Senior technical leadership — part-time, from day one, without the salary and equity of a full-time hire. Architecture, cloud cost, hiring, and roadmap, scaled to your stage. USD-billed for global teams.
You need a CTO's judgment long before you need a CTO's salary. A fractional CTO closes that gap.
The senior calls that decide whether your tech helps or hurts the business.
The big technical bets — what to build, how it scales, what it'll cost — made with the business in mind, not resume-driven.
Keep the bill sane and the stack lean as you grow. Most founders are overpaying; a CTO who watches this is worth the fee alone.
Who to hire and when, how to interview engineers, and how to level up the team you already have.
Turn the plan into shipped software on a real cadence — and say no to the work that doesn't move the business.
What to build, what to buy, and which vendors to trust — the decisions that quietly decide your burn rate.
The hard calls — security, scale, technical risk, due diligence — with a senior engineer actually in them.
The judgment is backed by published work — what lean infrastructure means, treating the infra bill as a product metric, what to audit first on a $50K cloud bill, and how one team cut $120K/month. The thinking is public; the references are real.
We don't put a number on this page — on purpose. Here's why, and how we work it out.
The questions founders ask before they hire.
A fractional CTO is a senior technical leader who works with your company part-time — setting architecture and strategy, controlling cloud cost, guiding hiring, and owning the roadmap — without the salary, equity, and commitment of a full-time CTO. You get senior judgment scaled to your stage.
We don't publish a fixed rate, because the right number depends on your stage, what you actually need, and whether we're a fit — so we scope it together on a call. What's certain: it's far less than a full-time CTO's salary plus equity, you're paying for judgment rather than hours, and it's quoted in USD with no long lock-in.
Fractional CTOs are usually engaged on a day rate or monthly retainer rather than hourly, because the value is judgment, not hours logged. We scope a fixed monthly engagement so the cost is predictable and you're not watching a clock. Quoted in USD.
Hire fractional when you need senior technical direction but not 40 hours a week of it — early teams, pre-Series-A, or a founder who needs a sounding board and architecture owner. Move to full-time once the role genuinely needs someone in the building every day; a good fractional CTO will tell you when that point arrives and help you hire them.
It varies by stage — from a couple of days a month for direction and key decisions, up to a day or two a week when you're scaling or fundraising. We size the engagement to what you actually need and adjust as you grow.
Tell us where you are and what technical decisions are keeping you up — architecture, hiring, cloud cost, a fundraise. We'll tell you honestly whether a fractional CTO is what you need, and how much of one.
