CTO Advisory at $5,499 a month. Weekly calls, architecture reviews, first-engineer hiring. Month-to-month. 14-day money-back.
- Audit
- Architect
- Scale
monthly retainer
Who this is for
You built to $20K MRR on your own, and now the technical decisions are outpacing your confidence. Every stack choice, vendor commitment, and engineering hire lands on your desk with no one to pressure-test it against. I work with solo non-technical founders at exactly this stage: past proof-of-concept, before the point of no return on decisions that compound.
The pain today
- Architecture choices land on your desk with no one qualified to push back.
- The first senior engineering hire is make-or-break with no filter to catch a bad fit.
- Vendor and SaaS commitments carry multi-year lock-in you did not see coming.
- Investors ask technical due diligence questions you cannot answer without guessing.
- An AI vendor or dev shop pitches you weekly and you have no way to evaluate the pitch.
The outcome you get
- Weekly calls on the decisions that cost the most to unwind.
- A hiring process for your first engineer that filters for fit, not just credentials.
- Vendor evaluations before you sign anything over $1,000 a month.
- Investor-ready answers to technical due diligence questions.
- Month-to-month with cancel-anytime terms.
The decision-load wall every solo founder hits
There is a specific inflection point solo founders reach around $20K MRR. Revenue is real. The product works. And suddenly every technical decision feels like it could break something that took two years to build.
Stack migration, cloud infrastructure, API design, the first engineering hire, the AI tool the vendor keeps pitching, the dev shop that wants $40,000 for a feature you are not sure you need. Each one lands on your desk and the downside of getting it wrong is not a bad afternoon, it is six months of cleanup.
I have been a working CTO and senior engineer for 17 years across 250+ projects. When I took a solo founder from architectural chaos to a clean engineering engagement at GigEasy, the difference was not more hours of work. It was one weekly call with a senior voice who had seen that exact decision pattern before and knew which ones to stop.
The Advisory is that: a $5,499 a month retainer that gives you CTO-level judgment on the calls you cannot afford to get wrong.
Weekly calls on the decisions that cost the most to unwind.
What the engagement actually covers
The Advisory is not a consulting project with a deliverable at the end. It is an ongoing relationship structured around your decision calendar.
Weekly strategy call. Usually 30-45 minutes, focused on the decisions in your queue for that week. Architecture choices, vendor evaluations, hiring questions, investor prep, whatever is live.
Async escalations. You have a direct channel. When a vendor needs an answer by Thursday or a developer sends you a contract to sign, you do not wait for the next call. Most solo founders send 3-6 async escalations a month.
Hiring support. I help write the job description, screen CVs, run technical interviews, and help close the candidate. No recruiter fee.
Vendor filter. Every SaaS, AI tool, and dev shop you are considering gets a structured evaluation before you commit. About 40 percent pass as-is, 30 percent get a modification recommendation, 30 percent get rejected in favor of a better option or a build.
The engagement is written into an SOW so there is no ambiguity about what escalates to me and what your team handles.
3 weeks: From kickoff to investor demo.
Hiring your first engineer
The first engineering hire is the highest-leverage decision a solo founder makes in the first three years. A right hire doubles your shipping velocity. A wrong hire costs somewhere between six months and $150,000 to unwind, depending on how deep in they get before the fit breaks down.
Most solo founders cannot tell the difference between a senior engineer who is genuinely strong and one who interviews well. The difference shows up in the third month, not the third interview.
I help with the full hiring cycle: writing the job description to attract the right signal, designing the technical screen, running the interview panel, and pressure-testing the fit before the offer goes out. The success rate on first-engineer hires run through the Advisory is high because the filtering is tight.
After the hire, I stay as a sounding board for the relationship. The first 90 days with a new engineer are as high-stakes as the hire itself.
Technical due diligence for investor conversations
Solo founders raising a pre-seed or seed round face a specific type of question that is hard to fake: technical due diligence. Investors or their advisors want to know your stack choices, your architecture rationale, your security posture, your scalability plan, and sometimes why you made a decision three months ago that looks questionable in hindsight.
