A Fractional CTO Who Actually Builds
Most fractional CTOs only advise. We give you a senior tech leader plus the engineers to execute - one retainer, one accountable team, no slide decks gathering dust.
A fractional CTO is a senior technology leader embedded in your company part-time on a monthly retainer — typically 20 to 60 hours per month — covering the work a full-time CTO would do without the full-time salary. The standard fractional CTO market sells advisory only: someone smart sits on a weekly call and writes opinions. Borah Labs sells fractional CTO services bundled with an embedded engineering team, so when the strategy says "refactor the auth layer," we refactor it; when the roadmap says "ship a billing redesign in six weeks," the same retainer covers leadership, design, and engineering. Three engagement formats: Strategy ($5,000/month, advisory only), Strategy + Build ($8,500/month, leadership plus ~40 hours of senior engineering), and Dedicated Partner ($14,000/month, embedded full-time team). Cancel with 30 days notice, no equity, no lock-in. Engagements typically run 6 to 18 months — long enough to land a hiring plan and ship the highest-impact items, short enough to hand off cleanly to a permanent CTO when you're ready.
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Who this is for
Built for teams with one of these problems.
If your situation looks like one of these three, you'll feel at home with us.
Pre-seed to Series-A startups across B2B SaaS, fintech, AI, marketplaces
Funded founder, no senior tech leader
You raised, hired your first one or two engineers, and now every architecture call, vendor selection, and hiring decision lands on your desk. You need someone senior making the technology calls so you can stay focused on customers, fundraising, and the next milestone — not debating Postgres versus DynamoDB at 11pm.
$5M-$50M revenue businesses across distribution, professional services, vertical SaaS, ecommerce ops
SMB with a fragile codebase
Your product works, customers pay, the business runs — but the codebase is held together with duct tape, the original developer is long gone, and you can't tell which agency proposals are honest. You need a technical adult in the room: someone who can read the code, audit the agencies, screen the next hire, and own the technology direction without you needing to learn it.
PE-backed companies, post-acquisition integrations, founder-CTO step-backs
Interim leadership during change
Your CTO just left. You closed an acquisition and need to merge two engineering organizations. You're carving a tech function out of a holding company. You need senior leadership for 3-9 months while you run a permanent search — and you need the interim to actually move things forward, not just hold ground.
Sound familiar?
- You have product ambitions and a working business but no senior technical leader to make the calls — architecture, vendor selection, hiring, build-vs-buy — and every decision is landing on the founder's desk while the actual job goes undone.
- Your last technical hire blew the budget, missed every deadline, left a codebase nobody on the team wants to touch, and walked away with the institutional knowledge — and now you're terrified of repeating the same mistake on the next hire.
- A full-time CTO costs $250-300K all-in by 2026 US comp standards plus 3-6 months of recruiting time you don't have. You need that level of judgment for a fraction of the cost — and you need execution, not just slides — starting next month, not next quarter.
How we solve it
- A senior technical leader (10+ years, ex-Toptal, multiple shipped products across SaaS, fintech, ecommerce, and AI) embedded in your team part-time with a weekly leadership sync, Slack access, and direct accountability for the architecture and hiring calls that compound for years.
- Strategy backed by a delivery team that actually ships what we recommend. One retainer covers leadership hours plus an embedded engineering team — designers, full-stack engineers, AI specialists — so the roadmap doesn't gather dust on Notion.
- Transparent monthly pricing from $5,000 with three engagement formats matching the level of execution you need. 30 days cancel notice, no equity required, no long-term lock-in, no severance theatre. The relationship stays honest because cash is the only currency.
What you get
Deliverables, with sample artifacts.
Concrete outputs you can expect from this engagement — and a sample of what each one looks like.
Technical Strategy & Roadmap
A 6-12 month technical roadmap tied to your business goals, with the architecture, build-vs-buy, and vendor calls already made and documented. Includes a written assessment of the highest-impact technical risks (the things that will cost you in year two) and the order in which to address them. Reviewed quarterly with you and updated as the business evolves.
