CTO Consulting Services from a fractional or interim CTO who decides, not advises.

It does not: CTO as a Service, outsourced CTO and virtual CTO are the market's names for the same seat, and the real choice is between two shapes of it.

• A fractional CTO takes a fixed share of the week, agreed at scoping, when the decisions keep coming and a full-time executive hire is not the answer.
• An on-demand CTO, or interim CTO, is engaged for one thing: a launch, a raise, a technology audit, or the gap between permanent hires.

A fractional seat can step up to interim leadership or hand off to a full-time hire, and when a fractional CTO is the right call against an in-house one is on our blog.

A prioritized technology roadmap with its horizon agreed at scoping; architecture decision records for the major calls; an engineering team assessment with a hiring plan or vendor shortlist; an AI readiness assessment; a build-versus-buy evaluation of the tools in play; documentation that makes your side of a technical due diligence readable; and onboarding documentation for your next technical hire.

We scope before we quote, because the real driver is how much of a senior leader's week you need and for how long, not a headline number. Three things move it:

• the model (a recurring fractional seat, a milestone-scoped interim mandate, or a one-off assessment)
• the size and state of the system
• whether the CTO is also accountable for a delivery team

Where the engagement includes that team, it runs as team extension, billed monthly per team member. unicrew does not publish project price bands; the scoping call is where you get a real number.

It depends on the model, and the term is set by the model and agreed at scoping rather than by a standard contract length. There is no minimum engagement period. A recurring fractional seat runs while the decisions keep coming. An interim mandate is scoped around one thing and ends when that thing is cleared. The assessment is the small end of this engagement and stopping there is a legitimate outcome. Most engagements start within two to four weeks.

Our project managers and engineers work from Ukraine, Poland, Estonia and the UK. Those four are where the team you work with sits, inside the six countries our engineers work in. The overlap window is agreed at scoping rather than promised on a page, and with one US client that has meant a daily status meeting held in the team's Ukraine evening. The CTO works in your tools, your Slack, your repository and your sprint reviews, rather than a portal we impose.

Yes, and inheriting what you already run is most of the job. A fractional CTO joins a live system with an ERP or CRM, a cloud account, a CI/CD setup, existing vendors and, usually, a codebase nobody fully documented. We map those dependencies first rather than proposing a rewrite: on one B2B platform that meant assessing the on-premise setup and its bottlenecks before a single service moved to Azure. If your current vendor is doing good work, keeping them is a legitimate outcome.

Yes, on your side of the review. Investors and acquirers assess your stack, your architecture decisions, your technical debt, your security posture and your team's capability. A unicrew fractional CTO prepares the documentation, responds to investor questions, and addresses flagged concerns before they become deal blockers. If you are raising, what we do with startups covers the rest. What that review covers is on our blog.

You are handing someone your repositories, your cloud accounts and your roadmap, so run four checks on any vendor, us included. Any firm that advises and builds can describe itself the way this page does. Compare below the category.

• The mandate in writing: the decisions owned, the reporting line, the KPIs. Without one, a part-time seat behaves like an advisory retainer, which you discover on the first contested call.
• What happens when the plan says build: who staffs it, and whether the firm that wrote the plan carries the exposure when delivery goes badly. Ours: 100+ senior in-house engineers across six countries, unicrew employees rather than subcontractors.
• What they do not hold: unicrew holds ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015, audited by Quay Audit UK, and does not hold SOC 2.
• The reviews rather than the rating: ours are 61 verified client reviews on Clutch carrying a 5.0 unified rating as of 31 July 2026, and every testimonial here links to the review it came from.

High enough that buyers have chosen us on the strength of one conversation, so ask to meet whoever would take your seat before you sign. An executive at a UK SaaS company described that meeting in a verified Clutch review published in 2023, under our former Artelogic brand: "During the interview process, we met Artelogic’s CTO, and he impressed us. He and his team stood above the other companies we interviewed due to their breadth of talent and eagerness to wanting to develop a relationship with us."

Not fully independent, and you should price that in. unicrew is a software engineering company, so if the plan says build, we would like to build it. What we offer instead is accountability: the people advising you are the ones who would have to deliver it. That is a strong incentive against a plan that cannot be built on the timeline it promises.

Where the read has to be provably disinterested, for investor due diligence or a board opinion, that is work for a firm with no delivery arm, and we are not one. We say that on the first call rather than after the invoice, and stopping at the assessment is a legitimate outcome here.

CTO consulting is an operational role: the CTO leads technology decisions, manages technical teams or vendors, owns the architecture, and is accountable for delivery. Technology advisory is a strategic one: the advisor gives expert input on direction, evaluates options and challenges assumptions, without operational ownership.

If you need someone to make decisions and drive execution, this page is the fit. If you need a senior voice in the room while your own team executes, technology advisory is enough, and it is the smaller purchase. What CTO as a Service means as a category is on our blog.

That combination is a single engagement here, and unicrew provides both: a fractional or on-demand CTO who owns the architecture and technical direction, alongside a dedicated development team that builds it, with one point of contact and one delivery accountability. You do not have to commit up front: you can begin with a scoped architecture or delivery review and add the build team when it is time to execute.

Every engagement carries structured documentation requirements: the decisions, the roadmap, the vendor choices and the onboarding material for whoever takes the seat next, written down while the work is happening. Transitions are planned rather than abrupt, with the handover period written into the mandate rather than improvised at the end. If you continue with a different unicrew CTO consultant, the institutional knowledge stays inside the team.