Non-technical founders who have not had a senior technical voice in the room often answer these badly, not because the decisions were wrong, but because they cannot explain them in the vocabulary investors recognize.
Part of the Advisory is exactly this. Before a fundraising conversation, we walk through the likely technical questions, I prepare you with the answers, and if an investor wants a technical deep-dive call, I can join it. Having a credentialed CTO available to investors signals that your technical foundation is being managed, not improvised.
This has closed rounds. It has also caught architecture decisions mid-flight that would have been embarrassing in a due diligence call.
Evaluating AI vendors and dev shops
The current AI vendor market is designed to confuse non-technical buyers. Every pitch deck has benchmark numbers and capability claims that sound impressive and are very difficult to validate without hands-on technical experience.
Dev shops are the same. A $30,000 quote can represent good work or it can represent a project that will take twice as long, cost twice as much, and leave you with code you cannot maintain.
I evaluate both. For AI vendors, I look at actual integration complexity, real pricing at your scale, data privacy implications, and the exit cost if the tool does not perform. For dev shops, I review the proposal, the contract terms, the portfolio work behind it, and what happens if they ghost.
About a third of the vendor and dev shop pitches I review get a flat rejection with a better alternative. That filter alone has paid for the Advisory many times over for the solo founders I work with.
When Advisory is not the right fit
The Advisory makes sense at $20K MRR and above. At $5,499 a month, the retainer is roughly 20 percent of that revenue, which is the upper bound of sustainable for a lean operation. Below that threshold, the cost-to-value ratio tilts the wrong way and I will say so.
The Advisory is also not a substitute for a development team. I do not write production features under this engagement. Code reviews and architecture prototypes are in scope. Production sprint work is not. If you need consistent feature velocity, the Applications subscription at $4,999 a month is the right pairing.
If you need more than advisory, the full Fractional CTO engagement at $9,499 a month covers 15-20 hours a week of embedded technical leadership. That is the right choice once you have 3-5 engineers and need organizational as well as technical direction.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Built and shipped an investor-ready MVP from scratch
Built the entire technological base and delivered MVP in just 3 weeks, enabling a successful rapid launch and investor demo.
Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
A technical advisor typically gives one-off opinions on specific questions. A fractional CTO advisory engagement is ongoing, structured, and accountable. I am on a weekly call, reviewing your actual decisions, joining investor calls when needed, and available for async escalations between sessions. The difference is accountability versus access.
$20K MRR and above. At $5,499 a month the retainer is roughly 20 percent of $20K MRR, which is the upper end of sustainable for a lean operation. Below $20K, the cost-to-value ratio does not work and I will tell you that directly rather than take the engagement.
A technical co-founder takes equity and is involved in every layer of the company. A fractional CTO advisor is a service relationship: fee-only, month-to-month, with a defined scope. For solo founders who do not want to give up equity and need targeted senior judgment rather than a full-time partner, the advisory model is the cleaner fit.
Yes. Preparing you for technical due diligence questions is a standard part of the Advisory. If an investor wants a direct technical call, I can join. Solo founders raising pre-seed or seed rounds consistently find that having a credentialed CTO available to investors changes the tone of those conversations.
Weekly call plus async, roughly 4-6 focused hours a month depending on what is live in your queue. The full Fractional CTO engagement at $9,499 a month is 15-20 hours a week and covers organizational leadership for founders who already have a team.
Yes. Vendor and proposal evaluation is one of the highest-value uses of the Advisory for solo founders. I look at real integration cost, data implications, contract exit terms, and portfolio credibility. About a third of the pitches I review end in a rejection with a better alternative identified.
Yes. Month-to-month with cancel-at-end-of-month terms. The 14-day money-back guarantee applies to the first billing period. There is no annual lock-in and no penalty for pausing if MRR drops or you bring on a full-time CTO.