Services · Fractional CTO
A technical owner, part-time, with no reason to tell you to build.
For ecommerce brands doing $1M–$50M that need engineering judgement more often than engineering hours. Build-or-buy calls, vendor selection, developer oversight, and the risk register nobody owns. Rolling monthly, thirty days’ notice.
A$2,000–A$8,000 per month. Most engagements start with the diagnostic so the first decisions run on real numbers.
The problem
The expensive decisions are being made by whoever is nearest.
Somewhere between one and fifty million in revenue, the technology questions stop being small. Do we replatform. Do we build the warehouse system or buy one. Is this developer any good. Should the ERP vendor have that much access to our data. Do we need a data warehouse or does someone just need to fix the spreadsheet.
In most businesses this size, those calls land on a founder or an operations lead who is capable but does not do this for a living, and who is being advised almost exclusively by people with a financial interest in the answer. The platform partner recommends the platform. The agency recommends a build. The app vendor recommends the app. Each is individually reasonable and collectively it is not advice.
A full-time technical executive fixes this and is usually unjustifiable at this size — the decision volume simply is not there, and the cost of getting the hire wrong is high in both money and months. So the role goes unfilled, and the decisions get made anyway, one vendor call at a time.
The fractional arrangement exists for exactly that gap. Someone senior, engaged part-time, whose incentive is unchanged by whether the answer is build, buy, integrate or nothing at all. The value is mostly in the projects that never happen.
The role
Six things that become somebody’s job.
Build, buy, integrate or delete
The recurring decision, made properly and written down each time with the reasoning attached. Most of the money lost in this range is not lost on a bad build; it is lost on building something that could have been bought, or buying something that then had to be worked around forever.
Owning the stack as a whole
Someone has to hold the map: what each tool is for, what it costs, what depends on it, and which two are quietly doing the same job. Ecommerce stacks accrete one app at a time and nobody is ever assigned the total.
Being the technical side of a vendor conversation
Sitting on calls with platform vendors, app partners and development shops, asking the questions that only get asked by someone who has implemented the thing before, and reading the contract terms that decide what happens to your data if you leave.
Oversight of whoever is writing code
In-house developers, a contractor, an offshore team or all three. Review, standards, environments, deployment, and a definition of done. Cheap development is genuinely cheap now, and it works well precisely when someone competent is specifying and reviewing it.
Roadmap and sequencing
What gets done this quarter, what waits, and what gets abandoned. Sequencing is where most of the value sits: doing the data work before the reporting project saves the reporting project, and doing it the other way round wastes both.
The unglamorous risk register
Access control, backups you have actually restored from, dependency on one person, PCI and privacy obligations, what happens if a key vendor disappears. None of it is interesting until the week it is the only thing that matters.
The comparison
Fractional CTO, agency, or a full-time hire.
These solve different problems and the wrong one is expensive in a different way each time. The honest summary: buy delivery from an agency, buy judgement fractionally, and hire full-time when technology becomes the product.
| Dimension | Fractional CTO | Agency / dev shop | Full-time CTO |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you're buying | Judgement and ownership, part-time | Delivery capacity for a defined project | Full-time leadership and availability |
| Typical commitment | Monthly, rolling, 30 days' notice | Per project or per retainer | Permanent, with notice period and equity |
| Time to start | Days | Weeks | Months, including search and notice |
| Cost shape | A$2,000 – A$8,000 / month with us | Project fee or monthly retainer | Salary, on-costs, equity and recruitment |
| Incentive on advice | Paid the same whether you build or buy | Usually paid to build | Paid the same, but may want to build a team |
| Best when | You need decisions more often than you need code | You have a scoped project and want it delivered | Technology is the product, not the support act |
| Weakness | Part-time attention; not a substitute for capacity | Little continuity between projects | Expensive and slow to reverse if it's the wrong hire |
| Who owns the code | You do | Depends entirely on the contract — check it | You do |
Cost shapes are stated qualitatively except for our own price, which is published above. We are not going to put a salary benchmark on this page without a source we would defend.
