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Last updated 9 September 2026. Every answer here is drafted with AI against sources I choose and pin, checked line by line, and published under one person's name. This is who that person is, what he has actually run on systeme.io since 2021, and why you might believe him.
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.
I opened a systeme.io account in 2021, and dismissed it
In 2021 I was on WordPress, running Thrive Themes, All in One SEO and dozens of other plugins. systeme.io was spreading fast and one of my own students had started using it, so I opened an account to see what the fuss was about.
My verdict after an hour was that it was nothing special. It looked much like it does now and it was primitive underneath, with only a handful of functions. Nothing in it was any use to me at that size.
Two things did stick, though. There was almost nothing to learn, and it was fast. Moving between tabs and getting something finished took no waiting, and the whole thing felt intuitive in a way the tools I was paying for did not.
The first thing I built was a plain email automation, to see how far it went. That is what settled it. I was running far more advanced automations in GetResponse at the time, and this could not go near them.
One more thing put me off, and it was not the software. Their Facebook group was thick with spam. People posted templates and guides for scraping leads out of the group itself, with the usual comment below to get this file. It worked, which is why there was so much of it, and I was surprised the admins allowed it.
So I closed the tab. I also kept an eye on it.
What I got wrong about it
I was right that it was too basic in 2021. I was wrong about where it was going, and I was wrong for three more years.
I looked in every few months. The Facebook group, spam and all, turned out to be a decent way to see what they were shipping, and they kept adding things. By 2024 I was testing it properly. It was smooth, it was fast, and it cost a fraction of what I was handing over every year.
What kept me away by then was not doubt about the software. Moving platform is a 200-hour job at the very least, and it disrupts your audience as well as your week. Once you are ingrained in a system, everything you own is inside it, and back then everybody was on WordPress or ClickFunnels for exactly that reason.
What finally moved me was the sprawl. Five or six websites, dozens of plugins, and too much of my week spent on support tickets getting them to talk to each other.
I went full time on systeme.io in early 2025. Getting the rest of the way out has taken far longer than going in did.
What I run on it now
Nearly all of it runs on systeme.io now. Every email I send is sent from it. My sales pages, funnels, courses, images and files all sit under one login.
That is over 100 funnels, around 10,000 contacts, five or more courses, and hundreds of thousands of emails sent.
The word doing the work in that first sentence is nearly. A business this size does not move in a weekend. I have been unpicking mine for eighteen months and I am not finished: a handful of straggler sites are being moved across right now, and there are two subscriptions below with terms still running on them. When those expire, that is the end of it.
Vimeo I am keeping for now, and that one is pure laziness. Around 4,000 videos in the library and I have not moved them. If I were starting today I would not have a Vimeo account at all.
The awards, and what they are actually for
One award hangs on my wall. It reads for earning $10,000 with the systeme.io affiliate program.
So here is the conflict, in plain words, before you read another line of this site. I have earned money promoting systeme.io. Not here. On my own business site, where I publish a systeme.io review that carries affiliate links and pays me a commission when somebody signs up through one. Plain Funnels carries none of that, and the section further down sets out exactly what this site earns.
There is a second one at $100,000, and that one is for revenue earned as a course seller on the platform rather than for affiliate commissions. I have not claimed it yet, so there is nothing to photograph. The next tier up is $1,000,000, and that will take some time.
Here is the honest reading of all three. They tell you I have been inside this product for years, at a volume most people writing about it have not. They do not tell you that any particular answer on this site is correct. Nothing on this page does that. The source line under each answer does that.
What I paid before this
I have paid for the alternatives with my own money, and I still have the invoices.
Kartra cost me $5,148 for the year, plus $1,029.60 of tax on top. SamCart was $199 a month. Before either of them I ran everything on WordPress. At my worst point I was paying over $1,000 a month in hosting and plugin licences, including three years of fees on plugins holding up courses I had already stopped selling.
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.
Two of the tools systeme.io replaced are still winding down, and you can see it on the dates. GetResponse ran my email, on a plan covering 10,000 contacts, paid a year at a time.
