Technical Retainers
You need senior technical decisions made every month and work delivered in line with those decisions, without hiring a full-time CTO.
What You Get
A Technical Retainer gives your business a fractional CTO: the strategy, the architecture, the decisions about what to build and what to leave alone, vendor and developer oversight, and accountability for the results, on a part-time basis instead of a full-time salary. That is the Advisory retainer, and it is the core of what we do. Your team or your vendors build against the plan. The Embedded retainer adds execution: the same leadership, plus an agreed set of work delivered by us each month with a measurement and progress report, for businesses and agencies that also need the hands. Three-month minimum on either.
Price
Advisory from $4,000 per month. Embedded from $7,000 per month. Prices cover a monthly cadence; weekly or daily involvement is scoped and priced up front. Larger delivery volumes quoted custom.
Hosting and Maintenance
$25 per site per month, with a $100 minimum. That includes hosting on our infrastructure or yours, core and plugin updates, daily backups, and uptime and security monitoring. Fixes and changes that need a person are handled as tickets. Retainer clients get the first 10 sites included.
Questions
How much does a fractional CTO cost?
Advisory retainers, a fractional CTO for your business with your team or vendors doing the building, start at $4,000 per month. Embedded retainers add execution by us and start at $7,000 per month. Both carry a three-month minimum. Either is a fraction of the cost of a full-time CTO.
What is included each month?
Advisory: ownership of the technical direction. A prioritized roadmap for the month, architecture and stack decisions as they come up, review of everything your team or vendors ship before it goes live, oversight of any developer or vendor doing the work, a written monthly summary of what was decided and why, a standing line to us for questions between meetings, and a seat at the table when you need one: your internal meetings, and calls with your clients or their vendors. Embedded: all of that, plus we deliver an agreed set of work each month and report the measured result.
What if we need more than the retainer covers?
Recurring extra need means a bigger retainer, scoped at renewal. A one-off build or integration is quoted as a project. Small undefined work is billed hourly at a rate stated before it starts.