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Fractional CTO Services
Technical StrategyTeam HiringBoard Reporting

Fractional CTO Services for SaaS Startups

Senior Technical Leadership Without the Full-Time Hire

40+
SaaS Engagements
Series A through Series B
$10K
Starting Monthly
Predictable fixed fee
3.2×
Avg Engineering ROI
Within 6 months
0
Equity Required
Cash-only engagement
What Is a Fractional CTO?

A fractional CTO is a senior technical leader who works part-time with your company — usually 15 to 25 hours a week — giving you the same strategic oversight as a full-time CTO without the full-time price tag. For Series A through B SaaS startups, that means architecture decisions, engineering hiring, vendor evaluation, and investor-facing technical reporting. No $350K+ salary. No equity dilution.

Waar projecten falen

Your investors want a technical roadmap and your board deck has a blank slide That blank slide erodes board confidence fast — and once confidence drops, follow-on fundraising gets harder and oversight gets tighter.
You're hiring engineers but nobody's actually evaluating their system design skills Bad hires compound. One wrong senior engineer can set your architecture back 12 months.
Your AWS bill tripled last quarter and nobody can explain why Uncontrolled infrastructure costs burn runway — and they signal operational immaturity to every investor who sees them.
Three vendors are pitching you and you can't tell which one is lying Wrong vendor lock-in costs $100K+ to unwind and can delay product delivery by quarters.
Technical debt is piling up but nobody's weighing it against feature work Velocity drops quarter over quarter until shipping anything takes 3× longer than it should.
Your engineering team has no career ladder, no sprint process, and no incident playbook Top engineers leave within 12 months. Replacing them runs $30K–$50K per head.

Compliance

Technical Strategy & Roadmapping

We build a 6–18 month technical roadmap tied to your business milestones and fundraising timeline. Every architecture decision maps to a revenue outcome or a specific risk you're trying to eliminate.

Engineering Team Hiring

We write job specs, screen candidates, run technical interviews, and design your engineering ladder. You get the right people in seats without burning 40 hours on screening calls.

Architecture Review & Remediation

We audit your codebase, infrastructure, and data layer for scalability bottlenecks and security gaps. You get a prioritized remediation plan — not a 60-page PDF that collects dust on a shared drive.

Vendor & Tool Evaluation

We evaluate SaaS tools, cloud providers, and third-party integrations against your actual requirements and budget. Objective analysis — no affiliate links, no kickbacks.

Board & Investor Reporting

We build the technical slides for your board deck and join board meetings when it matters. Investors get straight answers about uptime, velocity, and technical risk.

SOC 2 & Security Readiness

We put access controls, audit logging, and security policies in place that enterprise customers and investors expect to see. SOC 2 Type II readiness without hiring a full compliance team.

Wat we bouwen

Weekly Strategy Sessions

Recurring 90-minute sessions with founders to keep technical priorities aligned with business goals and your next fundraising milestone.

Async Slack Access

Direct Slack access to your fractional CTO for real-time decisions. No waiting for the next scheduled call when something's on fire.

Sprint Process Design

We put lightweight agile processes in place that actually ship software instead of just generating Jira tickets.

Due Diligence Support

Technical due diligence prep for your next funding round — code quality reports, architecture diagrams, and risk assessments that investors actually expect to see.

Incident Response Playbooks

We write and drill incident response procedures so your team handles outages without panic at 2 AM.

Build vs. Buy Analysis

Data-driven analysis for every major technical decision so you stop building commodity features that already exist as off-the-shelf services.

Ons proces

01

Technical Assessment

We audit your codebase, infrastructure, team structure, and technical debt. Within the first week, you get a written assessment with severity ratings and a prioritized action plan.
Week 1
02

Strategy & Roadmap

We align your technical roadmap with your business milestones — next fundraise, enterprise launch, or compliance deadline. Every workstream gets an owner, a timeline, and a clear definition of done.
Week 2–3
03

Execution & Hiring

Then we start executing: architecture changes, hiring pipelines, vendor evaluations, process improvements. Your team sees measurable velocity improvements, not just slide decks.
Month 1–3
04

Board Integration

We build your first technical board report and establish the KPIs that matter — deployment frequency, incident response time, infrastructure cost per customer. Investors stop asking uncomfortable questions.
Month 2–4
05

Transition or Retain

When you're ready for a full-time CTO, we write the job spec, screen candidates, and run a structured handoff. Many clients keep us on through Series B. Honestly, both paths work fine.
Month 6+
Next.jsAWSVercelSupabasePostgreSQLTerraformGitHub ActionsDatadog

Veelgestelde vragen

How is a fractional CTO different from a technical consultant?

A consultant writes a report and leaves. A fractional CTO embeds with your team — attending standups, making hiring calls, joining board meetings, and owning technical outcomes over months or years. We're accountable for results, not deliverables.

How many hours per week does a fractional CTO work?

Typically 15 to 25 hours per week depending on the engagement tier. That covers strategy sessions with founders, async Slack availability, engineering team interactions, architecture work, and board prep. Most Series A startups find 20 hours is the sweet spot.

Do you take equity as compensation?

No. We work on cash-only monthly retainers. Equity creates misaligned incentives — we want to give you honest advice on build-vs-buy, team changes, and technical direction without any stake in your cap table clouding that judgment.

Can you help us hire a full-time CTO later?

Yes. Most engagements include a planned transition. We write the job spec, source candidates through our network, run the technical interviews, and manage a structured 30-day handoff. Several of our placements have come through direct referrals from our own professional network.

What SaaS tech stacks do you work with?

We work across modern SaaS stacks — Next.js, React, Node.js, Python, Go, PostgreSQL, AWS, GCP, Vercel, and Supabase are all common. We're stack-agnostic in our recommendations. If your best move is Rails or Elixir, we'll tell you that and help you hire for it.

How quickly can you start?

Most engagements start within a week of signing. We run a paid technical assessment in the first five business days and deliver a written report with prioritized recommendations. From there, we move straight into execution on your highest-impact items.

Fractional CTO from $10,000/mo
Month-to-month. No equity. 30-day termination clause.
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