Senior technical leadership — without the $400K hire.

A senior technology executive who leads your technology function part-time, on a retainer, instead of as a full-time hire. You get executive-level strategy, architecture, and team leadership for the slice of time your stage actually requires — typically 10–20 hours a week — without the salary, equity, and benefits load of a full-time CTO.

Truvisory®'s engagements run $6,000–$25,000+ per month depending on the model — roughly $72,000–$192,000 a year. Compare that to a full-time CTO: Salary.com puts the average base at $309,539, and total comp commonly reaches $400,000+ once you add benefits and equity. A fractional engagement captures most of the strategic value at 40–70% lower cost.

Go fractional when you need senior technical judgment, architecture ownership, and direction — but not 40 hours a week of it. Go full-time when your technology is the core product, you need daily hands-on team management, or you're at a stage (like IPO) that requires a named full-time executive. We'll give you an honest read on your first call.

Roughly 5–8 hours for Advisory, 10–20 for Fractional, and 20+ for Embedded engagements that include a build team. What matters more than the hours is that a senior person owns the outcomes — not that a seat is filled 40 hours a week.

Days, not months. A full-time executive search takes four to six months before onboarding even begins. We typically open with a two-week Technical Assessment and move into the engagement immediately after.

There's no recruiting search and no equity to negotiate. You book a call, we run a fixed-fee two-week Technical Assessment, and you get a scoped proposal — model, deliverables, price — before any commitment. Engagements start in days and run month-to-month after a short initial term. The only hard part is vetting: confirm the person owns the technical call and actually ships, rather than advising and leaving.

Six things: an embedded leader who owns the architecture decision and carries the outcome (not a report-and-leave consultant); proof they ship working software, not just decks; a record of putting AI into production and governing its cost; references and reviews you can actually check; month-to-month terms with no equity or recruiting fee; and the honesty to disqualify themselves if you'd be better served full-time — or not yet. Pricing is covered separately in our cost guide.

An interim CTO is a temporary full-time placeholder, usually bridging a gap until you hire permanently. A fractional CTO is an ongoing, part-time arrangement — the right long-term answer for many companies that genuinely don't need (or can't justify) a full-time technology executive.

In practice, yes — "part-time CTO" and "fractional CTO" describe the same arrangement: a senior technology executive who owns your tech function for a fraction of a full-time role, on a retainer. "Fractional" is the term the market has settled on because it emphasizes the executive scope you get, not just the reduced hours. Our fractional CTO services are structured this way: senior ownership and accountability, sized to the slice of time your stage needs.

Both — and the build is what sets us apart. Behind the strategy is a Cloudflare-native delivery capability, so when the plan calls for software, we ship it, with a target of production in 90 days. Most fractional CTOs stop at advice.

It's the same embedded-leadership model focused specifically on getting AI into production and proving ROI. Given that MIT found 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots deliver no measurable return, many companies need exactly this: one accountable leader owning AI strategy, architecture, and governance. Our fractional CTO engagements include this by default.

When your technology is your core product (deep-tech / hard R&D), when you need someone 40+ hours a week in the code, when you're at IPO stage and need a named full-time CTO, or when your team needs daily hands-on management more than strategic leadership. If that's you, we'll tell you.

Funded startups, mid-market companies, PE-backed operators, and federal/SDVOSB-eligible organizations across the U.S. The common thread is a company that needs senior technical leadership — and often applied AI in production — faster and leaner than a full-time hire allows.

A fractional CTO provides senior technical leadership part-time: owning technology strategy and architecture, leading and mentoring engineers, making build-vs-buy and vendor decisions, overseeing security and infrastructure, and reporting to the board. Most are advisory; a build-capable minority also write code and ship.

Truvisory is the build-capable end of the spectrum: one senior operator picks the stack, writes the code, and ships to production — working software, not strategy decks. It's a 25-year operator who now writes the code, not someone claiming two decades as a CTO. Where many companies need an advisory CTO for a team that already builds, Truvisory fits when you need senior judgment and something shipped.