WordPress hosting was SiteGround, renewed in three and six month blocks. Twelve consecutive months of it looks like this.
Both of those bills are the tail end of the move rather than the middle of it. Neither renews. I am telling you about them because a review that only shows you the tidy version is not worth reading, and because the eighteen months is the honest answer to how long a switch takes when you have a lot to move.
What I have never used
SMS. It is built in, it runs from inside your automations, and I have not touched it once. I am keen to, because I have used WhatsApp for the same job and I want to see how a direct text compares.
So if you are reading an answer here about SMS, you are reading documentation I have checked rather than a feature I have lived with. That distinction holds across this whole site, and it is why every answer names its source.
Getting a real answer out of their support
This is not documented anywhere, and it has saved me more time than any feature.
The AI chatbot handles basic questions and gets specific ones wrong. It can tell you what a tag is. It cannot follow what you are trying to do when your setup is unusual, which is exactly when you needed help.
Email support is genuinely good, and it runs seven days a week. The same limit still applies though. Ask something tailored to your own business and the first reply can miss the point.
The trick is to notice the moment they have not understood you, and ask to be passed to a superior. You then get somebody who understands marketing rather than somebody trained on the common questions. That is a fair split. A first-line agent is not employed to reason about your funnel.
Why this site exists
systeme.io publishes 366 help articles. 304 of them begin with the words "How to". Only 25 explain what a thing is.
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. 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
These answers are written with AI, so it is fair to ask what that leaves me doing. I choose the questions, from a gap I measured in systeme.io's own help centre. I find and save the source page before anything is written, and nothing may be written from memory. I read the finished answer. Where the documentation is silent or wrong, I test it in a real account myself. The writing is assisted. The claims are mine, and so is the blame when one is wrong.
Nothing here is written from memory. If a number appears on this site, it was read off a page or tested in a real account in the same session it was written.
Every answer names what it was checked against and the date. Three kinds of source are allowed, in this order:
- A published page, named and linked, so you can open it yourself.
- A live account check, used when the documentation is silent or wrong, cited with the date and flagged as tested rather than read.
- A reply from systeme.io support, cited with its date and subject. These are never linked, because there is nothing for you to open.
A page you can check always outranks an email. Where both cover the same fact, the page is the source and the email is only corroboration.
Every citation is then checked twice, and the second check is done by a separate AI that has no memory of writing the answer. It gets the finished page and the saved source and nothing else, and has to point at the line that supports each factual sentence. Anything it cannot support gets cut. This catches more than a re-read does, because re-reading your own work while holding the same wrong assumption produces the same error with more confidence attached.
As of 17 September 2026 that is 154 answers across 178 pages, carrying 678 citations. The build refuses to publish an answer with no source on it.
Where this site has been wrong
Two answers here were wrong. Both for the same reason: I reported systeme.io's own documentation faithfully, and the documentation was behind the product.
The clearest case is their developer page, which lists five capabilities for the MCP server and presents that as the whole list. A live connection exposes 113 tools.
That changed how I work. Where a live account can settle a question the documentation leaves open or answers wrongly, I check the account. It is cited as an account check with the date, and the source panel says plainly that it was tested rather than read. You can tell the two apart at a glance on every answer.
What I earn from this site
Nothing. No affiliate links anywhere on Plain Funnels, no adverts, no email list, nothing for sale.
The award higher up this page is the reason that sentence matters. I do earn commissions from systeme.io elsewhere, and this site is deliberately kept clean of them, 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.
Corrections and contact
I re-read the answers on a routine basis rather than waiting to be told. When one changes, the date under it changes with it, so the line saying when it was last checked is always true. That date is also what the sitemap reports, which means a stale answer cannot quietly look fresh.
If an answer here is wrong, tell me. Write to philip at takingaction dot online, say which answer and what is wrong with it, and I will check it against the source again and either correct the page or explain why it stands. A correction is the most useful mail this site can get, because every answer on it is a claim that something is true.