can set a threshold—like $10 is the default—and every time you reach that threshold of $10, then HighLevel refills your wallet with $10, and then you slowly use those credits.
Now, if you still have questions regarding what's included in each one of the three HighLevel plans as far as features, definitely check out this video that I made. But I'll just pop up a small graphic on the screen right now that shows the differences between these three. There are small differences in the features available on each one; that's the main thing you need to understand. And, by the way, they don't list the $497 plan publicly on their website; it's more of an upgrade thing once you've joined HighLevel. So don't worry about that if you don't see it there. If you'd like to access it straight away, you can click my link below and get access to it there, plus $88,000 worth of bonuses—kind of insane—check it out.
All right, that brings me to our first quote "hidden fee" category, which is SMS and telephony—I think that's the way you say that word, telephony. I always feel silly when I say it. So anyway, phone costs. Let's call it that. The first thing here is: before you can send any texts or make any calls, you have to actually have a phone number. The way these are built really depends on your country, so I'm just going to give the US numbers here, and then I'll pop up throughout the video a screen with the cost, and you can pause the video and look for your specific country. For local numbers, it's going to be $1.15 per month, and for toll-free numbers, it's going to cost you $2.15 per month. Obviously, very reasonable to own a phone number for that amount, and HighLevel isn't marking this up at all; they're just selling it to you for what they're buying it for.
Once you've forked up your $1.15 to buy the phone number, however, you have to register it—lovely—A2P 10DLC registration in the US only is required at this point. And if you don't do it, you're likely not going to get your messages delivered. And while they may deliver without registration, you're going to get charged more by the carriers, which charge fees just for you sending texts for a HighLevel or Twilio number.
Now, the fees around this A2P 10DLC process are pretty difficult to understand, so bear with me. I promise it's going to get better. I think, uh, we're talking about fees for this video, so it's not really exciting in the first place, but it'll get easier to understand. Let's say that. So, first of all, there are two types of registration you have: you have brand registration, and then you have campaign registration. For brand registration, for most people, it's going to cost $441. If you're sending higher volume and you need that upper tier, it's going to be $485; most people don't need that though. And then, once your brand is registered and you get your campaign up and running, that's a one-time charge of $16.54. Now, in practice, I actually have seen these fees come out a little bit different—like I just had a client register one today, and it went through for $15, not $16.54—so who knows, you may get lucky, but definitely count on the higher number just to make sure.
Now, once you're registered, you do have to pay a monthly fee to stay registered, and those are up on your screen now. Depending on what type of business you run, most people are going to be on the sole prop or low-volume mixed-use case campaign, so not looking at a ton of money here, but it is something to be aware of. Now, as if all of that wasn't enough, again, the carriers are actually going to charge you fees, and if you're registered, they are half what they normally are. So those half fees are on your screen now, anywhere from 3 cents per text to 1 cent per text. Few.
All right, so now that we have the phone number, we've registered it, and we know the one-time cost and the monthly cost associated with that, how much does it cost to actually send text messages and make phone calls? Well, again, depends on your country; check the screen for more info. But if you're in the US, it's going to be .79 of a cent per message, both on inbound and outbound. Now that price is per segment, which is up to 160 characters. So if you send a message that's over 160 characters—even if it's 161 characters—it's going to cost you double that. Also, it should be noted that emojis and pictures increase that cost because they require more power to send, I guess.
So again, I know what you're thinking: Katon, that doesn't help me; like, I don't know how to conceptualize .79 of a cent. How much is that actually going to cost me per month? Well, let's say you're sending 1,000 segments per day, which would be a lot—that'd be a lot of texting for a business, but you know, it's feasible, it could happen. That means you would be sending 30,000 per month, and if you do the math, you can see that comes out to about $237 per month. Now, when I ran an agency of about 40 to 50 clients, our fee was a little bit higher than that, and that was with a lot of clients and including the phone bill. So I don't think most people are going to actually reach that amount; that's with sending like a really big volume. Most clients that I worked with never exceeded like $10 a month in text and phone costs.
