Migration
Switch from Alpine IQ in 2 hours. Seriously.
The industry treats platform migration like a 30-day hostage negotiation. Here is our clock instead: connected, imported, and sending in one afternoon, followed by a safe, engagement-first full cutover over roughly two weeks. You do not cancel anything on day one, and you do not lose a single subscriber, opt-out, or loyalty point along the way.
The 2-hour timeline, spelled out
This is the actual onboarding sequence, not a sales metaphor. Every step happens with you on the call, and the finish line is a real campaign to your real audience.
- :00
Connect your POS and Alpine IQ
We link your point of sale and your existing Alpine IQ account. Read-only where possible, credentialed by you, revocable by you.
- :30
Contacts and audiences imported
Your customer list, opt-in status, and the audiences you already built in AIQ are imported, suppression lists included, so nobody who unsubscribed ever hears from you again.
- 1:00
Dedicated IPs and domain authentication configured
Two dedicated IPs (marketing and transactional) are assigned to your store, with DKIM and reverse DNS set up on your own sending domain.
- 1:30
Your first ready-to-send campaign appears
The campaign feed reads your live menu, banners, offers, and inventory and drafts designed emails. Each one carries a visible reason why it should work.
- 2:00
You press send
Your first campaign goes out to the same Alpine IQ audiences you were mailing yesterday, with every opt-out honored.
The honest second act: ~2 weeks, not 30 days
Two hours gets you sending. It does not get you fully cut over, and anyone who claims otherwise is skipping the part that protects your domain. After your first send, our warm-up governor shifts volume onto your new dedicated IPs engagement-first: your most active openers move over first, ramp rates increase automatically, and the system auto-pauses if complaints exceed 0.1% or bounces exceed 5%. One flagship store completed a roughly 6,000-contact cutover in two weeks with Gmail deliverability parity or better. That is still half the industry-standard 30-day migration, with none of the blackout period where you cannot email anyone. Read more about how the sending infrastructure works on our cannabis email deliverability page.
What you keep. What you finally lose.
You keep
- Your loyalty members and their points. Nothing resets.
- Your Alpine IQ audiences, mailable from day one.
- Opt-out compliance, with two-way unsubscribe sync while both platforms run. See the Alpine IQ integration for how coexistence works.
- Your Alpine IQ subscription, as long as you want it. Run both, then decide.
You lose
- Per-message email fees. From real invoices we computed roughly $2.47 per 1,000 emails in AIQ per-message charges. Our pricing is flat.
- The send queue. We observed AIQ campaigns scheduled for a set time arriving about 15 minutes late through their internal queue. Our sends go out immediately.
- The agency retainer. A cottage industry exists just to operate Alpine IQ. Our campaign feed shows its reasoning on every suggestion, so you do not need one.
$1,240 → $12
One store's monthly sending cost: $1,240 in June on Alpine IQ, $12 in July with us. Same store, same sends, both figures straight off the invoices.
40.1% vs 19.7%
Gmail open rates, measured head-to-head: same store, same 30-day window, distinct recipients. Roughly double, on dedicated IPs.
Why leave Alpine IQ, and when you shouldn't
Alpine IQ is a healthy company with genuine strengths: broad channel coverage (their own feature list spans SMS marketing, email, push, voice drop, direct mail, and a Wallet Pass), a deep integrations catalog, mature loyalty tooling, and continued investment (Flows and Loops automation, a new AI Sales Agent product). Their homepage claims 7,000+ retail locations. If SMS is your primary channel today, they belong on your shortlist, because we do not offer SMS. One thing you will not find anywhere on aiq.com, though, is a price: pricing is entirely quote-based. The operators who switch to us are the ones spending four figures a month mostly on email and loyalty, and feeling three specific pains: per-message fees stacking on top of the platform bill, audiences that rematerialize roughly nightly so a segment built this morning can be stale until tomorrow, and reporting their own G2 reviewers describe as needing customizable reports and clearer dashboards. We generate campaigns from your live POS inventory, sync tickets nightly straight from the POS, and show POS-verified revenue per campaign. The full side-by-side lives on our Alpine IQ alternative comparison, and the auto-generated campaign feed is explained on the automated campaigns page.
Why not just move to Klaviyo or Mailchimp?
Plenty of dispensaries leaving Alpine IQ consider a generic ESP next. Three problems. First, policy risk: mainstream ESPs tolerate cannabis email at best and prohibit cannabis SMS outright. Your account lives at the discretion of a compliance team that never approved your industry, and shutdowns arrive without notice. Second, shared IPs: your deliverability rides on thousands of strangers' sending behavior, which is exactly the guilt-by-association problem cannabis senders can least afford. Third, no POS brain: a generic ESP has never seen a menu, a batch expiry date, or a loyalty balance, so every campaign starts from a blank canvas. We run our own mail infrastructure with dedicated IPs per store, our sending lanes were approved with full cannabis disclosure, and your campaigns are generated from what is actually happening in your store.
Frequently asked questions
Book your 2-hour switch
Bring your Alpine IQ login and a recent invoice. We'll connect your store, import your audiences, and have your first campaign ready to send before the call ends. Then we'll show you the percentage you'd save.