How much does a fractional CTO cost?

Most fractional CTOs charge a monthly retainer, and most published rates assume an involvement of two to three days a week: on that basis they run from about £6,000 to £16,000 a month. An early-stage company rarely needs that much time. Two to six days a month is the usual level at the start, and at that level the same rates come to roughly £1,500 to £8,000 a month. Day rates sit between £600 and £1,600, hourly rates between £100 and £300. Nearly every page publishing these numbers belongs to a firm selling the service, so read them as the going market rather than as advice, with London and fintech at the top of each band.

Three things move the number:

• how many days a month you need;
• how messy the situation is when the work starts;
• how senior the person you hire is.

A company with one developer and a clear product sits at the bottom of the band. A company with an agency to manage, a codebase nobody trusts, and a raise coming sits near the top.

What the money buys

A fractional CTO is paid to own a small number of decisions: what to build and what to leave out, whether the developers’ work is good enough to build on, which risks are worth taking, and when to tell you plainly that something is going wrong. The days and hours are packaging around that ownership. Price and value separate easily here, because you cannot see the work itself, only the activity around it: someone who joins every call and sends long weekly updates can cost more than someone who spends two focused days a month, while the second one stops you building the wrong thing and covers a year of their own retainer with one decision. When you compare prices, compare what each person will be accountable for, rather than how much of their time you get.

How the pricing models differ

Hourly pricing rewards time spent, and you have no way to tell a productive hour from a busy one. It suits a one-off question or a short review; for ongoing ownership it points the incentives at the wrong target.

A retainer pays for a defined level of ownership instead of for time, which matches the job and stops the meter running in your head every time you send a message. A retainer stays honest only if you agree at the start what it covers and what you should be able to point at after three months; without that agreement it drifts into a subscription to someone who has stopped doing much.

Project pricing looks the safest and is the hardest to compare, because the scope is written by the person being paid. A cheap bid is usually cheap because the judgment work, deciding what to leave out and checking the result, was cut from the scope to win it.

For ongoing work, agree a retainer with a written scope; keep hourly for one-off advice, and read a project bid’s scope more carefully than its price.

Before you agree a price

Four questions expose what a price is buying, and none of them needs technical knowledge.

• What decisions will you be accountable for, and how will I see that you made them? A good answer lists concrete calls; a weak one describes availability.
• What should I be able to point at after three months? The answer should be about your product and your risk, never a count of meetings.
• What will you tell me that I will not want to hear? Delivering bad news early is part of the job, and someone with no answer is not planning to do it.
• If this is not working, how does it end, and what do I keep? A good answer is quick and clean, with your code and your accounts staying yours.

My own pricing follows the retainer logic above: we agree the scope and the number of days before the engagement starts, the price attaches to the work rather than to hours logged, and there is no lock-in. The fractional CTO page explains the arrangement, and if you want to work out what the right scope looks like for your company, book a free 30-minute call.