Fractional CTO
Standing availability for architecture calls, hiring input, vendor assessment and the decisions that are hard to reverse.
Services — 05
Senior engineering judgement, without hiring a CTO
For founders making architecture decisions alone, teams that have stopped shipping, and codebases someone else abandoned. Retainer or fixed-scope audit — whichever answers the question you actually have.
Typically
From €1,500/month retainer · fixed-price audits
The problem
The most expensive technical decisions get made by the people least equipped to make them, usually early, usually under time pressure, and usually with nobody senior in the room to say 'not like that'.
This is the engagement for putting someone in that room. Sometimes it is a two-week audit that ends an argument. Sometimes it is a standing half-day a week for a year. Both are more useful than a rewrite, which is what you buy when nobody has been willing to understand what you already have.
What’s included
Everything below, as standard.
Technical due diligence
A written, honest map of a codebase — what it does, what is genuinely dangerous, and a ranked remediation plan. Useful before an acquisition, an investment or a rewrite argument.
Code rescue
Stalled or inherited codebases brought back to a state where features ship again. Usually the domain logic is fine and the delivery pipeline is the problem.
DevOps and delivery
Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes and CI/CD. Cutting a four-hour pipeline to thirty minutes changes how a team behaves more than most refactors.
Team augmentation
Working inside your team rather than beside it, pairing on the changes rather than doing them for you, so the capability stays after we leave.
Security review
Authorisation, input handling, secrets and dependencies reviewed deliberately, plus automated scanning in CI.
Sound like the right fit?
You probably need this if
Any of these sound familiar.
01You are the technical decision-maker and you are guessing
02Releases have gone from weekly to whenever
03You inherited a codebase and nobody can explain it
04Someone has proposed an eighteen-month rewrite
Typical stack
Architecture reviewTerraformDockerKubernetesGitHub ActionsJenkinsGCPAWS
Where we’ve done it
Work of exactly this kind.
Questions
How much of your time do we get?
Retainers start at €1,500/month and are scoped in days rather than vague availability, so you know what you are buying. Audits are fixed-price.
Will you tell us to rewrite?
Rarely. A rewrite is what you buy when nobody can be bothered to understand what you have. It is occasionally right, and we will say so plainly if it is.
Can you work alongside our existing developers?
That is usually the point. We pair on changes rather than doing them in a corner, because the goal is that your team can maintain it afterwards.
Other services
Let’s build something that lasts.
Tell us about the project. If we’re not the right studio for it, we’ll say so — and usually point you at someone who is.