HighLevel, a.k.a. GoHighLevel, is a one-stop sales and marketing platform that’s primarily geared toward digital marketing agencies. As an all-in-one platform, it provides a variety of tools for users to run their businesses conveniently and efficiently: landing pages, an inbound phone system, forms, marketing emails, voicemail, SMS, analytics, scheduling, payment processing, CRM, and more.
Despite being a relatively new company – it was founded in 2018 – HighLevel has become very popular recently, as these stats indicate. In that light, if you’re a business or an agency owner, or work for a digital agency, considering HighLevel as a new solution for your business needs is the most natural thing to do. As pricing usually plays an important part in the decision-making process, here we decided to explore that side of HighLevel.
Before we continue, one note on the platform’s name. Here, for the most part, we’ll use HighLevel, but you’ll occasionally see the abbreviation HL as well. We prefer to use HighLevel over GoHighLevel since this is the actual name of the platform, while GoHighLevel is its domain name (URL). We’ll use HL only when we mention the name of the platform more than once in the same sentence. Now, with that out of the way, let’s explore HighLevel’s pricing plans.
HighLevel Pricing Plans
A peculiarity of HighLevel that we’re not exactly a huge fan of is that the company is not very transparent when it comes to pricing. It’s strange and even frustrating not to be able to find anything beyond the most basic information on a platform’s prices and plans. This is presumably one of the reasons why transparency regarding pricing is common practice among e-commerce, sales, marketing, and automation platforms. However, HighLevel is an exception, and there’s hardly anything we can do about it.
Since there’s barely any readily available information on the pricing plans on the HighLevel website, we have to resort to other means to explore this facet of the platform. Apart from digging and research, another way to find out more on this important topic is simply to sign up for a free trial. However, the bummer is that HighLevel requires you to leave your credit card and personal information, which is not something we like much either.
Anyway, the HighLevel pricing system includes three pricing plans and one plan add-on:
- Agency Starter Account or simply Starter (full pricing plan)
- Agency Unlimited Account or Freelancer (full pricing plan)
- Agency Pro (full pricing plan)
- White Label Mobile App + Custom Zap Upgrade (a plan upgrade or a plan add-on)
In addition to these four paid packages, HighLevel offers a 14-day free trial of both the Starter and the Freelancer plans, which is pretty neat. As for the Agency Pro plan and the plan add-on, there’s no free trial, but if you can contact the HighLevel team by email and ask about the specifics you’re interested in.
Now, let’s look at the four paid offerings and see the features they include.
The Starter Plan
As far as billing is concerned, HighLevel offers two options: monthly and annual. So, the Starter plan costs $97/month (monthly billing) and $972/year (annual billing). As usual, the annual billing includes a discount, and the fee for the annual subscription is the same as if you were paying $81/month.
On its website, HighLevel singles out the following three features of this plan, probably because it finds them to be the most important:
- Twilio allows two-way texting.
- Mailgun allows unlimited email sending.
- Single account: you can create an account and use it either for yourself or for a client.
Let’s explore these three features further.
Twilio
Twilio is a separate platform that HighLevel allows you to connect to through your HL account. It belongs to the category of PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). A PaaS is a cloud-based platform that enables you to take care of every important aspect of an app’s lifecycle. More precisely, it allows you to create, test, manage, run, and update web applications.
Twilio refers to itself as a customer engagement platform. Essentially, this means that it allows you to communicate with users’ phones from the web via voice and text messages. You can make phone calls, send SMS and email, contact users on WhatsApp, etc. In the HighLevel context, Twilio allows you to do two-way texting – sending and receiving text messages from within your HL account. This is possible via API calls.
Mailgun
Similar to Twilio, Mailgun is also a separate company. It's an API-based email delivery service that allows you to “send, receive, and track email effortlessly,” as it says on the Mailgun official website.
As we mentioned earlier, thanks to Mailgun, you can send an unlimited number of emails from your HighLevel account.
Single Account
This means that with the Starter plan, you can only have one business account. It’s key to understand that this implies that you can’t work with multiple clients from the same account. Or, more precisely, if you want to do that you’ll have to pay the full plan fee for every single client, which means that ten clients would cost you $970/month. A pretty hefty sum, isn’t it?
That said, as an agency owner, you can charge your clients whatever sum you think is fair for your services, including the monthly fees for the Starter plan as well.
More Features
In addition to the three features we discussed, HighLevel offers more tools with the Starter plan. Here are some of them:
- Different types of visual easy-to-use builders: workflow, campaign, landing page, website, membership, email, form, and survey builders.
