Fractional CTO Services | Beka Tomashvili

Twenty years building in tech. Several startups through small exits, accelerators like Berkeley SkyDeck, 500 Startups and AWS Startups, and a long run of the decisions that quietly decide whether a product survives its second year. If you need that judgment on your side of the table without adding a full-time executive to the payroll, that is what a fractional CTO is for.

A good CTO saves you from the mistakes you can't see yet.

What is a fractional CTO?

A fractional CTO is a senior technical leader who works with your company part-time, on an ongoing basis. Not a contractor who ships a feature and leaves. Not an advisor who takes equity and answers a message every few weeks. Someone accountable for the technical direction of the business, at a fraction of the time and cost of a full-time hire.

In practice the word "fractional" means a defined slice of the week — often one or two days — spent on the work only a CTO can do:

Architecture decisions — choosing the foundations deliberately, with the trade-offs written down and the expensive options ruled out early
A roadmap that survives contact with reality — sequenced by risk and dependency, not by wishful thinking
Engineering leadership — hiring, technical interviews, code standards, and the practices that raise quality without slowing delivery
Translation — turning what the engineering team knows into something a board, an investor, or a non-technical founder can act on
Vendor and build-versus-buy calls — where to spend, where to integrate, and where a cheap decision now becomes an expensive one later

Founders usually reach for one when there is a real technical business to run but not yet enough of it to justify a full-time CTO, or when the team has grown past the point where the founder can hold the architecture in their head.

What does a fractional CTO cost?

Most pages on this topic will not answer this. Here is the honest version.

Fractional CTO work is priced one of two ways. Monthly retainers buy a fixed slice of time — typically somewhere between a few thousand and twenty thousand dollars a month across the market, depending on how many days a month are committed and how much accountability comes with them. Hourly or day rates suit shorter engagements and diligence work, and across the market they sit broadly in the range you would expect for senior technical leadership rather than for contract development.

Three things move the number more than anything else:

Days committed per month. One day a week is a different engagement from three days a week, and pricing scales close to linearly.
Depth of accountability. Advising on architecture costs less than owning the roadmap, the hiring, and the delivery outcome.
Scope of the work. A greenfield build, a rescue of a system already in trouble, and a due diligence review are three different jobs.

For comparison: a full-time CTO in a startup market commands a salary plus meaningful equity, and takes months to find. A fractional arrangement starts in weeks, costs a fraction of that, and can be scaled up or ended without a severance conversation. That flexibility is most of the point.

When does a startup need one?

Not every company does. The signals that you might:

You are pre-CTO but past prototype. There is a product in production, customers depend on it, and nobody senior is accountable for how it is built.
The team ships slowly and nobody can say why. Usually architecture, sometimes process, occasionally hiring. Diagnosing which is the job.
You are raising, and technical diligence is coming. Investors will ask about scalability, security, and technical debt. It is cheaper to have good answers than to improvise them.
You are acquiring or investing in software. An honest read of the codebase — security, debt, performance, what it would really cost to maintain — before the money moves.
You have engineers but no engineering leadership. Good developers without direction build good components that do not add up to a system.
You are about to make an expensive, irreversible call. Platform, stack, infrastructure, a rebuild. These are cheap to get right and brutal to get wrong.

If none of those describe you, you probably do not need a fractional CTO yet, and I will tell you so on the first call.

How I work

Every engagement starts the same way: a conversation about what you are building and what is actually in the way. If the problem is not one I am the right person for, that is a short call and an honest answer.

From there the shape depends on what you need:

Ongoing fractional CTO — a committed slice of the month, owning architecture decisions, roadmap, and engineering practice alongside your team
Technical due diligence and code audits — a written review of security, technical debt, performance and scalability, with clear next steps and a realistic cost of ownership
Startup launch consulting — validating the idea technically, picking the stack, and estimating cost before you commit to any of it
Architecture reviews — a focused engagement when one big decision needs to be right

What I bring to all of it is the same: two decades of building and shipping, including the failures. I have launched companies, exited some, and watched others break in ways that were entirely predictable in hindsight. Most of the value in this role is pattern recognition on the mistakes.

Most AI projects die in the demo stage. I build for the boring part — production.

That applies well beyond AI. Demos are easy. Systems that run for years, under load, maintained by people who did not write them, are the actual work.

Hire a fractional CTO

The first conversation is free and genuinely useful even if we never work together. Tell me what you are building, where it hurts, and what decision is in front of you.