Overview
Scaling
Developers
Account
Started in 2015, RipplePop is a one-stop-shop for any and all WordPress help.
RipplePop gives you and your company a professional and dedicated developer for a flat weekly fee.
A RipplePop developer works in your tools (Slack, Basecamp, Asana, anything!) and on your timezone, no matter where your businesses or customers are in the world.
You can scale your development team up and down as needed.
Best of all, with RipplePop you get the reliability and accountability of the RipplePop support team in Chicago.
We try to make the process of getting the best developer to help you as simple as possible. The first step is to get on a call with us so we can learn more about your needs and make sure we are a good fit. Then we will work to find the best developer on our team for your needs.
Once we find that developer you can speak with them directly before signing up if you wish or you can get started right away with them. It's as easy as that to get a professional developer added to your team and working on your projects.
If you have any questions before getting started, just send an email to [email protected] and we'll help.
You can view pricing on the homepage of our website. We offer weekly plans as well as bulk hour bundles. To get started, book a call with us and share your needs and we can find the perfect fit developer for you.
If you have any questions about our pricing or plans, please email us at [email protected].
Our primary plans are week-to-week. We even offer a 7-day 100% satisfaction guarantee on our weekly plans to make it even easier for you to sign up with as little risk as possible.
We also offer bulk hour bundles that are valid for 1 year (for the 125 hour bundle) and 18 months (for the 250 hour bundle) from the date of purchase. These are great for one-off projects or if you want a large bank of hours to pull from as-needed.
RipplePop is based in Chicago and our development team is based in the Philippines. We love our Filipino team, they are incredibly hard-working and diligent.
We look for at least 5+ years of custom WordPress development experience along with great English skills. Part of our vetting process is making sure our developers have very good English comprehension and writing skills to reduce the risk of any miscommunications.
In short, yes you can use one of our plans to complete a project. Just remember, that our plans are not bound to your project scope or deadline. If the project is not going to meet its deadline, we can not be at fault. You may just simply need to increase the number of daily hours (upgrade your plan) for your developer to better meet a deadline if things are off-track. Our developers will always do their best to help you meet your deadlines, but we are in no way bound to your deadlines or project scope.
Absolutely! Many of our customers have projects ranging from Shopify to marketing to design to app development. If you'd like us to help find the perfect creative for your next project that is not WordPress related, be sure to ask at [email protected].
The main advantage of RipplePop is that you have a company (us) and service offering backing up our plans.
If an Upwork freelancer decides to leave town and not answer any emails, you are left with little that you can do and even less that you can do legally if they are an international freelancer.
With us, you get a company that backs the promise. If a dev is not doing a good job for you, you can quickly pick a new one on our team to work with and even provide replacement developers if your developer is sick or absent. These types of things are what make our service something you might pick over trying to go and find the perfect freelancer that you can entrust with the work you have.
Scaling your RipplePop team is something we wanted to make simple. There are two ways you can scale:
Horizontally or Vertically.
Vertically:
You have a developer on a 4-hour per day or 2-hour per day plan, and you simply scale up their daily hours if they have that availability.
Horizontally:
You already have a developer on another plan for 8, 4, or 2 hours per day. You want to add an additional/new developer to the team (maybe with different skills) on their own plan. This allows you to grow the depth of your team rather than just scaling up one person's hours.
So you can either scale up your current developer's hours or scale outwards by adding additional developers to your team.
Yes! Our developers are yours to use as you need. If you need a developer or team of developers to be replying directly to your clients or customers, we can supply the team to do that.
You can make them their own email within your organization for them to use to white-label it even further. We try to be flexible here so you can use your developer for your specific use-case.
Our current plans only cover 5 days of work per week (Monday - Friday), however, if you are interested in getting weekend coverage, just let us know and we can talk about finding someone for weekend work if we have them available.
