What is a fractional CTO?
A fractional CTO is a senior technology leader who works with your company part-time, typically 10 to 20 hours per week, providing the same strategic guidance, architecture decisions, and engineering leadership as a full-time CTO at a fraction of the cost. Unlike a consultant who delivers a report and leaves, a fractional CTO gets embedded in your team for months at a time.
People have the wrong mental model for what this role looks like in practice.
They imagine someone who shows up for a two-hour meeting, draws architecture diagrams on a whiteboard, gives some advice, and leaves. Like a consultant but with a fancier title.
That's not what we do. When we operate as a fractional CTO for a startup, we're embedded in the team. We're in the Slack channels. We're reviewing pull requests. We're interviewing engineer candidates. We're on the call with the founder when an investor asks a hard technical question.
Here's what a typical six-month engagement actually looks like. This is based on a composite of several real engagements, so the details have been mixed and anonymized, but the shape of the work is accurate.
Month one: The audit
The first month is almost entirely assessment. You can't make good technical decisions for a company you don't understand yet.
We start by reading every line of code that matters. Not all of it, because some codebases are enormous and some of that code is dead. But the core business logic, the database schema, the deployment pipeline, the error handling patterns. You learn a lot about a team's engineering culture from how they handle errors.
At the same time, we're having one-on-one conversations with every engineer. Not performance reviews. Just conversations. What's frustrating about the codebase? Where do bugs come from? What takes longer than it should? Engineers know where the problems are. They've just never had anyone with authority listen.
By the end of month one, we have a written assessment. Here's what's working. Here's what's dangerous. Here's what's slowing you down. And here's what we're going to focus on for the next five months.
For one particular startup, the audit surfaced three things. The deployment process was entirely manual and took two hours, which meant the team deployed once a week and dreaded it. The database had grown organically with no migrations history, so nobody could run the application locally without a database dump from production. And there were zero automated tests, which meant every deploy was a gamble.
None of these were surprising. But having them written down with their cost in engineering hours per month made them impossible to ignore. This type of audit is exactly what we describe in our post on the real cost of technical debt, where a similar assessment uncovered $38,000 in monthly waste.
Month two: The foundation
Month two is about fixing the foundation before building anything new. This is the hardest month to sell to founders because the output looks like "nothing new shipped." But it's the most important month of the engagement.
For that startup, we spent month two on three things.
First, we set up a proper CI/CD pipeline. Code gets pushed to a branch, tests run automatically, and if they pass, the code gets deployed. No human intervention for standard deploys. We went from two-hour manual deploys to twelve-minute automated ones. The team went from deploying once a week (with dread) to deploying three times a week (without thinking about it).
Second, we migrated the database schema into version-controlled migrations. This took about a week of careful work, comparing the production schema against what the code expected, and creating migration files that could recreate the schema from scratch. Once this was done, any engineer could run npm run db:setup and have a working local database in two minutes.
Third, we added test coverage to the most critical paths. Not aiming for 100% coverage. Nobody has time for that at a startup. We focused on the signup flow, the payment flow, and the core business logic. About 40 tests total. Enough that the team could deploy with confidence that the most important things still worked.
Month three: The architecture decisions
By month three, the team is moving faster because the foundation is solid. This is when we start making the architecture decisions that will shape the product for the next year.
The typical questions: Should we introduce a background job system or keep processing synchronous? Which parts of the application need caching and what invalidation strategy makes sense? How should we structure the API to support mobile clients later? Is the current database schema going to scale to 10x our current user count, and if not, what do we change now before it becomes painful?
These decisions compound. A good caching strategy saves the team hundreds of hours over the next year. A bad API structure costs hundreds of hours in rework. The value of a fractional CTO at this stage is making these calls based on experience shipping other products, not based on blog posts and conference talks.
We also start looking at the hiring pipeline. Most startups at this stage need to add one or two engineers. We write the job descriptions, design the interview process, and sit in on final-round interviews. We've written about what makes a great CTO hire and the signals we look for, including the five qualities that matter and the three archetypes to avoid.
Months four and five: Building and shipping
By now the team has a solid foundation, a clear architecture, and (usually) one or two new engineers getting onboarded. Months four and five are about building. Not building infrastructure. Building product.
Our role shifts from hands-on engineering to technical leadership. We're reviewing architecture decisions before code gets written, not after. We're running sprint planning with the engineering team and making sure the work aligns with the product roadmap. We're catching scope creep before it turns into timeline creep.
We're also setting up the operational practices the team will need after we leave. Monitoring and alerting so production issues get caught before users report them. Incident response protocols so the team knows what to do when something breaks at midnight. Documentation practices so institutional knowledge doesn't live only in people's heads.
Month six: The handoff
The last month is about making ourselves unnecessary. A good fractional CTO engagement ends with the team operating independently, not with the team dependent on you.
We document every architectural decision we made and why. Not just what we chose, but what we considered and rejected. When the team encounters a new challenge in month twelve, they need to understand the reasoning behind the existing architecture, not just its structure.
We also help the founder decide what comes next. If the company has grown enough to justify a full-time CTO, we help write the job description and evaluate candidates. If a fractional arrangement still makes more sense, we adjust the engagement to a lighter ongoing cadence. Maybe eight hours a month instead of sixty for ongoing architecture reviews and strategic input.
How much does a fractional CTO cost?
A typical fractional CTO engagement with us runs between $5,000 and $15,000 per month depending on the hours and the scope. At the heavier end, that's about 15 to 20 hours per week. At the lighter end, it's strategic guidance and code reviews, maybe 8 to 10 hours.
Compare that to a full-time CTO at a US-based startup: $250,000 to $400,000 in annual salary, plus benefits, plus equity (usually 1% to 5%). A fractional CTO gives you 80% of that value at about 20% of the cost during the exact stage when every dollar matters most.
When fractional CTO doesn't make sense
This isn't the right model for every company. If you need someone writing code 40 hours a week, you need a full-time engineer or a full-time CTO, not a fractional one. If your product is the engineering (you're building a database, a compiler, a cloud platform), you need a deeply technical co-founder, not an external advisor.
Fractional CTO works best when you're a non-technical founder building a SaaS product, or you're a small team with no senior engineering leadership, and you need someone who's shipped real products to make the decisions that compound over the next two years.
The bottom line
A fractional CTO is not a consultant. It's not a part-time advisor. It's a technical co-pilot who gets embedded in your company for a defined period, makes the high-leverage decisions that shape your product's trajectory, and builds the systems and team culture that outlive the engagement.
If you're wondering whether you need one, the signal is usually that you're making technical decisions you're not confident in, or your engineering team is building things without senior guidance, or your AWS bill and deploy times are creeping up and nobody knows why.
We do this work for startups from seed to Series A. If any of this sounds familiar, let's have a conversation.