GoHighLevel workflows: how the automation builder works

Triggers: what starts a workflow

Every workflow begins with a trigger, and HighLevel groups them by area so the right event is easy to find. Contact triggers include Contact Created, Contact Tag and Birthday Reminder. Event triggers include Form Submitted, Inbound Webhook and Email Events, which fire on delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, spam or unsubscribe. Appointment, opportunity, payment, course, community, certificate and IVR triggers cover the rest of the account, and connected sources add their own, such as a Shopify order, a Google Ads lead form or a comment on a Facebook post. Trigger filters narrow the start condition to one form or one pipeline, so a single event does not set off several workflows by accident.

Actions, branches and waits

After the trigger, actions do the work. Contact actions create or find a contact, update a field, add or remove a tag, assign an owner, add a note or create a task. Communication actions send an email, SMS, WhatsApp message, Instagram DM, Messenger or live chat reply, post to Slack, or place a call. Internal tools shape the path: If/Else splits contacts by a condition, Wait pauses for a time or an event, Goal Event moves a contact ahead once they convert, Go To jumps between sections, and Split divides traffic for testing. Opportunity, appointment, payment, course and community actions reach the rest of HighLevel, for example moving a deal to a new stage or granting a course offer.

• If/Else: send contacts down different paths by tag, field value or behavior
• Wait: hold a contact for a set time or until an event happens
• Goal Event: skip ahead once the contact books, pays or replies
• Webhook and Custom Webhook: send contact data to another system
• Custom Code and Text Formatter: reshape data between steps

Premium steps and what they cost

Most workflow steps are free. HighLevel charges for a defined group of premium steps: inbound webhooks, custom webhooks, Google Sheets and Slack actions, steps that come from Marketplace and LC apps, and the Workflow AI actions (Decision Maker, Intent Detection, Summarize and Translate). Each sub-account gets 100 free premium executions for its lifetime, and they do not reset. After that each execution costs $0.01, charged to the agency wallet. GPT steps that call an outside AI model are a separate category, billed at the model provider's price with no markup, according to HighLevel.

Busy accounts can subscribe to a Workflow Pro tier instead. Starter at $10 a month includes 10,000 premium executions and charges $0.008 for each one over. Growth at $25 includes 30,000 with $0.006 overage, and Scale at $50 includes 65,000 with $0.004 overage. Standard steps never count toward these allowances. Agencies can pass premium execution costs on to clients through HighLevel's rebilling settings.

Three ways to start a workflow

The Workflows page offers three starting points. Build using AI lets you describe the automation in plain language and generates the trigger, actions and structure for review. Templates give you a pre-built flow to adjust. Starting from scratch means choosing a trigger, adding trigger filters if needed, then adding actions one by one. Whichever route you choose, nothing runs until the workflow is published, and the workflow settings decide details such as whether a contact may enter the same workflow more than once. Build and publish in a test sub-account first when the workflow sends messages to real customers.

Workflows worth building first

For a new client account, a handful of workflows does most of the work. An instant text and email to every new form lead, plus an alert to the owner, stops leads from going cold. Appointment reminders cut no-shows. A thank-you message with a review link after a payment builds reviews without anyone remembering to ask. A slower sequence for leads who went quiet brings some back. All of these use standard triggers and actions, so none of them adds premium charges beyond the texts and emails they send. Snapshots let an agency build them once and load them into every new sub-account.

Costs add up differently for every account. Put your numbers into the HighLevel cost calculator, or browse every HighLevel feature.

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