- A 2-way email functionality allows you to send and receive emails from your HighLevel account.
- Pipeline creation and management allows you to build different types of pipelines (funnels), define their purpose and stages, create different opportunities inside your pipelines, edit and delete existing pipelines, and more.
- Integrations: HighLevel allows you to add awesome and helpful third-party apps to expand the capacities of the platform, such as Stripe for payment processing, QuickBooks for accounting, DropInBlog for blogging and content marketing, and more.
- Calendar allows you to schedule appointments and other important events.
- Power dialer allows you to call selected contacts from large contact lists continuously, hence quickly and efficiently. For instance, call the first contact, wait for a certain time and if they don’t answer, automatically continue with the second contact. Then, if the second answers, proceed with the third after you finish the conversation, etc.
- Call tracking helps you understand how leads find your or your client’s number and decide to call. For instance, is it an ad they see on Facebook, a Google ad, or maybe something else that makes them call? This way, you can learn what channels help you get the most traffic and leads.
- Analytics dashboard allows you to keep track of different types of stats related to your revenue, customers, and so on.
- Account snapshots: Snapshots are, essentially, account templates that allow you to copy functionality from an existing to a new client account and build new client accounts in a much quicker and more efficient way.
- Email support: In case you stumble upon a problem or have questions for HighLevel, you can contact support via email and enjoy the perks of a responsive customer support team that’s on top of any problems that may arise.
Who Can Benefit From the Starter Plan?
Since it allows you to have only one business account, the Starter plan is well suited for business owners who want to enjoy the perks of a one-stop platform. More specifically, if your business is growing and you need a sales and marketing platform with a CRM functionality to manage your business and audience more efficiently at an affordable price, the Starter HighLevel plan can work well for you.
Additionally, as we already mentioned earlier, agencies can use it to set up a separate client account per plan.
The Freelancer Plan
The price of the Freelancer plan, a.k.a. Agency Unlimited plan, is $297/month (monthly billing) or $2,976/year (annual billing, same as $248/month with the discount). Price-wise, this is a big jump from the previous plan, but as you’ll see very soon, the included features justify the much higher price tag.
It goes without saying that the Freelancer plan includes all the features from the Starter plan. On top of those, you get access to the following two features that HighLevel picks out as the most important (they’re the only features mentioned on the company’s website):
- Unlimited sub-accounts: HighLevel lets you set up as many client (sub)accounts as you need.
- Branded desktop app: Allows you to use a custom domain and customize the platform completely in line with your own agency’s brand.
Let’s look at these two features in more detail.
Unlimited Sub-Accounts
With this feature, the Freelancer plan solves the problem of the previous Starter plan.
If you’re an agency owner or an agency employee, once you start having a larger number of clients, it really makes sense to subscribe to the Freelancer plan, precisely because of the unlimited sub-accounts. This plan allows you to have your own HighLevel account and work with multiple or even a host of client accounts at the same time without paying a penny above the $297/month (monthly) or $2,976/year (yearly).
Branded Desktop App
Building a recognizable brand is a must for any digital marketing agency. HighLevel allows you to do that in the most efficient way: by customizing and white-labeling your HL desktop web app. What does this mean exactly?
It means that your HighLevel-powered agency will not just look and feel the way you want it, but you’ll also have your branding (logo, colors, and so on) all over the app, with no traces of HL’s own branding – just as if it were your own app.
More Features
On top of these two features, the Freelancer plan offers other perks as well, some of which are the following:
- API access allows you to use the HighLevel API to customize and manage certain aspects of your agency, such as your calendar and scheduling.
- Chat and phone support: Both of these options, especially phone support, allow you to get help in a much more direct and quick way compared to only email support.
- A partner program allows you to become a HighLevel affiliate, partner, or certified partner, which can bring you many benefits.
Who Can Benefit From the Freelancer Plan?
With this plan, HighLevel caters to agencies and freelance marketing experts with a larger customer base. The white label desktop app and unlimited sub-accounts clearly show that it’s not for regular business owners with a single HighLevel account.
The Agency Pro Plan
The Agency Pro plan costs $497/month or $4,968/year (equivalent to $414/month). It’s interesting that HighLevel doesn’t even mention this plan on its website. Anyway, with the Agency Pro plan, you get access to everything from the Agency Unlimited plan plus the following features:
- SaaS mode allows you to resell or, more precisely, offer the HighLevel software as your own in return for a fixed monthly or yearly fee, just like any other SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform out there (for instance, Shopify). Some of the mechanisms that enable you to resell the HighLevel software are automated pricing, automated creation of sub-accounts, and automated blocking of users who don’t pay their fees.