Sample artifact
A written 6-12 month roadmap document, an architecture-decision-record (ADR) library for the calls we make together, and a quarterly board-ready tech update template.
Hiring & Team Scorecards
End-to-end hiring support for engineering and design roles. We write the job description, design the interview process, build a scorecard rubric per role, run the technical screen, design and grade the take-home (or pair-programming) round, attend the final-round panel, and weigh in on the offer. You meet only the candidates we'd hire.
Sample artifact
Scoring rubric per open role, a running shortlist with notes, take-home tests built and graded, and a quarterly retro on the hiring funnel.
Codebase & Vendor Audits
Independent senior review of your existing codebase, your current agency or freelance relationships, or your SaaS vendor stack. Written report with the top risks, the quick wins, the things to negotiate, and the things to walk away from. We look at the stuff founders don't have time to read carefully — auth, secrets management, deploy pipelines, observability, contracts.
Sample artifact
A 15-25 page audit report with prioritized findings, a side-by-side vendor comparison where applicable, and a 30-60-90 day action plan for the team.
Embedded Delivery Team
Senior engineers, designers, and AI specialists ready to execute — so the strategy doesn't stay on a slide. The same team that owns the strategy ships the work. Weekly sprints, working software each Friday, code review on every PR, and the same accountability standards we'd hold an in-house team to.
Sample artifact
Working software shipped weekly, sprint demo recordings, a public roadmap board you and your team can see, and quarterly retrospectives on the engineering function.
Tech stack
The tools we ship with.
Battle-tested, boring where it should be, modern where it earns it.
Laravel
Next.js
React
TypeScript
Python
PostgreSQL
AWS
OpenAI
Process
Week by week — what shipping looks like.
A typical engagement, end to end. Concrete deliverables every milestone.
Week 1
Audit & alignment
- Day one onboarding: codebase access, infrastructure walk, team intros, current roadmap and OKRs.
- Codebase audit covering architecture, auth, secrets, deploys, observability, technical debt hot-spots.
- Vendor audit of current agencies, SaaS contracts, and any active freelance engagements.
- Stakeholder interviews — founders, engineering team, product, key customers if relevant.
Week 2
Written report & roadmap draft
- Top-5 technical risks ranked by impact and effort, with proposed mitigations.
- Quick-wins list — the 3-5 things we can ship in the first 30 days that move a real metric.
- Initial 6-12 month roadmap draft tied to business milestones.
- Hiring assessment: which roles to hire, in what order, and at what seniority.
Week 3
Hiring & roadmap finalization
- Lock the roadmap with the founder / CEO / leadership team after one round of structured feedback.
- Write the first hiring spec (typically a senior engineer, designer, or AI specialist) and design the interview rubric.
- Identify and start screening the existing pipeline of agencies / freelancers / referrals.
- Set the weekly leadership cadence — synchronous sync, Slack channels, escalation rules.
Week 4 onward
Steady-state
- Weekly leadership sync covering pipeline, risks, decisions, and shipping status.
- Quarterly board-ready tech update with KPIs the leadership team agreed to track.
- Continuous hiring support and final-round interviews on every open engineering role.
- Embedded delivery team shipping working software each Friday under the agreed roadmap.
Featured plan · Monthly
Growth
Recommended starting point for a fractional cto who actually builds. Retainers from $5,000/mo.
- ~70 dev hours/month
- Everything in Standard
- Priority task queue
- AI integration work included
- Bi-weekly strategy call
- 24h response time
Choosing a stack
When to pick what — and when to skip it.
The honest version. Real trade-offs, not marketing slideware.
Full-time CTO ($25K-30K/mo all-in)
When to use
Hire full-time when you have steady-state engineering of 10+ people, a $5M+ ARR business, and a 3-5 year horizon where the CTO will own the function continuously. The premium for full-time judgment is worth it past that scale.
When to avoid
Below 10 engineers and pre-Series-B, full-time CTO is usually overkill — you're paying for capacity you can't use efficiently. Worse, the wrong full-time CTO hire is a 3-6 month recruiting timeline followed by a 6-12 month exit timeline if it doesn't work out.