Engagement
Monthly, and easy to end.
No minimum term, thirty days’ notice, and everything produced during the engagement is yours. A retainer that is hard to leave stops being advice and starts being a subscription to somebody’s opinion.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Price | A$2,000 – A$8,000 per month, depending on cadence and scope |
| Commitment | Rolling monthly, 30 days' notice, no minimum term |
| Cadence | Typically a weekly working session plus asynchronous availability |
| Usually starts with | The Operations Diagnostic, so the first decisions are made on real numbers |
| Included | Vendor calls, architecture review, developer oversight, roadmap, risk register |
| Not included | Writing production code as the primary activity — that is a fixed-scope build |
Qualifying
Who this is for, and who it isn’t.
This is for you if
- You are doing $1M–$50M and technology decisions now cost real money, but not enough of them to justify a full-time executive.
- You are about to make an expensive, hard-to-reverse call: replatforming, a custom build, an ERP, a warehouse system.
- You have developers — in-house, contract or offshore — and nobody senior is reviewing what they produce.
- The founder is currently the technical decision-maker by default and would rather not be.
- You want advice from somebody with no financial interest in the answer being 'build it'.
This is not for you if
- You need hands on keyboard. This is judgement and oversight; capacity is a separate conversation.
- You want someone available all day, every day. Part-time attention is the trade you are making.
- Technology is your product rather than the thing supporting it. At that point hire properly, full-time.
- You want a title on the website for a funding round. That is a real request and we are not the right answer to it.
- You already have a senior technical leader and want a second opinion once. Buy the diagnostic instead — it is cheaper and more useful.
Questions
What people ask before booking.
A senior technical decision-maker engaged part-time, usually monthly, who owns the technology direction of a business without being a full-time employee. In practice the job is decisions, oversight and sequencing: what to build, what to buy, who should write it, what order it happens in, and what the risks are. It is not a part-time developer, and the distinction matters more than anything else on this page.
An agency sells delivery capacity for a defined project and is generally paid to build. A fractional CTO sells judgement and continuity, and is paid the same whether the answer is build, buy, integrate or do nothing. The two are complementary — a good fractional CTO will often hire an agency and then review what it produces — but they are not substitutes.
When technology is the product rather than the thing supporting it, when you have enough engineers that management is a daily job, or when the decisions have become continuous rather than weekly. All three are good problems. If you are approaching any of them, we would say so and help you write the role description rather than extend the engagement.
It varies with what is happening, which is why we price the engagement rather than the hours. The usual shape is a weekly working session, asynchronous availability in between, and heavier involvement around a decision or a vendor selection. If it becomes a full-time load, that is a signal to change the arrangement, and we will raise it.
Some, when it is the fastest way to settle a question or unblock someone. But writing production software as the main activity is a fixed-scope build with its own quote, kept separate on purpose. Mixing the two turns the advisory relationship into a sales relationship, which is exactly what makes the advice worth less.
Yes, and this is one of the most common reasons brands start. Review, standards, environments, deployment process and a clear definition of done. It works with in-house teams, contractors and offshore teams alike; what it needs is agreement up front that technical decisions route through one person.
Rolling monthly with thirty days' notice and no minimum term. There is no lock-in, and everything produced during the engagement — documents, decisions, code, infrastructure — belongs to you. We would rather you could leave and chose not to.
Yes. We are based in Australia and work with clients in the United States and Europe on an asynchronous default with scheduled overlap for the sessions that need to be live. Written decisions are a requirement of the role rather than a concession to distance — a technical owner who does not write things down is a problem in any timezone.
Next step
Start with the diagnostic, then decide.
Two to three weeks, a document you keep, and a clear view of whether you need a technical owner or just one decision made properly.
Ace takes these calls. Not a salesperson, because there isn’t one.