One-Day CTO · Single session
A senior CTO for one day. Stack decided, plan written, by tomorrow.
A 2–3 hour focused session and a written action plan the next business day. Fractional CTOs cost $5,000–$15,000 a month; we charge $500 for the core of what they do.
Common situations
"We need a CTO call, but not a CTO contract."
A One-Day CTO is for the moment between knowing you need senior technical help and signing up for a monthly retainer. Designed to deliver real decisions in a single session.
No CTO, no in-house architect. Every technical decision pings the founder, and the founder is not a technical founder.
You are not asking "what should the company be?" You are asking "should we use Postgres or DynamoDB?"A vendor sent a $80,000, 6-month estimate. You suspect it is high, but you have no way to challenge it.
A second-opinion call from a senior CTO costs a fraction of being wrong.Engineers are shipping, but you cannot tell if the architecture will hold at 10× users. No one has drawn the system diagram.
One day, one diagram, one written plan. That is the entire deliverable.Before → After
What changes in one day.
The output is a document, not a conversation. By the next business day you have decisions in writing — the kind that survive the next board meeting.
- Cannot choose a tech stack with confidence — every option sounds plausible.
- Engineers' suggestions arrive without a senior cross-check.
- No idea whether vendor estimates are reasonable, optimistic, or padded.
- Security, scalability, hiring — open questions, no owner.
- Tech stack decided, with reasoning written down.
- Architecture overview drawn — backend, data, integrations, deploy.
- MVP / build priorities and a 3-month roadmap, in writing.
- Security & scalability concerns named, with concrete next actions.
Why one day is enough — at this price
You are not buying access to a CTO. You are buying their decisions.
Fractional CTOs charge $5,000–$15,000 a month and bundle availability with output. We sell the output, packaged.
Three hours of homework, for free
Submit your stack and a GitHub URL; an AI agent reviews them and produces a pre-analysis report before the call. The session starts in the right place, not at "tell me about your company."
The person who runs production
The session is led by a CTO who operates our own live products — Tsunagu, Dr. Unco, and L-career — and is building the next one, Fortress. They have made these calls before, for real money.
Documents survive memory
Decisions, architecture diagram, and a 3-month action plan — written and delivered the next business day. Distribute to the team without paraphrasing.
How it works · 4 steps
From the form to the action plan, four steps.
All four happen in a week or less, with the session and report being the core 24 hours.
Submit the form
Five fields. Your situation, current stack, GitHub URL if you have one, budget context, email. Takes a minute.
NDA signed before any technical content is exchanged.
Free AI pre-analysis
Within 24 hours we send a free written pre-analysis: what we have inferred about your stack, the questions we want to ask, and the topics we will likely cover. If we do not think a One-Day CTO is the right fit, this is where we say so.
Free · No commitment
2–3 hour session
Video call with a senior CTO from our team. Stack decisions, architecture diagram drawn live, concrete next actions. Recorded with your permission so notes are not the bottleneck.
$500 (2 hours) or $1,000 (3 hours)
Written action plan, next business day
A written report: decisions, reasoning, architecture diagram, 3-month roadmap with priorities, and risks to watch. Distribute it inside your company as-is.
PDF + Markdown · Yours to keep
Why the price works
The numbers behind $500.
A fractional CTO at $10K/month, divided across the few hours they actually move the needle, costs roughly the same per decision. We have just unbundled the package.
A typical fractional CTO is $10K/month — $120K a year. The One-Day CTO is $500. If we are wrong, the cost of being wrong is one-twentieth of one month with a fractional.
Our process is built around three sessions per CTO per day. AI pre-analysis does the prep; the human spends their time on judgement, not orientation. That economic structure is why $500 works.
Tsunagu, Dr. Unco, and L-career. The CTO running your session has made these decisions for products with real users — not just clients.
Continue into a monthly CTO. The $500 comes off your first month.
The One-Day CTO is designed to pay for itself the moment you keep going. If you sign up for CTO-as-a-Service, the full $500 (or $1,000 for the longer session) is deducted from your first invoice. No voucher, no expiry, no fine print.
What you can rely on
Five operational rules that govern every One-Day CTO.
Not stretch goals — rules. We apply them whether the session costs $500 or $5,000,000.
NDA before tech
NDA and DPA are signed before the free pre-analysis. Code review, architecture sketches, and stack details are all under written confidentiality.
Senior, not sales
The CTO running the session is the same person who runs our own products. No bait-and-switch — the senior on the discovery call is the senior in your session.
Free pre-analysis
If we do not think a One-Day CTO is the right fit, we say so in the free pre-analysis — before you have paid anything.
Recorded session
With your permission, the session is recorded and the recording is yours. You can share it with co-founders, engineers, and investors without paraphrasing.
Next-day delivery
The written action plan lands in your inbox by end of the next business day. If it slips, you do not pay.
FAQ
Five questions before you book a CTO day.
Specific case not here? Write it in the form message field and we will reply within one business day.
How is $500 different from a free advisory call?
Does the $500 really roll into CTO-as-a-Service?
Who runs the session?
What if my problem is too big for one day?
What if I do not have a tech stack yet?
Book a CTO Day
Tell us the challenge. Get a free AI pre-analysis.
We reply within 1 business day with a written pre-analysis before any payment. If a One-Day CTO is the wrong fit, we will say so.
- NDA signed before any technical discussion — including the free pre-analysis.
- The senior who scopes your session is the senior who runs it.
- If one day is not enough, we say so before you book — not during.
- $500 · 1 day
- Free pre-analysis
- NDA before tech
- Credit toward CTO-aaS
Request a free pre-analysis
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