Outsourced & Fractional CTO
Stop guessing with your tech budget.
Senior technical leadership for non-technical founders already juggling a few agencies - dev audits, vendor oversight, budget optimization, and a roadmap you can actually ship. No full-time salary required.
The Mandate
Built for founders operating without a technical co-founder
Technology spend nobody can account for
Cloud infrastructure, contractor invoices, and SaaS subscriptions accumulate for years with no senior technical review of what's actually earning its keep.
Multiple agencies, no one translating between them
A dev shop, a marketing agency, maybe a platform partner - each speaks a different technical language, and without someone to referee, conflicting advice and overlapping invoices quietly drain the budget. Read: how to manage multiple dev agencies without getting played.
A roadmap set by whoever spoke last
Without technical leadership in the room, priorities are decided by the loudest vendor pitch rather than a clear read of risk and return.
Platform decisions made on faith
Ecommerce migrations, headless rebuilds, and checkout overhauls get approved on vendor promises rather than an independent, technical view.
A full-time hire is the wrong instrument
A senior technical hire takes months to find, costs upward of $200,000 loaded, and often sits under-utilized at this stage of the business. See the full outsourced vs. full-time CTO cost comparison.
The Conflict Of Interest
Agencies bill by the hour. You need it to ship.
None of this requires bad faith - just misaligned incentives nobody's watching closely enough to catch. Read more on managing multiple dev agencies without getting played.
Hour-stretching
A feature that takes 15 focused hours - often less now, with AI-assisted development - can take a week to bill when nobody's checking the estimate against the work. Multiply that gap across a roadmap and it's thousands of dollars a feature, quietly.
The upsell stack
Standups, sprint ceremonies, and project-management overhead get billed as necessary process. Sometimes they are. Often they're theater that pads the invoice without changing what actually ships.
No stake in your time-to-market
An agency isn't penalized when secondary polish delays a launch. You are - every week a revenue-driving feature sits unshipped is a week of business benefit that never happened.
The retainer fade
Agencies work hardest while they're still earning the contract. Once a retainer becomes routine, output quietly slows - not from bad faith, just from nobody keeping them accountable to the pace that won the business in the first place.
Working With What You've Got
You don't need to fire anyone to hire this
Most clients arrive already paying a dev agency, a marketing agency, maybe a platform partner - and no one who can tell them if any of those agencies are telling the truth. The role isn't to replace them. It's to sit above them.
Two agencies, one bill
Overlapping or duplicated work across vendors - the kind that only shows up when someone technical reads every invoice line by line - gets caught in the budget diagnostic, not discovered a year later.
Plain-language translation
Every proposal, quote, and technical claim from every agency you work with gets explained in terms you can actually act on - before you sign, not after something breaks.
One point of accountability
When something breaks, there's one person who already knows your whole stack - not three agencies pointing at each other while the site stays down.
The Practice
What falls under the mandate
Every engagement begins narrow and fixed-fee. Nothing below requires a retainer to access.
Technical & codebase audit
A structured review of your codebase, architecture, and engineering practices - surfacing risk, technical debt, and the gap between what you're paying for and what you're getting.
Infrastructure & budget optimization
A line-by-line review of cloud, hosting, SaaS, and contractor spend, with a prioritized list of cuts, renegotiations, and consolidations - one that often funds the engagement outright.
Ecommerce technology strategy
Platform selection, migration planning, checkout and performance review, and vendor evaluation across Shopify, headless commerce, and custom storefronts - including custom Shopify app development for merchants who've outgrown off-the-shelf apps.
Technology roadmap & planning
A prioritized, board-ready roadmap that ties engineering work to revenue and risk, so every build decision has a stated reason behind it.
Vendor & agency oversight
A single technical point of contact across every agency and vendor you already work with - dev, marketing, platform - so their work gets coordinated, their claims get evaluated, and nothing falls in the gap between them. You keep the relationships; someone technical finally has your back in the room.
AI-development & data security
A review of how AI coding tools and agents touch your codebase, infrastructure, and customer data - making sure secrets, credentials, and production access are properly isolated, and your environment is configured so AI-assisted development doesn't become a liability.
Fractional CTO retainer
Ongoing technical leadership by the day or month - architecture decisions, team leadership, and execution of the roadmap, for as long as it's needed.
Behind The Practice
Built by someone who has run the stack, not just reviewed it
Every recommendation here comes out of having carried the pager, not just the slide deck.
CTO, Healthcare Ecommerce
Led technology through the company's growth from $100K/month on OpenCart to a $5M/month international ecommerce operation.
