CTO as a Service
CTO as a service: senior technical leadership on a subscription
You're building a company. Investors ask who owns the technology. An agency is quoting you numbers that feel invented. Your MVP, maybe AI-generated, maybe outsourced, works right up until it doesn't. CTO as a service gives you an experienced technical executive on demand, without the salary, the equity, or the six-month executive search.
The model is a monthly subscription for CTO-level judgment plus real engineering capability. I review the architecture, own the technical roadmap, sit in the investor and vendor meetings, and personally build the systems that matter when speed counts. Advisory-only firms stop at the meetings.
Every technical decision you make before product-market fit either compounds or costs you, which is why renting the judgment now makes sense. Hire the full-time CTO when the revenue justifies it.
What's inside the subscription
Technical due diligence & investor readiness
Architecture documentation, security posture, and a straight answer to "can this scale?" before your investors ask it.
MVP rescue & hardening
AI-built or agency-built MVPs cleaned up for production: auth, payments, cost controls, and maintainable code.
Roadmap & sprint direction
A prioritized technical roadmap your developers can execute, reviewed and re-planned every month.
Hiring & vendor bench
Interview your engineering candidates, vet your agencies, negotiate your contracts.
Direct build hours
A portion of every engagement is hands-on-keyboard: integrations, automations, and fixes shipped by me.
Proof, not promises
I've shipped and scaled production systems for American manufacturers and tech platforms, including a platform rebuild serving 398,000+ users and a programmatic SEO build that hit 4 million search impressions in a single month, with a #1 ranking for a 240,000-volume term.
Frequently asked questions
How much does CTO as a service cost? +
Subscriptions typically run $3,000 to $10,000/month for advisory-weighted engagements and more for embedded work, compared to $25,000+/month all-in for a full-time CTO. Every engagement starts with a fixed-price audit, so the first invoice pays for itself in findings.
Is CTO as a service right for a pre-revenue startup? +
Yes, and it's often the only responsible option. You get executive-level decisions during the phase where mistakes are most expensive, without burning runway on a $400K hire.
What happens when we outgrow it? +
I help you hire your full-time CTO. I write the job spec, interview the candidates, and hand over a documented, healthy stack. When that day comes, we both did our jobs.
Related services
Hire the judgment and the hands in one place.
One of five seats is open. Apply, and if you qualify we start with the Technology Reality Audit: two weeks, one fixed fee, fully credited if we work together. You keep the 12-month roadmap either way.