DropInAdmin is an elite, on-demand DevOps and infrastructure support service built for startups, agencies, and growing businesses. We help teams move faster by providing expert help with Laravel, cloud automation, CI/CD pipelines, migrations, and server administration. You can engage us for one-time tasks, ongoing support, or monthly plans depending on your needs—no long-term contracts, no hidden fees.

Drop-In Support is billed hourly and focuses on a specific service—like setting up Ansible, tuning GitHub Actions, configuring PHP, or resolving infrastructure issues. It's perfect when you need fast, targeted help without any ongoing obligation.

Monthly Support is a cost-effective retainer for ongoing assistance. It includes a set number of hours each month and is better suited for long-term projects, recurring tasks, or clients who prefer a consistent partnership. We also include basic system and uptime monitoring, and can proactively handle issues before they become problems.

Once you’ve selected a plan and paid your retainer, we’ll reach out immediately to confirm details—like your goals, operating system, tools in use, and anything else you shared on the confirmation page.

You’ll then securely submit any required access details or context through our portal. Once everything’s in place, we’ll assign the right engineer to begin work — usually the same day.

🕘 Business Hours

We’re online Monday through Friday, 9am–5pm Eastern Time. During these hours, we typically reply to live chat inquiries within minutes.

💬 Before You Purchase

If you're browsing or considering a retainer, feel free to reach out via live chat or contact form. We’re happy to guide you quickly—no pressure.

🚀 After Retainer – Guaranteed SLAs

Once your retainer is paid and onboarding begins, you're covered by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) depending on your plan:

• Starter Plan – Response within 4 business hours
• Pro Plan – Response within 1 business hour
• White Glove – Priority response within 30 minutes, with access to live chat and phone support

⚡ Real-World Turnaround

In practice, we’re often faster than our SLA promises. If your issue is urgent, just let us know—we’ll do everything we can to help immediately.

1. Visit our Sign Up page and choose the plan that fits your needs: Drop-In (hourly) or one of our monthly plans—Starter, Pro, or White Glove.

2. After checkout, you’ll complete a quick intake form to tell us about your systems, goals, and priorities.

3. We’ll follow up through Zendesk to securely collect any access credentials or project-specific information you’re ready to share.

4. Once onboarded, you’ll be able to manage tickets, track requests, and communicate with our team through your dedicated DropInAdmin Zendesk portal.

You can manage billing details, invoices, and plan changes by contacting us directly through Zendesk or live chat. Monthly and White Glove users can also request recurring payment setup or service adjustments at any time.

Yes! While our core support hours are 9am–5pm Eastern Time (US), we work with clients globally and adjust our scheduling to fit project needs. For larger or ongoing engagements, we can assign team members in overlapping or flexible time zones.

For login issues, billing concerns, or general help, you can reach out via live chat or submit a ticket through Zendesk (email us). Most issues are resolved the same day, and our team is available to assist during business hours.

White Glove users may also call our support line directly for urgent help.

We offer two ways to work with us: Drop-In support (hourly) and monthly plans (Starter, Pro, and White Glove). Drop-In starts at a flat hourly rate, while monthly retainers come with bundled hours, response SLAs, and other perks like monitoring and priority handling. You can view full pricing details on our Pricing page.

Yes! Annual billing is available for all monthly plans at a discounted rate. It’s a great option for teams that need long-term support and want to lock in savings while maintaining consistent access to our engineers.

Each retainer plan includes a set number of hours per month and specific response-time SLAs. Once your retainer is paid, onboarding begins immediately. Any unused hours do not roll over, but you can upgrade or renew your plan at any time if more time is needed.

Yes, you can change or cancel your monthly plan at any time. For cancellations, changes will take effect at the end of your current billing cycle. If you're not sure which plan is right for you, our team is happy to help guide you before purchase.

After you sign up, you’ll receive a secure onboarding ticket via our Zendesk portal. You can reply to that ticket with server access details, technical notes, or attach files. All communication is encrypted and protected within Zendesk's world-class secure infrastructure.

If you use password managers like 1Password or Bitwarden, you can also share credential vault links with time-limited access.

It depends on the task. For server-side work, we may request SSH access, control panel credentials (e.g., cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, Virtualmin or Forge), or cloud platform logins (AWS, GCP, etc.). We only request access to what is strictly necessary and can work with restricted or read-only roles where appropriate.

If you'd prefer not to grant access right away, we’re happy to work on a proof-of-concept (POC) within our own test infrastructure first. This allows you to evaluate our approach and results before integrating into your live systems.

No — we do not retain passwords or access credentials outside of Zendesk unless specifically requested by you (e.g., via a secure password manager like 1Password or Bitwarden). Even then, storage is temporary and access is limited to engineers actively assigned to your project. We take this very seriously.

To minimize liability and ensure your privacy, we strongly prefer not to store credentials at all. Any credentials shared through the Zendesk ticket thread are used solely during the active service window and can be redacted or deleted at your request at any time.

Once your service has ended — whether due to plan cancellation, completion of work, or a written offboarding request — all access details are removed from our systems and our scope of access is closed out.

You are also encouraged to delete or redact sensitive content from your own Zendesk tickets as an added layer of control.

In many cases, yes — especially if your engagement spans multiple phases. However, assignments can vary based on workload and expertise needed. If working with a dedicated engineer is a priority, you’re welcome to request it. We actively encourage long-term pairing inside our White Glove plan, where consistency and familiarity are often crucial.

Yes — and in fact, this is one of the reasons clients choose DropInAdmin. We routinely match engineers to projects based on real-world experience with specific technologies like Laravel, Docker, Ansible, AWS, Neo4j, and more.

Our team is purpose-built for efficiency. When you tell us what you're working with, we make sure you’re paired with someone who understands it deeply and can jump in immediately.

We adapt to how your team operates. Whether you prefer real-time messaging, async check-ins, scheduled meetings, in-person meetings or something in between — we can slot right in. We commonly work through Slack, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost, or shared project channels, and we're comfortable participating publicly or behind the scenes based on your needs.

Our engineers also contribute to shared documentation platforms like Google Docs, or Confluence. We provide written updates, architecture notes, and/or handoff instructions as needed — often in the form of documentation, so your internal team can pick up right where we left off.

We're also comfortable working in Git-based workflows, ticketing systems (e.g., Jira, Zendesk, Freshdesk), and directly supporting your dev, staging, or production environments as part of your delivery pipeline.

Whether you want us working side-by-side with your team or operating quietly in the background to unblock things — we’re here to support your workflow, not disrupt it.