When you sign up for RipplePop, you are signing up for 8, 4, or 2 hours of daily help (Monday - Friday). The daily hours you receive on your plan do not roll-over if they go unused on a particular day or set of days. Since your developer may be helping other customers of ours each day, we can not roll-over hours or bundle them in any other way.
The only difference between the plans is how much daily help you will receive: 8 hours, 4 hours, or 2 hours. Everything else about the plans is the same. You can: invite your developer into your tools, ask them for help on items small or large, and no restrictions on what you can ask for just as long as it's within the developer's skillset and you are ok with the timeline that the developer provides for the work.
One thing to keep in mind if you are on a 4-hour or 2-hour per day plan is that your developer services other customers before and/or after you. So please respect their time and understand that our developers are not bound to giving you overtime work beyond their standard hours. Our support team is also available if you have any questions about our plans [email protected].
If you want a more flexible approach to your hours, we offer bulk hour bundles where you get a larger bank of hours to pull from as-needed.
You can downgrade from any plan to a lower plan if you need to do that. You can do this from within your account area on our site, or simply by emailing us at [email protected]. Once your plan is adjusted, your next weekly charge will go through at the new weekly rate.
We have a very rigorous vetting process to ensure only the best developers make it through to be on our
team.
Here is what is involved to become a RipplePop Developer:
Our Developer Manager is responsible for finding and getting developers to start the application process.
We run the appropriate background checks, ID checks, and English comprehension tests to ensure we can proceed with that applicant.
The initial application is long and it takes around 45 minutes to an hour to complete. It has very specific instructions that, if not clearly followed, will result in us immediately disregarding the applicant. We ask the developer to record videos as they work and explain their reasoning and decision making as they work. This helps us judge their skills in real-world scenarios and get a feel for how they communicate through finding solutions.
If their initial application is good, we advance them onto some tests. This includes tests for their development skills, CSS skills, and other skills relevant to the customers they plan to serve.
If all tests go well, the candidate moves onto the final stage interview. This interview is with our most senior level developer. He has been with us for over 4 years now and been a developer for more than 10 years. He has seen everything under the sun, and we trust him deeply with being able to analyze if a developer has what it takes to be a successful developer on our team.
If the final interview goes well and the candidate passes, they are in the pool of "ready developers" who have been approved and are waiting to be assigned to a customer that matches their skill-set.
One of the ways we protect our customers is by having a very in-depth and thorough vetting process. This helps ensure only the most diligent, honest, knowledgeable, and reliable developers make it through.
As soon as you sign up, an internal clock of ours starts ticking. Typically we have a perfect match ready for you within 24 - 48 hours of signing up depending on your specific needs.
Yes!
Let's say you've set your developer up for 2-hours of work per day. Today, you have an hour of work (maybe
less to give them) but you want to make sure you utilize their time. Here are your options:
You can have the developer help with other tasks (editing spreadsheets, answering emails, tidying up work, admin work, etc) as long as they express they are comfortable working in the associated applications.
You can always ask your developer to do more proactive work. Example: "Please review all of my sites and do a speed audit. Improve the speed of the poorest performing sites when I do not have other work to give you."
You can always lean on your developer for some basic consulting. "What tool is best to accomplish X, Y, and Z?" "Can you highlight the best strategy to export and import thousands of custom posts and media?"
Your developer's daily hours are yours to utilize. If the amount of dev work is light, you can always get creative with asking for help on other items as long as they are comfortable doing so.
When you sign up we connect with you to discover your exact needs. If you need a developer who has solid design skills and can whip up a page from scratch with minimal design input, we can find that developer for you.
In short, the answer is yes, we absolutely have developers on our team who can handle design as well as
development.
If you need a graphic designer outright, you can let us know as we have many great designers we can assign
to you as well!
We were often challenged with how we should go about scheduling our developers and how we felt, morally, about asking some to work overnight/graveyard shifts due to the larger effect that has on day-to-day life. The way we corrected this and allow ourselves to sleep much easier at night is we let our developers work out their schedule with you directly and attempt to find the best agreed-upon schedule that will work for you both.
