Fractional CTO for startups
The technical judgement your company is currently going without
Every architecture call, every hire, every answer to the investor's technical friend is currently yours alone — and the expensive ones are expensive years later, quietly. A fractional CTO is someone who has made those decisions before and makes them with you. A full-time one costs $250,000–$400,000 plus equity and takes a quarter to hire. This starts next week, month to month.
We take a small number of companies at a time so the answers stay fast. If there is no room this quarter you will be told, not queued.
From
$2,500/month
- $2,500/month — Advisory, 6 hours a month in writing
- $6,000/month — Fractional CTO, 16 hours and a weekly call
- $12,000/month — Embedded, 36 hours and two calls a week
- $300–$400/hour — project work, 10 hours minimum
Month to month, no notice period. A full-time CTO is $250,000–$400,000 a year plus benefits and equity and takes a quarter to hire.
The gap this fills
You are making CTO decisions without a CTO
Not because you are unqualified — because there is nobody else. Every one of these is a decision that is cheap to make right and expensive to unmake.
Which stack, and can I leave it later
The choice you make in week two decides who you can hire in year two and what a migration costs. Most founders pick what the tutorial used.
Is this data model going to hold
Tenants, money, state, history, permissions. The schema shaped by your first screen is the schema you will pay to change in month seven.
Is my first engineering hire any good
You cannot interview for a skill you do not have. One technical person in the room changes who you hire and what you pay them.
What do I tell the investor's engineer
Due diligence asks about access control, backups, dependencies and cost per user. The answers are built months before anyone asks.
Should we build this at all
The most valuable technical advice is usually 'buy it', 'wait', or 'that is two weeks of work, not two months'. Nobody on your team is incentivised to say it.
Is the AI-generated code a problem
You shipped fast with Lovable, Cursor or Claude Code. Someone senior needs to say which parts are fine and which are a liability, before customers arrive.
Why not just ask ChatGPT
Because it does not know your system, your money or your customers
Use the models — we do, every day, and a lot of this site was written with them. But a model answers the question you asked, from generic training, with no memory of the decision you made last month and no stake in what happens next. It will confidently recommend an architecture it cannot see the constraints of, and it will never tell you that the feature is not worth building.
Context, not just an answer
Someone who has read your schema, your bills and your roadmap, and remembers what you decided in March and why. The advice changes when your situation does.
Judgement with a stake in it
A model optimises for a plausible answer. A person who will still be advising you in six months optimises for the decision being right — which sometimes means telling you not to do the thing.
The question behind the question
You ask which database. The useful answer is often that the database is not your problem this quarter. A model answers what you asked.
Accountable, and reachable
A name, a history and a person who answers when it breaks at nine on a Friday. Not a new session with no memory.
How to work together
Three depths, one rate card
Every tier states its hours, because unlimited access is not something one person can honour. Month to month — no notice period, no minimum term. Moving up or down is an email.
Advisory
$2,500/month
6 hours a month of senior thinking, in writing, from someone who has read your codebase.
Best when you have a team that can build but nobody senior to check the decisions before they are made.
- 6 hours a month — ask as often as you like; a typical written question is fifteen minutes
- Email, Slack or a Golux Club ticket, answered within one working day
- We read your repository, schema and infrastructure at the start — that time is ours, not yours
- Architecture and stack decisions reviewed before you build on them
- Hiring: the role, the questions, a second opinion on a candidate
- A decision log, so the reasoning survives everyone forgetting it
Most founders start here
Fractional CTO
$6,000/month
16 hours a month including a standing weekly call — the conversation that is faster spoken than written.
Best when there is a roadmap, engineers to lead, and decisions that need arguing rather than answering.
- 16 hours a month, calls and writing together
- A scheduled call every week, 45–60 minutes, agenda yours
- Roadmap and sequencing: what to build next, and what to stop building
- Architecture and code review on the work in flight
- Investor and enterprise technical questions prepared with you before the meeting
- Present as your technical lead on a customer or investor call
Embedded
$12,000/month
36 hours a month, two calls a week, and the hands to act on the advice rather than only give it.
Best when you are shipping hard and need someone in the work, not beside it — but not a full-time hire.
- 36 hours a month across advice, calls and hands-on engineering
- Two calls a week, plus availability between them
- Roughly half the hours go into the keyboard — architecture, security, migrations, the risky feature
- We run the technical round for your engineering hires
- Due diligence: the artefacts, the answers, and the call itself
- Hours beyond the thirty-six agreed before they are used, never after
Project work, without a retainer
Scoped engineering is $300–$400 an hour depending on the work — review and pairing at the lower end, architecture, security and data migration at the upper — with a 10 hours minimum. Agreed before anything starts, never an open meter. Retainer clients get first call on the calendar.