CTO, Fashion-Tech
Full ownership of the technology stack end to end - in-store applications, a custom POS, order management, booking management, and manufacturing systems.
Branch Manager, ONLYOFFICE.com
Ran regional operations for ONLYOFFICE, a global productivity and collaboration software company.
Creator, SheetSync
Built and maintain SheetSync, a published Shopify app merchants use to bulk-edit product data, pricing, and metafields directly from Google Sheets. More on when to build a custom Shopify app vs. buy one.
Fluent In
AI & Automation
The Engagement
The Technology & Budget Diagnostic
A complete, independent read on your stack - in five business days.
One fixed fee. One written report. A full review of your codebase, infrastructure, and spend - plus a prioritized roadmap you can hand directly to your team, whether or not the relationship continues past the diagnostic.
- Scoped on a free call - the fixed fee is confirmed before any work begins.
- Delivered as a written report: risk findings, spend recovered or recoverable, and a prioritized 90-day roadmap.
- Presented directly to you and your team, not left in an inbox as an unread PDF.
- No retainer required to receive it, and no pressure to sign one afterward.
How It Proceeds
Four stages, five days to findings
Call
A free call to define exactly what's in scope, and agree the fixed fee before anything begins.
Diagnostic
Codebase, infrastructure, and spend are reviewed against a framework built from real operating experience.
Findings
A written report and a direct walkthrough: what's at risk, what's being wasted, and what to address first.
Advisory
Where it makes sense, the relationship continues on retainer. Where it doesn't, the report stays yours.
The Engagements
Three ways to work together
Every tier is scoped upfront. No hourly billing, no ambiguity about what's included.
The Review
The full technology & budget diagnostic, delivered as a written report with a 90-day roadmap.
Fixed feeConfirmed after the call
The Advisory
Ongoing technical leadership: architecture decisions, vendor review, and roadmap execution.
Monthly retainerScoped to your roadmap
The Mandate
Acting fractional CTO: team leadership, hiring, and direct oversight of delivery.
Monthly retainerScoped to your team
Questions
Before you write in
What does an outsourced CTO actually do?
Senior technical leadership without a full-time hire: diagnosing your codebase and infrastructure, optimizing engineering and platform spend, setting technology roadmaps, evaluating vendors, and guiding ecommerce platform decisions.
How much does a fractional CTO cost compared to a full-time hire?
A full-time CTO typically runs $200,000–$350,000+ per year loaded with salary and equity. Fractional advisory is scoped in days per month - usually a fraction of that - with no recruiting time, severance risk, or equity dilution.
What's actually included in the diagnostic?
A review of your codebase, infrastructure, vendor contracts, and cloud or platform spend, delivered as a written findings report covering risk, waste, and quick wins, plus a prioritized roadmap - within five business days of kickoff.
Do you work with ecommerce businesses specifically?
Yes - platform migrations, checkout and performance reviews, and vendor evaluation across Shopify, headless commerce, and custom storefronts are a core part of the practice.
What happens after the diagnostic?
You keep the report and roadmap regardless. Most clients move into a monthly advisory or embedded retainer to execute it, but there's no obligation to continue past the diagnostic.
Is there a contract or minimum term?
The diagnostic is a one-time fixed fee. Advisory and embedded retainers run month-to-month with no minimum term - cancel with 30 days' notice.
Do you review AI coding tools and agents for security risks?
Yes. As AI coding assistants and agents get more access to codebases, credentials, and production systems, the diagnostic includes a review of how those tools are configured - making sure secrets aren't exposed, permissions are properly scoped, and customer data stays protected.
I already work with a few agencies - do I need to replace them?
No. Most clients keep their existing agencies. The role here is to sit above them: translating their technical claims into plain terms, coordinating where their work overlaps or conflicts, and making sure you're not paying twice for the same thing.
I'm not technical - how would I even know if this is working?
Every engagement starts with a written diagnostic you can read without a technical background, and every recommendation comes with a plain-language reason attached. You're not expected to evaluate code - that's the job being outsourced.
Can you help cut costs across the agencies I'm already paying?
Yes - the budget diagnostic looks specifically at overlapping or redundant spend across every agency and vendor you're paying, not just your own infrastructure. That cross-vendor view is usually where the fastest, most defensible savings are found.
Start Here
Get a clear-eyed read on your stack before your next hire, or your next quarter.
A free call, no obligation attached. You'll leave with a fixed fee and a start date - not a sales pitch.