Ten thousand dollars a month is where engagements begin. The permanent equivalent here is benchmarked against trading firms and large insurers, a floor most founders hit within a week of starting the search. What you should weigh is the finished product, not the invoice. Give us the shape of it and we will come back with a number.

Founders selling into industrial, logistics, insurance and trading companies, and internal teams inside them. The buyer runs systems that predate the cloud and will not replace them, so most of the work is making the product fit an environment nobody wants disturbed.

An agency delivers to a specification and hands it over. Here the hard part is not the build, it is fitting into systems the customer will not replace. A fractional CTO owns that integration decision rather than treating it as a change request.

Yes, and we would rather you kept them. The people who understand the systems your customers run are hard to replace. We supply the direction and the architecture and lead your developers day to day, adding our own only where a specific skill is missing.

A consultant reviews what you are doing and writes it up. A fractional CTO decides how your product gets built, leads the engineers who build it, and answers for it afterwards. If nobody is doing that second job, you have bought an opinion, not a product.

We are not based in Chicago and we will not pretend otherwise. We travel for the meetings where being in the room changes the outcome, and the rest of the work runs the way your company already runs. Our leadership is US based and works your hours.

Both, and that is the point. Over fifty senior engineers work under the same leadership you are hiring, in Python, PHP, C# and .NET, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Node.js, Swift and PostgreSQL. Leadership without a team leaves you to go and hire one.

Yes, and we will help you make the hire rather than compete with it. We write the brief, sit in the interviews, and hand over the architecture and the reasoning behind every decision. A partner who makes that handover harder is protecting their contract, not your product. Chicago candidates out of trading and insurance tend to be strong on reliability, which is the instinct these products need most.

No, and early is usually where this saves the most money. The decisions that cost the most to undo are the ones made in the first few months, normally by whoever happened to be available. We pick your product up wherever it is and take it from zero to one.

Yes. Diligence asks who built the technology, how it was built and whether it will hold. We help you get the answers right, and we sit in the room with you rather than handing you a document and leaving.

No. We work with startups and enterprise teams across the US. What matters far more than a shared postcode is whether somebody senior owns how your product gets built.

One conversation. You tell us what you want to build, or where your product got stuck. We tell you honestly what we would do about it and what it would take. If we are not the right team for it, we will say so.