Many of our developers often prefer "off-hours" or the graveyard shift, which surprised us at first. We do not force our developers to work on schedules they have not indicated as their preference.
That way, you get a developer who is happy to be online and working with you during their preferred shift schedule. This allows you to do things like a Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, Slack chat, etc all while they are working. This real-time collaboration is a great way to help make sure you always have access to your developer during your daily shift schedule.
Yes!
We have our own set of tracking and check-in tools to monitor our developers. However, if you want your
developer to be reporting in a time-tracking tool that your company uses or monitors, you can absolutely do
that.
Simply invite your developer (via their RipplePop or the company email you made for them) into your time
tracking tool of choice. Then make sure you instruct the developer on how to properly track their time in
the proper way you are looking for.
That's it! You're all set and can now track the hours of your developer.
Most of our customers are people or agencies who are already using a project management tool to track their work. Examples of tools we've helped with in the past include Basecamp, Trello, Asana, Jira, Slack, Monday, Google Docs, etc.
One of the major benefits of our plans is that our developers come to you and your tools. So if you are using Asana to track to-do items around your site(s), you can simply invite your developer into your Asana and they can begin working through those items.
We do this to allow our customers more flexibility so that they are not restricted to a specific way of submitting work to their developer.
If you do not have a Project Management tool in place, let us know and we can always create a private shared Trello board as a starting point or you can simply request things from your developer by sending them an email if ever needed.
If you need to cancel, upgrade, downgrade, or change your billing information just send us an email and we can handle it for you. Easy as that!
Just send us an email at [email protected] and we'll help make sure everything gets correctly updated.
If you are looking to pause your work but would like to retain access to your same developer upon returning please let us know.
You can find our refund policy on our refunds page.
If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected].
Get in touch
At the end of the day, almost everything on the edges comes down to a case-by-case basis. Send an email to [email protected] and tell us what is going on.
Yes, if you wish to pause your billing and want to return in the future and have us retain the same developer who you were assigned, we can do that with a reduced monthly fee.
To reserve your Full-time developer (8-hours per day), the cost is $250/week.
To reserve your Part-time developer (4-hours per day), the cost is $125/week.
To reserve your Full-time developer (2-hours per day), the cost is $65/week.
If you are canceling or pausing for just a few days or one-week, oftentimes that is short enough where we can reserve your developer without much issue or need for additional charges. However, if you plan on pausing for more than a few days, you would need to pay the retainer fee to lock in the same developer and time slot when you return again.
That is the beauty of having a service/business (us!) around!
If your developer is ever sick, they will report that to our Customer Champion. Our Customer Champion then
will contact you to see if there is anything urgent to attend to, or if your developer can make up their
hours at a later date when they return. We always prefer the hours be made up if possible, but understand
there are times when you need more urgent help and your developer might be sick or absent.
If your developer is unable to make up their hours, or you have something urgent that needs attending to
before they can return, we can supply you with a coupon code and a list of replacements which will allow you
to begin working with another developer of ours in order to keep things moving.
If your developer is ever sick or misses a day of work, it is not required to get a replacement. If your
workload is light, you can simply let your developer have the day off if you choose. Or, if you do not want
a replacement (too many cooks in the kitchen) your developer can always work out a schedule to make up the
missed hours over the next couple of days.
We'll always be here to help in these types of scenarios. If your developer is not reporting in for you
today and you need something from them, please email us at
[email protected] so we can get you a replacement right
away.
Yes and no, let us explain.
If you want to change your current developer and work with someone new (for whatever reason), the way you do that is you would set your weekly plan to expire (not-renew). Then you would revisit our Developer List we shared with you and sign up with the developer you wish to work with instead. We do not allow you to change your developer mid-week, so please make sure that if you want to work with someone else on our team, that you plan that change accordingly.