What a Fractional CTO Costs
A fractional CTO at esence.io costs between $1,500 and $6,500 a month, depending on how many hours a week you need and how fast you need answers. You work directly with me: I set the architecture, review the code that implements it, and stay accountable for whether the system holds when it matters.
The number is on this page rather than behind a call, because a price you have to book a meeting to hear is a price somebody is still deciding.
Who does the work?
I do. Every part of an engagement is delivered by me: the architecture, the code review, the hiring calls, and the technical answers your board asks for.
That model has one practical consequence worth planning around. My capacity is finite, so the hours on each band are real numbers rather than an opening position, and work is scoped to what those hours genuinely cover. What you get in return is continuity: the person who designs your tenant isolation is the person reviewing the pull request that changes it a year later.
What moves the number?
Six things change what an engagement costs. Hours are the one you are actually buying, and the other five are reasons the same hours are worth more or less to you.
- Hours per week
- The only thing actually being bought. Everything else on this list is a reason the same hours cost more or less.
- How fast you need answers
- Async review inside a couple of days is cheaper than being reachable the same day, which is cheaper again than sitting in your standup.
- Whether you already have engineers
- Leading a team that exists costs less time than being the team. A pre-hire startup buys more hours to get the same distance.
- Size and age of the codebase
- An audit of a two-year-old system with no tests is not the same work as reviewing a service written last quarter, and it is priced by how long it takes to build an accurate picture.
- Regulated or high-consequence domains
- Fintech, health and anything carrying a compliance review add work that is real but invisible from the outside: evidence, controls, and being able to defend a design to an auditor.
- Fixed scope versus an open retainer
- A named deliverable with an end date prices differently from ongoing leadership, because the risk sits in a different place.
What each band does not cover
Knowing where a band stops is the useful half. It is what lets you size an engagement correctly before we ever speak.
Starter
$1500 / month
- No hands in the codebase: no code review, no implementation
- No time inside your sprint or standups
- No hiring interviews or candidate evaluation
Growth
$3500 / month
- No line-by-line code review
- No formal codebase audit or due-diligence report
- Not a named technical leader to your board or investors
Enterprise
$6500 / month
- Two days a week, not five: this is not a full-time CTO
- Not a substitute for engineers who ship the work
How does this compare with a full-time CTO?
The comparison people reach for is the retainer against a salary, and it is the wrong one, because a salary is not what a hire costs. Do the sum below with your own numbers, since the answer depends on your market and your stage rather than on anybody's published average.
| What a full-time hire actually costs | Your number |
|---|---|
| Base salary | the figure you were already comparing |
| Employer taxes and benefits | a percentage on top of base, wherever you hire |
| Equity grant | priced at your last round, not at zero |
| Recruiter fee | typically a percentage of first-year salary, paid once |
| Ramp | the months before the hire is making good decisions in your codebase |
| Risk of a mis-hire | the same costs again, plus the time lost, if it does not work |
Add those up, divide by twelve, and compare the result against a band above. The point of the exercise is not that fractional always wins, because it does not: past roughly five to ten engineers the bottleneck stops being architecture and starts being people management, and that is the moment to hire full-time. Below that line, what you are short of is decisions rather than presence, and decisions are the thing a fractional engagement sells.
If you want to see the shape of the work before spending anything, the engineering blog carries the actual configuration and failure modes, and the services pages break the engagement down by problem rather than by hours.
FAQs
At esence.io a fractional CTO engagement runs from $1,500 a month for up to 10 hours of asynchronous architecture and strategy work, to $6,500 a month for the full fractional CTO role at two days a week, with a $3,500 band in between for four hours weekly and priority access. Those numbers buy my time directly, which is why they are named on the page rather than quoted on request.
I do, personally. Every part of an engagement is delivered by me: the architecture, the code review, the hiring calls, and the technical answers your board asks for. My capacity is finite, so the hours named on each band are real numbers rather than an opening position, and work is scoped to what those hours genuinely cover.
Every band includes technical strategy, architecture review, product roadmap work and a technical debt assessment. From $3,500 that extends to database and microservice design, cloud and DevOps optimisation, sprint planning participation and hiring assistance. The top band adds the named Fractional CTO role, codebase audits, code review and due diligence.
Hours are fixed per band rather than open-ended: up to 10 hours a month with asynchronous support at the entry band, four hours weekly with priority access in the middle, and two days a week at the top. Fixing the hours is the point, because a technical leader whose availability moves every week cannot be planned around.
Compare the annual retainer against the full loaded cost of the hire rather than against base salary alone: salary plus employer taxes and benefits, plus the equity grant, plus recruiter fees, plus the months of ramp before the hire is productive. Put your own numbers into that sum, because the honest comparison depends on your market and your stage rather than on an industry average.
The fourth band exists for that and is quoted on request. It covers flexible engagements, project-based billing, and heavier engineering work than a fixed weekly commitment describes. If your need is smaller than the entry band rather than larger, say so, because a short scoped piece of work is usually a better first step than a retainer.