These arrangements are for companies that can fund senior engineering properly — funded startups, profitable businesses, and teams with a deal or a raise on the line. If you are pre-revenue and self-funding, the free audit and the guides on this site are genuinely yours to use, and that is the honest answer rather than a discount.
Why this person
Fifteen years, fifteen products, and a migration we did to ourselves
Nikola Golubović has been building and operating production software for over fifteen years — backend systems, data platforms and the AI features on top of them. Golux has built and still runs fifteen of its own products, which is a different kind of proof from a case study: the decisions were ours and so were the consequences. In September 2026 we moved this site and its client portal off Lovable and Supabase onto infrastructure we own, porting 143 row-level-security policies into tested code. That is the advice, with the receipts.
Who runs Golux- 15+
- years building and running production software
- 15
- products built and operated by this team
- 208
- AI-built apps audited in our first benchmark
- 1
- person answering — the one who did the work
How it starts
Four steps, and the first two cost nothing
- 01
An intro call
Thirty minutes. What you are building, where you are stuck, and whether this is even the right help. If it is not, we will say what is.
- 02
We read your system
Repository, schema, infrastructure, bills. A couple of hours before the arrangement starts, so the first answer is already about your app.
- 03
Pick a tier and start
Month to month from day one. No notice period, no minimum term, no contract you need a lawyer for.
- 04
Change it when you change
Move up when you need the call, down when you do not, and out when you have hired the person you were advised to hire.
Questions
Working with a fractional CTO
- How does this compare to hiring a CTO, or to other fractional CTOs?
- A full-time CTO in the United States is $250,000–$400,000 a year plus benefits and equity, and takes a quarter to hire. Fractional arrangements run $5,000–$25,000 a month; these sit in the middle of that range. You are paying for judgement and availability from one senior person, with no agency layer and no account manager — not for a discount.
- What exactly am I buying — hours or access?
- Access, on the two advisory tiers. There is no hour counter on written questions or on the weekly call, because counting them makes founders ration the thing they are paying for. The Embedded tier is the one that includes hours, because at that depth some of the work is hands on a keyboard and that should be explicit.
- What is the difference between this and just hiring you to build?
- Advisory is about decisions; project work is about hands. Most companies need more of the first than they expect and less of the second. If you only want code written, take it at $300–$400 an hour and skip the retainer — we will say if that is the wrong order.
- How fast do I actually get an answer?
- Within one working day on the written tier, and usually within a few hours during European business hours. If something is on fire, say so in the subject line and it jumps the queue.
- Do you sign an NDA?
- Yes, before the intro call if you prefer. Standard mutual NDA, or yours.
- Can you be listed as our CTO to investors?
- As a fractional or advisory CTO, yes, and we will join the call. Not as a full-time CTO or a co-founder — that is a different commitment and it would not be true.
- What if we grow and need a full-time CTO?
- Then we help you write the role, interview the candidates and hand over to whoever you hire. That is the intended ending, not a failure of the arrangement.
- Do you take equity instead of fees?
- No. Equity aligns incentives and also removes the freedom to tell you something you do not want to hear, which is the thing you are actually buying. A small equity component alongside a full fee is occasionally discussable; equity instead of a fee is not.
- Which stacks and tools do you advise on?
- TypeScript and React, Node, Ruby on Rails, Python, PostgreSQL, Supabase, Docker and the usual clouds — plus the AI builders and agentic tools (Lovable, Bolt, v0, Cursor, Claude Code), which is increasingly what founders are actually using. If your stack is far outside that, we will say so rather than learn on your money.
Related
- Free production-readiness auditStart here. Sixty seconds, no account, and it often sets the first month's agenda.
- Something specific is brokenThe eight problems we are asked about most, and what is actually causing each one.
- Claude Code app reviewArchitecture, tests and guardrails for a codebase written with agentic tools.
- Lovable development helpProduct, design and Supabase architecture while you stay on Lovable.
- MVP hardening sprintTen days to take an app with users to production.
- Who runs GoluxThe person you would be working with, and the collaborators behind him.
Next step
Thirty minutes to find out whether this is the help you need
No pitch deck, no discovery process. Bring what you are building and the decision you are stuck on. If a retainer is the wrong answer, you will hear that on the call.
