A few years ago, a company contacted me to help them with their slow WordPress website.
Long story short, they ran a newsletter plugin, sending out email notifications to a 10,000 subscriber base for the three blog posts they published daily.
The poor shared hosting solution was gasping for air as the PHP workers were timing out, crashing and restarting.
Subscribers with a surname starting with the letter “P” never got any of the emails as the process started again for each newly published blog post.
I moved the system over to Hubspot CRM and advocated for never sending newsletters from a WordPress website!
Last month I moved away from ActiveCampaign to run my newsletter on the WordPress plugin FluentCRM!
Wait? Whaaaaat!!
Ya crazy, Wil?
Maybe. 🤪
This newsletter is about budgeting and keeping an eye on your money in and money out.
The Back Story
Here’s what happened.
I’ve been with ActiveCampaign for about 5 years and was happy with the service.
In March 2023 ActiveCampaign switched to a new business model.
Like many other email service providers, they had core plans to move up and down on based on the number of contacts you were managing. The new model has split the service into two separate offers, one for sales and one for marketing.
I was on the A$30/month plan, billed annually. I received a polite email saying I would now pay A$74/month for the same service. That’s their lowest plan!
So I went from paying A$365 annually to a whopping A$888 yearly. That’s a 143% price increase!
There are additional features that I could use, but all I want is the core email marketing system and some automation.
Money In – Money Out
Being a solopreneur, I keep tight control of my budget and run a lean business.
I use a simple cashflow manager spreadsheet for tracking money coming in and out.
When I plug in numbers that increase even by 33%, cells turn red. This price increase was a bloodbath!
I pay a lot for online services, and I’m always trying to keep costs down. It’s one of the three ways to increase your profit.
- Charge more
- Sell more
- Spend less 👈
I needed to find an alternative solution.
The Hunt
I evaluated many other SaaS email marketing systems (EMS) and CRMs in the past before moving to ActiveCampaign, and not a lot has changed in the marketplace.
After doing my due diligence this time around, FluentCRM kept coming up with favourable reviews, but I pushed it aside – thoughts of anything slowing down my 99% A-Grade Google Core Web Vitals score sent shivers down my spine. The horror!
Against my best judgement, I reached out to my community and asked if anyone was using FluentCRM and their thoughts.
Guess what? A tonne of people are using it and seem to love it, including the awesome Chris Lema.
FluentCRM
Combining the fact that my subscriber lists are still very small, less than 1000, and I’m only sending out a biweekly newsletter, I started to read the reviews of FluentCRM.
I was pleasantly surprised by the functionality provided by the plugin for the USD$129 yearly subscription price.
So, I’ve set up an instance of FluentCRM on my WilBrown.com community portal site, where I host my online courses for WordPress developers and designers.
I’ve ported over all the automation and templates I had in the other system, including this newsletter.
Using FluentCRM on a subdomain doesn’t affect the speed of my main website, and with the webhooks and automation the plugin provides, I can easily grab subscriber data from anywhere and add them to my lists.
I save approximately A$600 per year!
Winner winner, chicken dinner. 🍗🐔
If my subscriber list grows to over 10,000, I may need to review which system I use, but that’s a problem for another day. A very happy problem to have! 🙂
I think it’s important for freelance WordPress designers and developers to keep an eye on cash flow – especially during high inflation and crazy price increases.
How do you keep track of your spondulicks, and how often do you check what’s coming in and going out? Have you had to change services recently due to price increases?💸
Send me an email and let me know. 📨
Until next time.
Wil.