- Split testing allows you to test out two variants of a page with your audience to see which one converts better.
- Email, phone, and text rebilling: This is related to the SaaS mode and, essentially, it means that you can bill your clients for the services you get with HighLevel (Twilio, Mailgun, and similar).
- Advanced API access allows you to perform even more advanced API operations and do sophisticated customization of HighLevel.
- Agent reporting: Essentially, more advanced reporting and stats.
- AI conversational bot: HighLevel has developed an AI-powered booking chatbot “on top of Google’s Dialogflow technology” that you can use in your workflows to automate appointment scheduling.
Who Can Benefit From the Agency Pro Plan?
The name of the plan says it all: this plan is for professional agencies. We would add that the Agency Pro plan is for established marketing agencies that are experienced and skilled in using HighLevel and understand how to get the most out of the software. That’s why they can rebill and resell HighLevel as their own SaaS.
The White Label Mobile App + Custom Zap Upgrade
As its name suggests, this is not a stand-alone pricing plan, but an upgrade or a plan add-on available for subscribers to the Agency Unlimited plan. In fact, a subscription to that plan is a prerequisite for HighLevel customers to be able to enjoy the perks of the White Label Mobile App + Custom Zap Upgrade.
This plan add-on costs $497/month. However, since it’s an upgrade on top of the Agency Unlimited Account plan, you need to pay this fee on top of that plan’s fee, which amounts to $794/month. In return, you get the following perks:
- Custom Mobile App allows you to be a fully branded digital marketing agency.
- Zapier allows you to create custom Zaps tailored for your business needs.
Custom White Label Mobile App
With this upgrade, the HighLevel team will undertake the project of building a completely customized mobile app in line with your business needs and requirements. The mobile app won’t be just a custom product tailored for your specific needs; it will also be a white-label product, just like the HighLevel desktop app with the Agency Unlimited plan.
Together with the branded desktop app, the custom white-label mobile app will allow you to operate as a fully branded digital marketing agency powered by HighLevel, but without the HL branding anywhere in your apps.
Custom Zap
Zapier is one of the most popular platforms that allow you to integrate third-party apps with whatever other platform you’re using. With Zapier, you can create Zaps, which are automated workflows that allow you to connect two or more apps. The apps can communicate with each other seamlessly and perform certain actions for you automatically when triggered by external events. The following image from the Zapier website shows some examples of Zaps and explains exactly what we mean by this:
These are just examples of what Zaps are and how they work in general, but not necessarily something that you can do on HighLevel. They show very clearly what we mean by events (for instance, “when a lead comes in”) and actions (“send an email”). We showed them strictly for illustrative purposes.
Who Can Benefit From This Upgrade?
This upgrade is for highly successful agencies and companies that want to go to the next level regarding customization as well as cover all the aspects of branding presence (desktop and mobile). Also, the steep price implies that the upgrade is suitable for larger agencies/companies that have money to burn.
Value for Money
Is HighLevel good value for money? The answer is definitely affirmative, as the majority of users and customers would confirm. This platform offers a lot of quality features and possibilities rarely found in a single place. As a one-stop sales and marketing platform, it really does replace so many other types of software, thus saving you money in the long run.
Even if you don’t use all the available features – for instance, you may think that a specialized website builder like Webflow or Wix would be a much better solution than the built-in HL site builder – HighLevel can still be cost-effective, thanks to features like CRM, white labeling, SaaS mode, etc.
Of course, there’s a limit to how far you can go with the “I don’t need all these features, but I still need HighLevel.” After all, it’s an all-in-one platform and that’s how it should be approached. If you only need one of its features but can live without the other 99, maybe it’s better to look elsewhere to find a more suitable business solution.
Over and Out
In this article, we reviewed the HighLevel pricing and tried to share with you the information we managed to collect on this platform’s pricing plans the best we could. We hope you’ve found this to be a helpful and informative read.
There’s a lot that’s great about HighLevel: the uniqueness of some of its features (SaaS mode, white-label desktop and mobile apps, custom Zaps, etc.), good customer support, overall quality of the tools, and last but not least, its pricing. All things considered, it’s a great one-stop platform. We just wish it was more transparent about its pricing and there was more easily obtainable information on its plans and upgrades.