Speaking of phone cost, the cost is different for outbound and inbound calls: outbound being 1.4 cents per minute and inbound being .85 cents per minute. So again, do some fancy math there. I don't expect it to come out to more than $10 or $20 per client, but there are people that can abuse that, and that's why the reselling features that HighLevel has protect you and make sure that if they run up the bill, they're actually liable for that.
All right, now moving on from telephony—my favorite word—to email services, our next incremental fee. Now, HighLevel used to let you plug in—easily let you plug in—to Mailgun, which was like the primary provider. Mailgun is a minimum of $35 per month, and that's for up to 50,000 emails sent per month. Now you can still finagle that yourself if you'd like, but there are a lot of benefits that come with using HighLevel email, even though it has turned out to be a little bit more expensive. Now, if you check the HighLevel help doc here, it's going to tell you that they are cheaper than Mailgun. As far as I can tell, this is not the case anymore; Mailgun has dropped pricing or moved some things around. However, I may be misunderstanding what plan HighLevel is really giving us when it comes to sending emails. So the information on the help doc that says HighLevel is cheaper than Mailgun may still be true. Anyways, I digress. To send 1,000 emails through the HighLevel system, it is $6.75—so not bad at all. That means 100,000 emails would cost you $67.50, which, if you can't make more than $67.50 from 100,000 emails, you probably shouldn't be sending 100,000 emails, let's put it that way.
Now, if you'd like to validate every single email that comes in before you send them an email, so that your deliverability doesn't get ruined, that is $2.50 per 1,000 validations. By the way, if you're struggling with email deliverability, make sure to check out this video where I explained the four levels of setting up email inside of HighLevel and how to make it as easy as possible.
Next up: premium triggers and actions. Now, this one is interesting because the HighLevel workflow builder is extremely robust; it replaces Zapier, PieSync, all those automation softwares—you don't even need them. But there are a few things that, again, cost on HighLevel's side that they charge us for just to make sure that they're profitable. For example: inbound webhooks, sending Slack messages, bringing in ChatGPT, and copying a contact from one sub-account to another sub-account. So these are called premium triggers and actions inside of the workflow builder, and every single time one of them executes, you will get charged 1 cent. So it's a flat rate across the board. Mine don't add up to much compared to the value that they give me, and if you're worried about this, you're worried about the wrong thing; I promise you, it's not that much, and these are super valuable things, especially considering all of the time that these automations save you, and the time that it will save you not to have to switch to something like PieSync, Zapier, etc. And those softwares can even be more expensive per execution, depending on the volume you're doing.
Now, in addition to these premium triggers and actions, HighLevel has also introduced a whole suite of AI capabilities, and there are really three ways to integrate this. First of all: conversational AI. So this is somebody messages in, and it messages back and forth with your custom-made AI chatbot. This one is 2 cents a message. Now, right now, to be honest, the best place to do this is not signing up with HighLevel; it's signing up with ZappyChat because you can have a lot more control over the messages that are sent. HighLevel's conversational AI isn't quite grown up yet, and ZappyChat charges you less per message, but you are paying an additional monthly fee, so kind of a wash there. Depending on how much volume you're doing, it may be a better choice for you on the cost side, but on the effectiveness side, probably not the feature I would be betting my whole business on right now inside of HighLevel.
Second here is the workflow AI. So when I said ChatGPT was a premium trigger and action billed at 1 cent per execution, that wasn't actually true; the ChatGPT one is billed at 3 cents per action after 100 free executions, which is nice—kind of a free trial for your clients, basically. This is just a more customizable way of doing conversational AI, but there's also other things that it can do, like generate content based on a certain trigger, check the intent of something, or translate something into another language—pretty helpful. Basically, this one has the potential to become another employee in your business that makes it so you—you can just run everything through a workflow, and ChatGPT could format something differently for you and then spit it out the other side—very cool.
