Fractional CTO services, from a CTO who still builds
Dmitry Nichiporchik, Yarvixo’s CTO, takes the technical seat in your company for the hours a month you need: the architecture and the decisions that are expensive to reverse, hiring and reviewing engineers, keeping an outside team honest, and the technical half of your investor conversations. A fractional CTO for startups and AI products, at every stage from the first line of code to due diligence.
$100 an hour · billed monthly for the hours worked · month to month · a free 30-minute call first
What is a fractional CTO?
The short answer, and the test for whether you need one.
A fractional CTO is an experienced technology leader who does a CTO’s job for part of the month instead of full time. They own the architecture and the technical decisions that are expensive to reverse, hire and review engineers, oversee outside teams, and represent the technology to the founders and the investors. The same role is sold as a part-time CTO, an interim CTO or CTO as a service; the difference is mostly how long it is meant to last.
The test is simple. If your company has technical decisions that need to be made well but not forty hours a week of them — no technical co-founder yet, a team or an agency building without anyone senior checking the work, an AI feature nobody inside can cost — a fraction of a CTO is the right amount. If the decisions fill a week, you need a full-time one, and helping you hire them is part of this job.
What a fractional CTO does, stage by stage
The same rate at every stage. What changes is where the hours go.
Before the first line of code
Whether to build at all or buy, the stack and where it will hurt at ten times the load, what the first version must contain and what it must not, a second opinion on the quote on your desk, and whether your first technical person should be a hire or a contract.
While the product is being built
Reviews of the changes that move the architecture, a weekly call with whoever is building — your engineers, a freelancer or an agency — the delivery process and its definition of done, and the first engineering hires: the role written, the interviews, the technical exercise.
After launch
Load and the cost of each user, security and access, tenancy if you sell to companies, backups that have been restored at least once, monitoring and the incident review after the first bad night, and the roadmap argued from what the system can carry.
Raising, selling or being audited
The technical part of a data room, answers to an investor’s or an acquirer’s technical due diligence, the risks found before they are, and a plain account of what the system is, what it costs to run and what it would take to grow.
For an AI product
Whether your data can carry it, retrieval or fine-tuning, which model behind which interface, what one answer costs at your volume, and the evaluation that tells you it works before your customers do. The decisions are early and quiet, which is why they are expensive.
Handing over
When the company needs a full-time CTO: the role written, the candidates interviewed, the architecture and its open questions documented, and a handover that leaves the new CTO owning decisions rather than inheriting them unexplained.
Who your fractional CTO would be
One named person, accountable for the figures this site leads with.
Dmitry Nichiporchik is Yarvixo’s CTO. He is accountable for the multiplayer backends behind 52,000 peak concurrent players at 62 ms average latency and 99.98% uptime, and behind Metarun, which peaked at 39,000 during an event and was built by six engineers in four months. He owns the boundary in a live game between what is kept off-chain and what a player owns on it.
He also built and runs ArendaOS, Yarvixo’s own multi-tenant SaaS for rental fleets, from an empty repository to a deployed system — which is the experience a startup CTO actually needs: tenancy decided in the schema before the first feature, then the money, the documents and the roles, all of it his to answer for. Every article in Insights carries his byline, so you can read how he argues a decision before you pay for one.
Behind him is the team that shipped the rest of the case studies — the King’s Bounty II Switch port, the X8 VR shooter, an enterprise AI platform and the CRMs and AI workflows three local businesses of ours run on. When a decision needs a specialist’s second look, it gets one.
How the engagement works
Month to month, so the arrangement has to keep earning its place.
A free 30-minute call
What the company is, what is being built and by whom, and what is keeping you up. If you need a one-off answer rather than a role, we will say so.
An hours budget for the month
Agreed in writing, and changed for the next month whenever you like. An NDA is signed before any code, documents or data are shared.
A standing slot
A regular call with you and whoever builds, plus review in your repository and your team chat between calls.
Decisions in writing
Each significant decision written down with its reason and its alternatives, so the next engineer inherits the why and not just the what.
A monthly invoice
For the hours worked, at $100 an hour, with a log of what they were spent on.
Stop any month
No long-term contract. When the company outgrows a fractional CTO, the last months go into hiring and handing over to a full-time one.
A fractional CTO, consulting, or a team?
Four things a company buys for a technology problem, and when each is the right one.
| Fractional CTO | AI consulting | Engineers on your team | Full-time CTO | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| You buy | A technical leader, part of the month | Answers to specific questions | Capacity, on your backlog | A technical leader, every day |
| Price | $100 an hour, billed monthly | $100 an hour, no minimum | $4,000–$7,000 per engineer per month | A salary and, usually, equity |
| Lasts | As many months as it is useful | Until the answer is clear | Three months at least | Years |
| Right when | Decisions need owning, but not full time | One question decides the money | You have a leader and the gap is people | The decisions fill a week |
The one-off kind is AI consulting; engineers on your board are staff augmentation; and if the result can be written down, a fixed-price build is usually cheaper than either.
How much does a fractional CTO cost?
One rate, and the arithmetic for two kinds of month.
Ours is $100 an hour at every stage, billed monthly for the hours actually worked, with no long-term contract. The hours are what you choose to spend, so the cost is yours to set.
For example, a light month — a weekly call, a review of the changes that move the architecture, one vendor quote checked — might be around 10 hours, $1,000. A month spent hiring your first engineers and setting up how they deliver might be 30 to 40 hours, $3,000 to $4,000. Neither is a package; they are what the rate comes to.
If the right answer turns out to be a build, the scope written in those hours is yours to take to any team. If you want us to build it, it is quoted at a fixed price from the bands we publish — a single-tenant MVP or a custom CRM from $7,000, an AI MVP from $40,000.
Common questions
What founders ask before the first hour.
Tell us what is being built, and by whom
And which decision you would most like a second pair of eyes on. The first 30-minute call is free; after that it is $100 an hour, billed monthly for the hours worked.
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