Retainer · From $3,500/mo · 3-month minimum

A senior technical brain on retainer — without hiring a full CTO.

For non-technical founders and small teams who used AI to build a real product, but now face decisions a chatbot can't answer. Architecture before the rewrite. Security before the breach. Vendor before the lock-in. Hire before the burn.

Book a CTO-Lite call → See Maintenance instead

Who this is for

Founders making technical decisions they can't quite verify.

CTO-Lite is for the company that has shipped, has revenue or close to it, and now has to make grown-up decisions.

Non-technical founder

You're the only one in the room

Investors ask about architecture. Customers ask about security. Vendors ask which plan. You need someone whose answer you trust.

Pre-first-hire

You're 60–90 days from your first engineering hire

We help you write the JD, screen candidates, run the technical interview, and onboard the hire on a clean codebase.

Cofounder coverage

Your technical cofounder left, or never quite arrived

We backstop the role until the right cofounder or VPE shows up — without the equity conversation.

What we do

Judgment work, with hands-on backup.

A typical month — we customize on the intake call.

Weekly 1:1. 60 minutes. Decisions made, decisions deferred, what to ship next.
Architecture & tech-debt calls. What to build now vs later. Where to draw the next abstraction.
Vendor & tooling decisions. Auth provider, hosting, observability, billing, LLM. Pros, cons, and our pick.
Hiring support. Engineering JD, screening, technical interviews, references, onboarding plan.
Investor & board prep. Tech section of the deck, technical DD answers, board memos for non-technical directors.
Customer security questionnaires. You forward, we draft. Two-day turn on most.
Incident leadership. When something goes wrong, we run the bridge call and write the post-mortem.
Slack & async. In your channel. Ask anything; we answer in hours, not days.

Red flags

If two of these are true, you needed a CTO yesterday.

Common situations that bring founders to this page.

C-01Critical

You can't tell if a vendor is overcharging you

Hosting bills, LLM bills, SaaS sprawl. You sign because the AI told you to. We benchmark.

C-02Critical

You're about to hire a senior engineer

Hiring is the most expensive technical decision an early founder makes. We help you not get it wrong.

C-03High

An investor asked for technical DD

You have 10 days. Your codebase wasn't built for inspection. We help — or we run the diligence ourselves on the other side.

C-04High

You don't know what to rebuild vs keep

The classic vibe-coded inflection: parts are great, parts are scaffolding. We help you draw the line.

C-05High

A customer's security team is asking questions

SOC 2 lite, vendor questionnaires, DPA reviews. We draft, you sign.

C-06Worth knowing

You feel out of your depth in technical conversations

You shouldn't have to fake it. We coach you to ask the right questions and translate the answers.

Pricing

Two tiers, both honest.

If most of what you need is code, look at Maintenance instead.

Advisory

$3,500/mo

Best for: solo founder, pre-first-hire, mostly judgment work.

Weekly 1:1 + Slack
Vendor & hire support
Up to 6h/mo of hands-on

CTO-Lite, asked & answered.

01 Will you write code?

Sometimes. CTO-Lite is mostly judgment, but on a small team we'll occasionally take a thorny ticket. If most of what you need is code, the Maintenance retainer is the right product.

02 Will you join board or investor calls?

Yes — on the Embedded tier. We help you prep technical updates, answer DD questions, and explain architecture decisions to non-technical board members.

03 Can you help us hire our first engineer?

Yes — and that's often the right outcome. We write the spec, screen candidates, run the technical interview, and onboard. We are explicitly trying to make ourselves redundant.

04 How is this different from a coach or advisor?

We do real work. Vendor calls, hire screens, post-mortems, on-call escalations. Coaches help you think; we also help you ship.

05 What's the minimum commitment?

Three months. Cancellable thereafter with 30 days' notice. Most CTO-Lite engagements last 6–12 months and end when the founder hires their VPE.

06 Equity instead of cash?

No. We've found that introduces incentives that don't serve either side. Cash on a flat retainer, cancel any time.