Technical leadership without the full-time hire. Architecture decisions, vendor selection, hiring calls, on-call engineering. Backed by a real engineering team that can ship the work, not just advise on it.
A full-time CTO in NYC costs $250–400K all-in. Most digital-native SMBs and agencies need 10–20 hours per week of CTO-level work, not 40. Fractional CTO at Simple4u covers exactly that band — at a fraction of the cost — backed by an engineering team that ships.
The big calls that don't ship code but shape the next year. Build vs. buy, monolith vs. service, hosting strategy, security posture, scalability roadmap.
The decisions that lock you in or give you flexibility. Stripe vs. Paddle. Supabase vs. Postgres. Vercel vs. AWS. Cursor vs. Copilot. We've shipped on most of them.
When to hire, who to hire, how to interview them. We've sat on both sides of every interview; we know what good looks like at every stack.
The CTO who actually fixes the bug. Production goes down, we triage. Stripe webhook stops, we debug. We don't just advise — we ship code when it matters.
Internally we sell fractional CTO as a flavor of our Operations Partner service — same retainer band, same shared engineering team, but weighted toward strategic and architectural work over evolution-of-features work.
$10–15K/mo retainer, same band as Operations Partner. Typically 10–20 hrs/week split between strategic work, code reviews, on-call, and direct engineering when needed. Three-month minimum engagement.
Founders or agency leads where technology is core to the business but a full-time CTO isn't yet justifiable. Series A and earlier. Bootstrapped agencies. Solo founders with paying customers.
Full-time CTO in NYC = $250–400K/yr all-in. Fractional CTO at Simple4u = $120–180K/yr. You get the same architectural decisions and on-call coverage, but you don't carry the headcount. When you grow into needing a full-time CTO, we help you hire them and hand off cleanly.
Consultants advise. We ship. The fractional CTO retainer includes engineering capacity from the same team — when a decision lands and code needs to be written, we write it. No "you should hire someone for that" deferrals.
Then Operations Partner is the better fit — same retainer band, just weighted more toward execution than strategy. Some clients start there and graduate into fractional CTO over 6–12 months as the strategic load grows.
From first call to active engagement: typically 2 weeks. We do a 1-week scoping pass (read your codebase, talk to your team, identify the top 3 priorities) before the retainer starts so the first month is productive.
Yes. Mutual NDA is standard in our engagement contract.