How much of your time does a fractional CTO engagement take?

One to four days a month for a standing engagement, usually a weekly call plus a block of focused work. Architecture reviews and technical due diligence are shorter: two to three weeks of part-time work with a written deliverable.

How do you price the work?

175 PLN per hour for advisory work. Retainers are quoted per month, and reviews or due diligence engagements are fixed-scope: one price agreed before anything starts.

Do you replace an in-house CTO or work alongside one?

Either. Before a hire exists I hold the technical decisions and help you make the hire. When a CTO is already in place I work as a counterpart for the hard calls, or on a specific problem like scaling, a migration or due diligence.

Fractional CTO for startups · one to four days a month

Technical decisions, taken by someone who has paid for them before.

Name: Fractional CTO — architecture, engineering leadership and technical due diligence
Price: 175 PLN
Availability: InStock

I architected and ran a platform that carries over a billion events a day, built the team that operated it, and sat on the technical side of an acquisition. Now I do that work part-time for companies that need the judgement without the full-time hire.

Senior technical advice at a startup-friendly 175 PLN/hour.

Book a 30-minute call Write on WhatsApp See the evidence ↓

Where I get called in

the four shapes of it

The roadmap outran the architecture

Shipping used to take days and now takes weeks. Nobody can point at the reason, and every fix looks like a rewrite.

The first senior hire

You need a technical bar more than you need headcount — someone who can tell a good engineer from a convincing one, and set the standard before it calcifies.

Due diligence is coming

An investor or an acquirer will read the code, the infrastructure and the delivery process. Better to know what they will find before they do.

Scale, suddenly

A customer win multiplies traffic, a regulator sets a date, or a migration cannot slip. This is the work I have done under load before.

How an engagement runs

four steps, no theatre

1 · Diagnose (about two weeks)

I read the code, the infrastructure and the delivery process, and talk to two or three engineers. You get an architecture map and a list of what actually carries risk.

2 · Decide

Two or three options with the trade-offs written down — cost in money and in weeks — so the decision outlives the meeting. Decision records are part of the deliverable.

3 · Build, or lead the build

I take the critical path myself, or guide your engineers through it and stay accountable for the outcome. Whichever leaves less mess behind.

4 · Hand over

Docs, runbooks and a team that can keep going without me. The goal of a fractional CTO is to stop being necessary.

Evidence

what this looks like in production

MarTech · 2016–2026 · exit

PushPushGo

Event ingest, fan-out, queueing and delivery for web and mobile push at over a billion events a day, on bare metal and cloud, with a warehouse over the top. Team of fifteen. Majority acquisition by Vercom S.A. in 2021.

stack · mongodb · rabbitmq · typescript · bare metal + cloud

FinTech · in market

GetViaMsg

Session-based micro-payments with asynchronous settlement: operator webhooks, idempotent accounting, DORA-aligned controls and documented operational resilience. Two SMS operators, three clouds.

stack · fly.io · cloudflare · oracle cloud

MedTech · live

Terapeuto

Multi-tenant system under medical-data constraints: four-level pricing engine, encrypted session records, conflict-free scheduling, end-to-end test coverage. Prototype in thirty days, feature lead time around two days.

stack · python · sqlite · litestream · fly.io · docker

Questions I get asked first

How much of your time does this take?: One to four days a month for a standing engagement — usually a weekly call plus a block of focused work. Reviews and due diligence are shorter: two to three weeks part-time, ending in a written deliverable.
How do you price it?: 175 PLN per hour for advisory work. Retainers are quoted per month. Reviews and due diligence are fixed-scope: one price agreed before anything starts.
Do you replace an in-house CTO?: Either. Before the hire exists I hold the technical decisions and help you make the hire. With a CTO already in place I work as a counterpart for the hard calls, or on one specific problem.

What I don't do

No staff augmentation or outsourcing — I am not an agency, and I will not pretend to be a team.
No fixed-price rewrite of a system nobody has read yet.
No retainer without a decision to make. If there is nothing to decide, you do not need me monthly.

Need a technical counterpart for the next six months?

Tell me what you are building and what is keeping you up. A thirty-minute call, then I come back with what I would do first, in writing.

Book a 30-minute call Write on WhatsApp