Nobody sold you a bad thing. You're simply not the person it was built for.
So this page isn't an argument for switching. It's a list of what you could do instead, which as far as I can see comes to four things. The fourth one is ours, and I'll say so when we get there so you can weigh it accordingly.
Two things before the four
I'm not going to tell you what GoHighLevel costs. Their prices change, we don't keep a dated copy of their pricing page, and a number I half-remember is worse than no number at all. Go and look at your last invoice. That's the only figure in this that's about you.
The second thing is less comfortable. None of the four below will fill a quiet diary. If enquiries have gone thin, the software isn't the cause and swapping it won't fix it. What these options change is where your evenings go and what you're paying while they go there. If you're hoping a new tool brings people through the door, none of this is for you and I'd rather say that on the way in.
Where it is genuinely the better buy
GoHighLevel is built for agencies. People whose day job is running marketing for other businesses, several at a time, copying a setup from one account into the next and watching leads move along a board. That's a real job, it needs a big tool, and for that job this is a good one. If some of what you sell is setting all this up for other practitioners, stay where you are. Nothing on this page is an upgrade for you.
The reason it feels heavy in a therapy room isn't that it's badly made. It's that you're one of the accounts it was designed to manage, rather than the agency doing the managing. Every word it asks you to work in - opportunities, campaigns, stages - is vocabulary borrowed from a business that isn't yours.
Option one: stay, and use a tenth of it
This is a real answer and I'd rather list it than pretend it isn't one.
If what you built works, if you can find the two screens you use with your eyes shut, and if the bill is small enough that it never crosses your mind on a slow month, leave it alone. Half the businesses on earth pay for more software than they use and get through the week perfectly well. There's no prize for tidiness.
What usually ends this arrangement isn't the money on its own. It's the month the bill lands in the same week as three cancellations, and you sit down and add up what you're paying per screen you actually open. Justine Lette, who runs Hypnosis New Zealand, was paying over $100 a month elsewhere and using a fraction of it, which is a very ordinary way for this to finish.
Option two: pay somebody to run it
More people do this than admit to it. There's a whole trade of freelancers who will build one of these setups and mind it for a monthly fee, and the good ones are worth what they charge.
What you buy is competence. What it costs, on top of the retainer and the subscription underneath it, is that the thing you were uneasy about - not understanding your own system - stops being temporary and becomes the arrangement. There's a specific way it fails, too, and it's worth naming: when they go quiet for three weeks in August, your reminders and your confirmations go quiet with them, and you hear about it from a client rather than from a dashboard.
Option three: strip it back to almost nothing
An email list, a folder of recordings, a payment link.
Don't dismiss this. Practitioners run perfectly good practices on it for years and it costs close to nothing. The price you pay is that you become the filing system. You'll send the same recording to the same person twice, you'll answer the same question in four different inboxes, and you'll have no idea who opened anything, which hardly matters when you're seeing people one at a time and matters enormously the moment you're teaching eight of them at once.
An aside that helps nobody sell anything: the best piece of client follow-up I've ever seen had no software in it whatsoever. A hypnotherapist in Devon wrote the date of the next session on the back of her own business card, in pen, and handed it over at the door. People kept them in their wallets for months. No tool on this page beats a card in a wallet.
Option four: something built for teaching rather than for selling
This one is ours. Read it with that in mind.
CourseSpaces is a course and membership platform for solo practitioners. The difference isn't the feature list, it's what the software assumes you're doing. It assumes you have people learning something from you over weeks, that you want to know how far along they are, and that you aren't running campaigns on behalf of anybody else's business.
One menu along the top. Your courses behind one item, your clients behind another, your community, your calendar and your video library behind a third.
Your three levels are already three courses
If you train other hypnotherapists, the shape is sitting in your head already. Foundation, practitioner, advanced. Each of those is a course. Inside them, lessons can be video, audio, a PDF, a written page, a quiz, or an assignment you mark by hand and send back with feedback written on it. Certificates on completion. You can release lessons week by week instead of handing over the whole thing on day one, and the automatic emails go out as students move.
When you'd rather not start at an empty screen, describe the course in a sentence and let it write the first draft.
It won't come back in your voice. It'll come back as something to argue with, and arguing with a draft is a far better use of a Tuesday evening than staring at nothing.
What your client opens
They log in and see your brand, your colours and the things you've given them. Not ours.
Who should shut this tab
- If part of your income is running marketing for other practitioners, this
replaces none of it. Stay exactly where you are.
- If what keeps you on GoHighLevel is texting clients from a business number,
we have no answer for that.
- If you haven't written a course yet and your income is all one-to-one
sessions, this changes nothing for you this month. Come back when the first one exists.
- You can point your own domain at your portal. What we do not offer is full
white-label hosting, where every address a student sees is yours.
What it costs
$47 a month. One price, no tiers to decode.
That covers unlimited courses and products, up to 1,000 active students, hosted video with 1TB of bandwidth a month, the AI course builder, the AI assistant with 1,500 messages a month, unlimited communities and one to one chat. Extra video bandwidth is $10 per terabyte if you ever reach it. We take 0% of your sales: you bring your own Stripe account, you pay Stripe's own 2.9% plus 30 cents, and nothing else comes to us. There's a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Where to start
If the thing you are actually weighing is a community rather than a funnel, the Skool arithmetic is the one to read instead.
There's a 30-day free trial and it doesn't ask for a card.
Move nothing. Take the course you already teach, put it in, add the three clients who message you most, and leave everything else running exactly as it is for a fortnight. Then put the two bills side by side and see which one you'd defend to somebody else.