For merchants without an IT department
Your store deserves its first CTO.
You built a successful online business. But every technical decision — hosting, agencies, upgrades, budgets — still lands on your desk, in a language you never signed up to learn. A fractional CTO is the technical brain on your side of the table, a few days a month.
"We recommend refactoring the legacy checkout module before implementing the new feature. Estimate: 120 hours."
Maybe necessary, maybe padding. Your CTO reviews the code and either approves it — or cuts it to 40 hours with proof.
"The site went down due to unexpected load. We suggest upgrading the server plan."
Bigger servers hide problems, they don't fix them. Your CTO asks why the site can't handle a normal sale — and gets it fixed.
"The platform upgrade is high-risk and should be postponed to next quarter."
Every postponed upgrade gets more expensive. Your CTO tells you the real risk of waiting — in euros, not adjectives.
A 60-second explainer
Developer, agency, CTO — who does what?
These three roles get mixed up constantly, and that confusion is exactly where money leaks. Here's the difference in plain terms.
A developer
Writes the code. Great developers solve the task in front of them — but someone has to decide which tasks are worth doing, and check the work.
An agency
A team of developers you rent. Useful — but the agency profits from billing more hours. Without your own expert, nobody independent checks their estimates or their code.
A CTO
Your technical decision-maker. Sets the direction, controls the budget, supervises developers and agencies, and translates everything into business language. Works for you, sells you nothing.
Fractional simply means part-time. Large companies have a full-time CTO. You probably need one for half a day to a couple of days per week — so you pay for exactly that, and nothing more.
A quick self-check
Six signs your store has outgrown "no IT department".
You approve agency invoices without being able to judge whether the hours are fair.
Technical conversations make you nod along — and decide later, alone, hoping for the best.
The website breaks during your biggest campaigns, and nobody can tell you why it keeps happening.
Important upgrades and security patches keep being postponed — by you, because the risk feels unclear.
If your developer or agency disappeared tomorrow, nobody in your company could even access everything.
You have growth plans — new markets, new systems — but no one to tell you what the technology side will take.
If you recognized two or more, the problem isn't your developers or your agency. It's that nobody is in charge.
Free 2-minute diagnostic
Do you actually control your own store?
Most non-technical owners don't know who really holds their code, backups, domain and accounts — until something breaks. Answer 12 questions and get a clear risk score, no jargon.
What you actually get
What your first CTO does — month one and beyond.
No abstract "strategy". Here's the concrete work, in the order it happens.
Learn your business & stack
- Sits with you to map goals, worries, and plans
- Reviews your store, hosting, and contracts
- Collects all accounts & access into your name
- Talks to your developers and agency
Give you the full picture
- A written report in plain language
- Risks ranked by impact on revenue
- What you're overpaying for — and underinvesting in
- A 90-day plan you can actually understand
Run technology for you
- Reviews every estimate before you pay it
- Supervises agency & developer work quality
- Plans upgrades so they stop being scary
- Joins your key meetings as "your technical person"
From day one, there is finally one person whose job is to make technology boring for you: working, predictable, and on budget.
What it costs
A fraction of a hire. Often cheaper than the problems.
Compare your realistic options for getting senior technical leadership.
| Option | Cost | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Full-time CTOAn employee on your payroll | €120–180k / year + recruiting | Hard to find, hard to assess, and most stores don't have full-time CTO work to give them. |
| Trusting the agencyThe default "option" | €0 visible / unknown hidden | The advisor and the seller are the same company. Padded estimates and postponed upgrades are invisible costs. |
| Fractional CTOStarting at 0.5 days/week, scale as needed | from €1,800 / month | You share your CTO with a few other merchants. For most stores under €20M revenue, that's exactly right. |
Example: 0.5 days/week ≈ 20 h/month × €90/h = €1,800. Most first-CTO engagements settle between 0.5 and 1.5 days per week. No long-term lock-in — monthly notice.
Honest answers
Questions merchants always ask first.
Do I have to fire my current agency or developer?
Almost never. In most cases your current partners are fine — they just need supervision, clear priorities, and someone checking the work. Your CTO makes them better. If a partner truly needs replacing, you'll get the evidence and a managed transition, not a sudden gap.
I'm not technical. Will I understand what's going on?
That's the whole point. Your CTO's first job is translation: every report, every recommendation, every risk arrives in business language — euros, dates, and customer impact. If you ever hear a word you don't understand, that's our mistake, not yours.
Does the CTO write code too?
The CTO role is about decisions and oversight, not day-to-day coding. But behind your CTO stands our team of certified Magento and Shopware developers — so when something needs building or fixing, you can use them, your existing partners, or both. Your CTO has no incentive to push our developers on you; their loyalty is to your budget.
Which platforms do you cover?
We're deepest in Magento (Adobe Commerce) and Shopware, with certified engineers on both. For other platforms we can usually still help with vendor oversight, budgeting, and strategy — tell us what you run on the intro call.
What if I only need help for a few months?
That's fine. Some merchants bring in a CTO just to get through an upgrade, a replatforming decision, or an agency change — and then scale down to a few hours a month of "keeping an eye on things". The engagement is monthly; it shrinks and grows with your needs.
How is this different from hiring a consultant?
A consultant gives you a report and leaves. Your fractional CTO stays accountable for the outcome: they make the plan, supervise the execution, and answer to you when the next campaign day comes. Same person, every month, who knows your business.
Free interactive tool
The cost of a slow site is invisible — until you measure it.
No technical knowledge needed. Plug in your revenue and load time and see, in plain euros, what slow pages are quietly costing you every month and year.
No-pressure start
Talk to your future CTO for 45 minutes. Free.
Bring your store URL and the technical question that's been bugging you longest. You'll get straight answers in plain language — and a clear sense of whether a fractional CTO is right for you. If it isn't, we'll say so.