Pure advisor / fractional advisor ($3K-15K/mo)
When to use
A pure fractional advisor is the right call when you already have a strong in-house engineering lead and just need senior judgment on specific calls — board-level architecture, fundraising tech-due-diligence, vendor negotiations, occasional hiring guidance.
When to avoid
When the team needs execution, not just opinions. Pure advisory engagements deliver slides, not shipped software, and the gap between "this is what you should do" and "this is what got built" turns into pure friction inside a fast-moving company.
Borah fractional CTO ($5K-14K/mo)
See Mabbly →When to use
Hire us when you need senior judgment plus an accountable team to ship. Strategy, hiring screens, vendor calls, architecture — and the same team building features alongside the in-house team or owning execution end-to-end. Best fit for funded startups, SMBs with a fragile codebase, and interim coverage during transitions.
When to avoid
We're not the right call when you genuinely need 40+ hours a week of CTO time, or when the engagement is purely advisory and there's no execution layer involved (we can do that but it's a smaller share of our work and a less specialized fit).
Hire-first vs operate-first
When to use
Operate first if the team is shipping but lacks a roadmap, the codebase has known but unowned debt, or the founder is bottlenecked by technical decisions. We embed, ship the roadmap, and run hiring searches in parallel.
When to avoid
Hire first when the team is structurally too small to operate (one engineer, no senior leadership) and the budget exists to run a CTO search immediately. In that case, we run the search and stay involved as advisor only — execution waits.
Real shipped work
Production case studies, not pitch decks.
Two engagements that mirror the kind of work you'd hand us.
Marketing Agency
Mabbly
How we built an AI agent platform that automated case study creation for a Chicago marketing agency - from concept to working product in under two months.
Read the case study →
SaaS / IT Hardware Management
Workwize
How an embedded Borah developer built the supplier sync engine that took delivery SLA from 25% to 80% for an IT hardware platform operating in 100+ countries.
Read the case study →FAQ
Common questions
Everything you need to know about our a fractional cto who actually builds services.
A fractional CTO is a senior technology leader who works with your company part-time on a monthly retainer - typically 20 to 60 hours per month. You get C-level judgment on architecture, hiring, and roadmap without paying a $250K+ salary or giving up equity. Engagements usually run 6 to 18 months.
Most fractional CTOs only advise. We bring a delivery team with us - so when we recommend a refactor, we can also build it. One retainer covers strategy, hiring support, and engineering execution from a senior team that knows your codebase.
Industry rates run from $3,000 to $25,000 per month. Our Strategy plan starts at $5,000/mo for advisory only. Strategy + Build is $8,500/mo and includes ~40 hours of engineering execution alongside the leadership work. Dedicated Partner is $14,000/mo for full embedded teams.
Three buyer profiles: (1) funded startups between pre-seed and Series A who need senior technical judgment but can't yet pay a full-time CTO, (2) SMBs with a working product and a brittle codebase that needs an adult in the room, and (3) PE-backed companies in transition where the existing team needs interim leadership.
Week 1: codebase, infra, and team audit. Week 2: written report with the top 5 risks and quick wins. Week 3: hiring plan and roadmap draft. Week 4: aligned plan, kicked-off sprints, and a weekly cadence locked in. We move fast because we have to.
No. Cash retainers only. We've seen too many founders give up 1-2% equity to advisors who never showed up. Cash keeps the relationship honest and easy to end if it isn't working.
Yes. We frequently step in as interim CTO during executive transitions, post-acquisition integrations, or when a founder-CTO is stepping back from technical work. Typical engagements are 3-9 months with a clear handover plan from day one.
We do that too. Our 4-week Hiring Sprint produces job descriptions, sourcing channels, interview process, and a shortlist of vetted candidates - flat fee, no retainer required.
Ready to ship a fractional cto who actually builds?
Tell us what you need. We will scope it, price it, and give you a timeline - all before you commit to anything.
No commitment. No sales pitch. Just a clear plan.