Fractional CTO or a development subscription: which do you actually need?

What is a fractional CTO?

A fractional CTO is an experienced technology leader who works for you part of the time, usually a set number of days a month, alongside other clients. You get the judgement of a chief technology officer without the salary of a full-time one.

The work is leadership, not production. A good fractional CTO will typically:

• Set technical strategy. What to build, in what order, and what not to build at all.
• Make architecture decisions. Which platform, which hosting, which tools, and how the pieces fit, so you don't pay to rebuild in two years.
• Hire and manage engineers. Write the job description, run the technical interview, and give your developers someone senior to answer to.
• Handle investor technical due diligence. Answer the technical questions in a funding round and make sure the answers hold up.
• Lead part-time. Represent technology in the leadership team and give the board a straight view of risk.

What a fractional CTO usually doesn't do is write most of the code. Some will roll their sleeves up, but a few days a month spent typing is a few days not spent on the decisions you hired them for. Expect a roadmap, a hiring plan and better decisions; don't expect a backlog to empty.

What is a development subscription?

A development subscription is a fixed monthly price for software that is built, maintained and kept shipping. You send requests: new features, fixes, upgrades, the page that takes six seconds to load. The work gets done, reviewed, tested and released, month after month, and the price doesn't move with the volume.

The part that matters is accountability. A subscription worth having puts a named role, a senior engineer, on the hook for every change that goes live. At 10x Works, AI agents do the building and a senior engineer reviews and signs off every change, with anything touching payments, logins or customer data waiting for that human's review.

What a subscription doesn't do is sit on your leadership team. It won't interview your next hire, pitch your architecture to investors or decide whether your business should be in software at all. It keeps the software you have improving, and builds what you ask for.

When you need both

Plenty of businesses need judgement and hands. A funded company with a product, a small team and investors watching may want a fractional CTO setting direction and owning the big calls, and a subscription doing the building and maintenance underneath. The CTO decides; the subscription ships. The two fit well because the CTO isn't spending scarce days on typing, and the subscription has someone senior on your side to agree priorities with.

Our larger plans include senior advisory time, which covers some of the ground a fractional CTO would. If you need board-level technology leadership, hiring and investor work, that is still a role in its own right.

Fractional CTO vs interim CTO vs part-time CTO

The titles overlap and people use them loosely, but broadly:

• Fractional CTO: ongoing, a few days a month, shared with other clients. For businesses that need senior judgement but not a full-time leader.
• Interim CTO: full-time or close to it, for a fixed period. Usually covers a gap, such as a departure, a merger or a turnaround, until a permanent hire arrives.
• Part-time CTO: often means the same as fractional. Sometimes it means a single employer on reduced hours, rather than one person working for several companies.
• CTO as a service / outsourced CTO: the same idea sold by a firm rather than an individual, sometimes with a team behind them.

All four are leadership roles. None of them, by default, includes a team building your software.

What does a fractional CTO cost?

Fractional CTOs are usually paid in one of three ways: a day rate, a monthly retainer for an agreed number of days, or occasionally a lower fee plus equity in an early-stage company. Rates vary widely with experience, sector and location.

There's little published data on fractional CTO rates specifically. The nearest public benchmark is contract CTO adverts: ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised UK day rate at £635 over the six months to October 2026, with most between about £550 and £860. That figure comes from only 13 adverts, and for contract roles rather than fractional ones, so treat it as a rough guide. At those rates, two days a month would be roughly £1,100 to £1,700 a month, before anyone has written any code.

What does a development subscription cost?

Here we can only speak for ourselves. 10x Works publishes four plans, each a flat monthly price, billed in advance, which you can pause or cancel at any time:

The price doesn't change with the number of requests. What changes between plans is how much senior human attention your work gets.

Signs you've hired the wrong one

Advice, with nothing shipping. You've had strategy sessions, a roadmap and an architecture diagram, and three months later the app looks the same. That isn't the CTO failing at their job; it may be that you needed builders, not a leader.

Shipping, with no one owning decisions. Features keep arriving, but nobody can say why these ones, the costs are creeping and the big technical questions get answered by default. That isn't the developers failing either; it may be that you needed someone senior deciding what to build.

Either way, the fix is the same: name the thing that's missing, and buy that.

Frequently asked questions