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Buyer Beware: Read the Fine Print Before Signing!I approached High Five Media for a custom WordPress website. During our consultations, I explicitly stated that my organization required a secure client sign-in portal, an automated scheduling system, and recurring monthly payment capabilities. I also explicitly stated that I would be hosting the website on my own secure server (Bluehost/DreamHost) to maintain full ownership.The salesperson nodded along, but the contract they handed me completely contradicted everything we discussed.First, their contract explicitly excludes "custom coding or advanced functionality" from the base price, meaning all the portal and scheduling features I asked for would have resulted in thousands of dollars in hidden hourly overages. Second, they capped custom design time at a mere 12 hours for a 10-page site, which mathematically forces their team to use cheap pre-made templates instead of the custom work they promise.Worst of all, their legal terms (Section 6) are predatory. Despite claiming "you own the website," the fine print states that if you ever try to move your website to an outside host, you forfeit all rights to your content and code unless you pay a massive exit fee equal to 12 months of billings.They rely on high-pressure sales and hope you won't read the contract. Do your homework, read every line of the fine print, and look elsewhere if you want an honest partner and true ownership of your website.

Beware. I contracted with High Five Media to run a 6-month Google PPC campaign in February 2025 and went into it with the expectation that a group of experienced marketing professionals could do a better job running a PPC campaign than my own unsuccessful attempt, which I think is a reasonable expectation to have.

Two months later the campaign went live. That seems kind of long to me but I don't have much marketing experience so perhaps that is normal? Six months after the campaign went live I had spent $6k for 89 clicks; a number so small that I can't even see the impact in my traffic analytics. And to be clear, 61 of those clicks were in August, a month that historically is much busier for us even without a running PPC campaign, so for the 5 months prior to that I spent $5k for 28 clicks. Six thousand is probably a laughably tiny amount compared to larger companies, but for a struggling small business like mine it is huge. According to their automated reports, roughly half of the money that I paid went to Google and the rest they seem to have pocketed. An effective 50% management fee seems high, but again, I haven't dealt with a lot of marketing companies, so maybe that's what is to be expected these days?

I outlined the campaign performance data and brought up my concerns to them and made it clear that I am not happy with their services but after 5 business days nobody has responded to my email and so I'm walking away with the feeling of having just been scammed out of enough money for an overseas vacation.

There are good reviews of HFM so they must help at least some, probably even most, of their customers, so maybe my product is difficult to market? Maybe my industry is too competitive? Maybe my account was too small for them to care much about? Surely, over $30 per click is not what everyone else is paying, right? I don't know why it went so poorly but at this point I can confidently say that your results may vary.

Update (2025-09-24):
A couple of days after posting this review I received a response to my email. We exchanged several emails, in which they were very persistent in asking for a call despite my insistence to keep things in writing, even going as far as telling me that I should remove my review because I refused to let them "make things right through an in-person meeting," though it was never made clear how or why that would be any better than addressing my questions and concerns via email. After initially trying to make me believe that my dissatisfaction with the performance of the campaign was because I was too focused on short-term results and that in fact if I just kept letting them spend money then things would turn around, they eventually agreed that the campaign was not up to their standards. They never did answer, or even acknowledge, the short list of questions that I had initially sent, though. The good news, I guess, is that during that exchange it was revealed that there was $2400 that they had not spent yet and they offered to refund that money. I was clear at our initial meeting over 8 months ago that I did not have a large budget, so instead of a partial refund, I would have preferred if they had been more careful with the funds in the first place, but until someone invents time travel I suppose I'll have to take what I can get.

Given that I still have unanswered questions and our initial post-review communication was less than stellar but I did receive an apology and a partial refund, I'm adjusting my review from 1 star to 2. Despite this whole mess, I don't think I can adequately express how much I wish that this review could have been 5 stars.