Pick your shape
Which shape fits what you're building?
Four engagement types. All include senior work from hour one — no junior upsell, no hidden PM fees, no retainer lock-in.
Most popular
Scoped build
Greenfield production system, milestone-priced, shipped in 4–16 weeks.
$5k starting
Fixed-price per milestone · typical range $5k–$40k 4–16 weeks
Ideal if: You have a clear goal, a rough scope, and you want one operator to own architecture → ship without handoffs.
- System architecture and schema design
- Full implementation (backend, frontend, mobile if needed)
- Cloud infrastructure and CI/CD
- Production deploy + monitoring + runbook
- Weekly working-software demos (no PDF status reports)
- 2 weeks of post-ship support included
- Open-ended ongoing support (see Retainer)
- Long-term strategic leadership (see Fractional CTO)
Ongoing
Retainer
Senior engineering attention on your existing system, every week.
$3k/mo starting
Monthly retainer · typical range $3k–$15k/month Month to month, 3-month minimum
Ideal if: You have a live system and need a senior engineer on hand for iterative improvement, incident response, and architectural oversight.
- Dedicated senior engineering hours each week
- Incident response during business hours
- Architectural reviews + decision docs
- Deploy / release management
- Async Slack / WhatsApp / email support
- Quarterly roadmap reviews
Leadership
Fractional CTO
Senior engineering leadership for seed / Series-A teams without the full-time hire.
$3k/mo starting
Monthly · typical range $3k–$6k/month 10–30 hours per month, 3-month minimum
Ideal if: Your team needs senior technical oversight but cannot justify a full CTO hire yet. You want an experienced operator to own architecture, help hire, and back you up during incidents.
- Architectural reviews + technical strategy
- Team hiring support (tech interviews, spec review)
- Vendor + platform selection
- Incident backup + oncall escalation
- Weekly leadership sync with founder / CEO
- Board / investor technical updates when needed
Triage
Rescue engineering
Inherited a codebase that has drifted? Diagnostic first, then a scoped rebuild.
$1k starting
Fixed-price diagnostic → scoped rebuild quoted separately 1 week diagnostic, then scoped
Ideal if: A live system you did not originally build is slowing you down — broken releases, spiralling infra cost, failing integrations. You want an honest written assessment before committing to a fix.
- 1-week deep dive into the codebase + infra
- Written assessment of top 3–5 risks
- Effort / cost estimates for each fix
- Optional: scoped rebuild quote if you want to proceed