94 |
| Descript | Video and podcast editing | $96 |
| WordPress (managed hosting, 22 sites) | Client websites | $660 |
| **Total** | | **$3,213/month** |
Beyond the raw cost, the real problem was that none of these tools talked to each other without Zapier acting as the glue — and Zapier only held things together until a workflow broke and no one noticed for a week.
"Our client data was everywhere," said Marcus Webb, Bright Digital's operations manager. "A lead would come in through Typeform, get pushed to HubSpot via Zapier, someone would send a Slack message about it, and by the time the right person followed up it had been four days. We had the tools. We just had no coherent system."
The Problem Compounds at Scale
The fragmentation was manageable at 12 clients. At 22, it was not.
Monthly reporting alone — pulling data from Hootsuite, HubSpot, SEMrush, and individual client Google Analytics accounts, then formatting it into client-facing reports — consumed an estimated 28 hours per month of combined team time. That is nearly a full work week every month spent on report compilation, not strategy.
Client onboarding was another friction point. When Bright Digital signed a new client, the process involved: setting up a new WordPress site, creating social media accounts in Hootsuite, adding the client to HubSpot, setting up a Typeform for their lead capture, connecting it all with Zapier, and creating project documentation in Notion. Every new client took approximately two days of setup work.
The team was also running client websites on managed WordPress hosting — 22 individual sites with 22 individual billing relationships, 22 sets of plugin updates to manage, and no single dashboard showing the health of all sites at once. Three times in 2024, a client site went down on a weekend and no one caught it until Monday.
Discovering the Alternative
Marcus began evaluating alternatives in September 2025, prompted by a monthly finance review that showed their SaaS spend had increased 34% year over year with no corresponding increase in team capacity or client delivery quality.
His criteria were specific:
1. CRM with email automation and pipeline tracking
2. Social media scheduling with multi-client management
3. Website builder for client sites with a client-friendly editor
4. Reporting that pulled data from one place rather than ten
5. White-label capability so client-facing tools showed Bright Digital's branding
"I had almost accepted that we needed to live with the complexity," Marcus said. "I assumed any tool that did all of this would do each piece badly. I was wrong."
After a two-week evaluation against three platforms, Bright Digital chose [We.Inc](/pricing).
The Migration: What It Actually Took
Bright Digital's migration ran over six weeks from mid-October to late November 2025. Marcus ran the migration in phases:
**Phase 1 (Weeks 1–2): CRM and email**
The team exported their HubSpot contact database and imported it into We.Inc's CRM. [Email sequences](/features/email-sequences) were rebuilt inside We.Inc, replacing the HubSpot workflows. They used this phase to clean up their contact database — removing duplicates and updating deal stages that had not been touched in months.
**Phase 2 (Weeks 3–4): Social media and client websites**
They migrated social scheduling from Hootsuite to We.Inc's [AI website builder](/social-scheduler). The 22 client websites were migrated from WordPress to We.Inc's [website builder](/website-builder) in batches — three to four sites per week, with 301 redirects handled by the platform. Each client received a new login to the We.Inc client editor, white-labeled with Bright Digital's branding.
**Phase 3 (Weeks 5–6): Automations and reporting**
The Zapier workflows were replaced with native We.Inc automations. Reporting was set up using We.Inc's cross-channel analytics, pulling website traffic, social performance, email metrics, and lead data into a single dashboard per client. The first automated monthly report ran in December.
"The website migration was the part I was most nervous about," Marcus said. "We finished 22 sites in three weeks and only one had an issue — a legacy redirect that took an afternoon to fix. The rest went cleanly."
The After State: 12 Months Later
By February 2026, Bright Digital had been running fully on We.Inc for just over two months. The measurable outcomes:
Cost Reduction: 43%
Their monthly software spend went from $3,213 to