Senior technical leadership for founders who need the decisions made properly but cannot justify a £120,000 hire. Architecture, vendor selection, investor due diligence and team oversight — £4,500 a month for roughly four days.
UK-based. Working remotely with founders across the UK, Europe and North America.
The standard fractional CTO is an advisor. They set direction, review other people's work and leave. That is genuinely valuable — and it is also why so many engagements stall: the strategy document is excellent, and then nothing gets built, because the person who wrote it was never going to be the person who builds it.
We come at it from the other direction. TS Design Solutions is an engineering consultancy that ships production software on fixed timelines. The fractional CTO service exists because clients kept asking us to make the decisions as well as implement them.
In practice that means technical direction gets tested against something real. When we say an architecture will work, it is because we have built on it — and if the answer turns out to be wrong, we are still there when it surfaces.
What to build it on, what to buy instead of build, and which decisions are reversible later versus which ones you are stuck with for years.
Writing the technical brief, sitting in interviews, assessing agency proposals, and telling you which quote is realistic and which one is fiction.
Preparing your codebase for investor scrutiny — and reviewing the other side when you are acquiring, partnering or depending on a supplier.
What gets built in what order so that the thing you need to prove next is actually provable, rather than blocked behind six months of foundations.
What the technology should cost at your stage, where money is currently being wasted, and what to stop doing.
Holding contractors and agencies to a standard, reviewing what they ship, and translating between business goals and engineering work.
Approximately 4 days per month · rolling contract · no minimum term
For context: UK fractional CTO day rates generally run £450–£1,400, and a full-time CTO costs upwards of £120,000 a year before equity and employer costs.
What the role covers, what it costs, and how it differs from hiring an agency or a co-founder.
TS Design Solutions charges £4,500 per month for approximately four days of senior technical leadership, on a rolling contract with no minimum term. For comparison, UK fractional CTO day rates typically run between £450 and £1,400, and a full-time CTO in the UK costs upwards of £120,000 a year before equity, employer national insurance and recruitment fees.
A fractional CTO owns technical direction rather than executing tickets: choosing the architecture and stack, deciding what to build versus buy, selecting and managing developers or agencies, running technical due diligence for investors, setting the engineering roadmap, and being accountable for whether the technology supports the business plan. It is the decision-making layer, not the delivery layer.
An agency builds to a specification. A fractional CTO writes the specification and is accountable for whether it was the right one. If you already know exactly what to build and need it built, hire an agency. If the harder question is what to build, what it should cost, and whether the people building it are doing it competently, that is the fractional CTO role. TS Design Solutions offers both, which means the technical direction can be tested against a working build rather than staying theoretical.
A technical co-founder takes equity, works full time and shares the founding risk. A fractional CTO is paid, part time and carries no equity by default. If you can find a co-founder you genuinely trust, that is usually the stronger long-term answer. A fractional CTO makes more sense when you need senior judgement now, cannot afford to give away 20 to 50 per cent of the company to get it, or are not yet certain enough about the direction to bind someone to it permanently.
Yes. That includes preparing your codebase and documentation ahead of investor scrutiny, and sitting on the other side of the table when an investor or acquirer sends their own technical reviewer. It also covers the reverse case: assessing a company you are considering acquiring or a supplier you are about to depend on.
Yes, and this is one of the most common reasons founders engage us. Managing an outsourced development team without a technical counterpart of your own is how budgets get spent on the wrong things. We review their output, hold them to a standard, and translate between what the business needs and what the engineers are actually being asked to do.
The engagement is rolling month to month with no minimum term and no exit fee. In practice, meaningful work takes at least three months to show, but that is a recommendation rather than a contractual lock-in.
Yes. Unlike advisory-only fractional CTOs, TS Design Solutions is an engineering consultancy first, so the same engagement can cover both the technical leadership and the build — either as a separate fixed-price project such as the £7,995 21-Day MVP, or by directing your existing developers. The retainer covers direction; delivery is quoted separately so you are never paying leadership rates for implementation hours.