Then lastly, we have written AI, and this is in the form of content. So it can write stuff inside of the email and funnel builders, and then it can also do reviews. The reviews are billed at 8 cents per response, and the written content is billed at 9 cents per 1,000 words that are written after the free trial of 500 words. I personally am not a big fan of using the content AI because I'd rather just use my GPT-4 account, but there is something to be said for having it right inside of the app for your customers. So if you can rebuild that cost to them, why not?
Next on the list is Yext. Yext is an online listings tool that automatically updates and maintains your client's business profile on 70-plus of the internet's most credible listing websites—things like Yellow Pages, Foursquare, Yelp, that type of thing. Now, for your clients to go out and buy this directly is going to cost them $11,000 a year, but you can buy it from HighLevel for just $30 a month with a minimum commitment of 3 months, and then you can resell that to your clients for whatever you want. Yext is also very—like the WordPress hosting that you can resell using HighLevel. Now, I've heard multiple hosting experts say that HighLevel's hosting is world-class when it comes to WordPress, and you being able to resell that world-class hosting at just $10 per site is absolutely insane. There's multi-multi-million dollar companies that all they do is WordPress hosting, and what's really cool is that you can get unlimited sites for $350 a month. So that one's like a cash cow, now that I think—think of it—WP Engine, Kinsta, all of these other hosting providers for WordPress charge at minimum $30 a month. So you've got a good spread to be made there, especially if this makes sense for your niche; you could sell it for $100 bucks a month because the quality is so good.
Next up: WhatsApp. This is a long-awaited feature that came to HighLevel recently in Q4 of 2023, and it is just $10 per month per sub-account. And that $10 gets you unlimited free inbound messages, but you do have to pay for the outbound messages, and again, that's a cost that Meta is charging because Meta owns WhatsApp. Now, there's a little bit of a weird thing here where you can't actually respond to somebody if it's been over 24 hours unless you have an approved, templatized response, and Meta approves those templates, and then you can send those templates to people if you're doing outreach or if you're responding to somebody after 24 hours. Now, inside of the 24-hour window, all texts are free, but outside of that 24-hour window, the text costs up to 22 cents per message if you're sending a marketing message, but if it's a different type of message—like authenticating someone or providing customer service—then it can go down to .88 of a cent. Again, that's in the US; check your screen for prices in other countries.
All right, we're getting close; bear with me. There are a few other things called Marketplace services that HighLevel offers on top of their monthly fees. These are very—kind of extra things that most people won't end up getting, but they are available, so I'll tell them to you now. Number one: basic account setup. When you sign up, if you'd like HighLevel to go in and configure your account for you, that's going to be $2.99. However, I'll let you know a little secret: if you sign up using my link below and you pay for the $297 plan upfront, they're going to give you that basic account setup for free. Make sure you use my link below, or you won't get that benefit. Now, an advanced account setup is going to cost $1,000; that's just going deeper, setting things up for you. Priority support is another $2.99 a month; haven't heard amazing things about this, but basically, if you upgrade, then you're able to get faster support responses. Next up is a white-labeled mobile app and Zapier zap. So if you're really going—going hard on the SaaS side of things and you want to make sure that you have your own mobile app, that's going—going to cost you another $500 a month or $1,500 per quarter. The white-label Zapier zap is an extra $50 a month. Now, the Eliza agent platform—this allows you to put every single lead that's coming into all of your sub-accounts into one spot—is $500 a month. They just recently lowered the price on that, which is amazing—super cheap to amalgamate everything if that's something that you need to do; makes sense for your model.
And that's it, folks. That is all you need to know about all of the quote "hidden fees" inside of HighLevel. These fees should be completely free to you if you rebuild them to your customers, and you know, it's just worth it at the end of the day. This stuff's going to save you so much time. Before you click off, please hear my pitch: if you're already a HighLevel customer, consider upgrading under me for a ton of free bonuses; check the link below. If you're not a HighLevel customer yet, go ahead and check the link below as well; there's a lot of really cool stuff there that can help you with your journey. Thanks so much for tuning into this video; we'll see you in the next one.