I've been trialling this for a week and recommend you at least give it a trial if you are looking for a email and CRM solution. There is a very good review of this product by Dave Swift (amongst other) on You Tube outlining how it works, so I'll just give a few personal thoughts:

I'm planning to use this to manage communications with a sports club (existing members) and to create a lead funnel with automated email sequences for new prospects.

It has good current functionality and roadmap looks promising so could be what you are looking for to replace an expensive subscription service.

Pros
- Interface is simple
- Relatively easy to create emails from simple to elaborate (in fact there are three different options from sending simple 1-2-1 emails from Gmail inbox to marketing campaigns.
- Drag and drop for automated sequences based on triggers... all the normal stuff you find in expensive email subscription products
- Integrates directly with Reoon for email validation (currently on AppSumo also)

Roadmap

The current functionality is pretty good but what will make this product excellent would be:
- Pipeline management functionality (I understand this is in development?)

- Add more functionality for email drafting - hyperlinks for text, code embeds (e.g., as part of lead generation it is essential to have links or embeds for other services such as booking calendars (Zcal) or shopping carts (ThriveCart) in emails.

- More integrations to be able to get leads into the apps (other than just Zapier). e.g. Pabby / webhooks would be great, along with some other direct integrations with popular Appsumo products. e.g., zCal, Tidycal.

Finally
- Note that to get your domain set-up, you need a bit of knowledge or help to input the settings with your hosting provider.