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About Plain Funnels
Every answer here is written by one person, checked against a real page, and dated. This is who that person is, and why you might believe them.
Who writes this
My name is Philip Borrowman. I have been building online businesses since 2012, and teaching other people to build them since 2018.
I started out as a baker running a tea room, trying every online business model going: blogging, YouTube, dropshipping, eBay reselling, freelancing. Four years of that, and almost none of it worked. In August 2016 I stopped chasing shortcuts and went back to fundamentals. That is the point things changed.
In 2018 I launched a training programme called Taking Action Online. More than 30,000 people have been through it in one form or another. I have run coaching groups, published courses, and spent years watching beginners get stuck on the same handful of things.
I live in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The business is registered in Dubai.
Why I write about systeme.io
Because I have paid for the alternatives with my own money, and I still have the invoices.
I spent $5,148 a year on Kartra, plus $1,029.60 of tax on top. I paid SamCart $199 a month. I ran my sites on WordPress for years before that. Most of my business now runs on systeme.io.
Kartra is the better tool on pure capability. More features, more automations, more of everything. That was exactly the problem. A small everyday task took me an hour and a half in Kartra and takes about six minutes in systeme.io. I did not switch to save money, though it saved me a fortune. I switched because the simpler tool made me faster.
That is the whole qualification for this site. Not that I work for systeme.io, because I do not. It is that I have used it, and the expensive things it replaces, for real, at real cost, over a long time. Which also means I am happy to tell you what it does badly.
Why this site exists
systeme.io publishes 366 help articles. 304 of them begin with the words "How to". They are genuinely good at showing you which button to press, and they assume you already know what the thing is called and why you would want it.
So there is a gap. Their guide to automating an email sequence never says what a campaign is. It links to another article, and that one does not say either. This site fills that half.
How the answers are checked
Every answer names the page it was checked against and the date it was checked. You will find that line at the bottom of each one.
Nothing here is written from memory. If a number appears on this site, it was read off a systeme.io page. When their pricing or features change these answers go stale, and the date tells you how far to trust them.
What I earn from this site
Nothing. No affiliate links anywhere on Plain Funnels, no adverts, no email list, nothing for sale.
You should have the full picture though. On my own business site I publish a systeme.io review that does carry affiliate links, and I earn a commission when somebody signs up through them. That is a different site doing a different job.
This one is deliberately kept clean, so that when an answer here says systeme.io does something badly, you have no reason to wonder whether I was paid to say otherwise.
Independence
Plain Funnels is an independent reference. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by systeme.io, and nobody there reviews or approves what appears here.
Found something wrong or out of date? A contact page is coming. Until then, the date on every answer tells you when it was last checked.