The question is framed wrong
We get it almost every week: "should I hire a fractional CTO or an agency?" And the honest answer is that these are two things that do not compete.
A development agency builds. You bring a brief and it hands back software. Its value is in execution: speed, code quality, delivering what was agreed.
A fractional CTO decides. What gets built, with which technology, in what order, with whom and at what cost. Its value is in judgment: making sure what gets done is the right thing, not just the thing that was asked for.
An agency with nobody steering does exactly what you ask, which is dangerous when what you ask is wrong. A CTO with nobody executing is an executive without a team. The right question is not which of the two, but which of the two you are missing.
What an agency gives you, and what it does not
A good agency gives you production capacity without hiring. Designers, developers and project management ready from week one, with a fixed scope and a date.
What it does not give you, however good the agency is:
- Judgment on whether the brief makes sense. If you ask for an app when what you need is a form, the agency builds you the app. Questioning you is not its job, and the ones that do lose the contract to the ones that do not.
- Continuity after delivery. The project ends, the team moves to the next client, and the knowledge of why each thing was done leaves with them.
- Someone on your side of the negotiation. When the agency proposes a technology, a timeline or an extra, who in your company knows whether it is reasonable? If the answer is nobody, you are paying whatever they ask.
- Decisions that cut across projects. Which authentication system to use company-wide, how the CRM talks to the website, what to buy and what to build. None of that fits in a fixed-scope brief.
What a fractional CTO gives you, and what it does not
A fractional CTO gives you executive-level technical judgment without an executive's salary. It defines the architecture, prioritizes the roadmap, chooses and supervises vendors, hires the team when the time comes, and answers to you for the technology serving the business.
What it does not give you:
- Hands. Two or three days a week of one senior person do not build a platform. They build the plan for someone to build it properly.
- Results without a team. If nobody executes, in-house or outsourced, the CTO becomes someone writing documents nobody reads. We have seen it, and it is an expensive way of not moving.
- A replacement for the agency. A fractional CTO can come with a team behind it, as in our case, but that is an agency with leadership included, not a CTO acting as a developer.
The three questions that decide it
Before talking to any provider, answer these in writing. It is usually enough to know what is missing.
- Are there technical decisions pending that nobody inside can make with confidence? Choosing a stack, deciding whether to migrate the CRM, judging whether an agency's proposal is reasonable, knowing whether the product will hold under the growth you expect. If yes, you are missing judgment: that is the CTO.
- Do you know exactly what you want to build and only need someone to build it? Clear scope, written requirements, and someone inside who can validate what gets delivered. If yes, you are missing hands: that is the agency.
- Is technology your product, or a tool for your business? If it is the product, technical decisions are business decisions and you cannot fully delegate them to whoever executes. If it is a tool, a well-defined brief to a good agency is usually enough.
The three mistakes we keep seeing
This is the uncomfortable part, and we tell it because we have arrived too late to some of these.
Hiring the agency without judgment of your own. The most common and the most expensive. The company commissions what it thinks it needs, the agency builds it well, and eight months later it has to be rebuilt because the architecture does not fit what the business turned out to be. Nobody did anything wrong. What was missing was someone asking "and what is this for?" before starting.
Hiring the CTO with nobody to execute. Less common, but it happens. A company with no technical team hires technical leadership and expects the leadership to produce software. Three months in it has an excellent roadmap and zero lines of code. The CTO was not the problem: it was step one of two, and step two never came.
The cheap two-in-one. A provider promising to be your CTO and your development team for the price of one. It usually means neither gets done fully: a senior developer making architecture decisions by inertia, without the time or the distance to question them. Judgment needs distance from execution, even when both sit in the same company.
When both make sense, and when neither does
Both, in this order, when technology is your product and you have no technical team. First the CTO, who defines what gets built and writes the brief. Then the agency, which builds it with someone on your side supervising. It is the combination that gets rebuilt least.
Only the agency when the brief is clear, bounded, and you have someone inside who can validate the delivery. A corporate website, a specific integration, an online store with a defined catalog.
Only the CTO when you already have a technical team and what is missing is direction. Start-ups with developers but nobody senior, companies that grew and left their team without a map, businesses about to raise money that need someone accountable for the technology.
Neither when what you want fits in a tool that already exists. Before building a CRM, try one. Before commissioning an app, check whether a well-made form solves the problem. Sometimes the best technical decision is not to build.
What to ask before signing with anyone
This works for both. Whoever has been doing this for a while answers without thinking; whoever has not, it shows.
- What happens when this ends? Who maintains the code, where the documentation lives, and whether your team will be able to touch it without calling anyone.
- In which case would you tell me not to do this? If the answer is "none", you are talking to a salesperson, not a technical partner.
- Who owns the code and the accounts? Repository, domains, servers, licenses. Everything in your name from day one, no exceptions.
- What does it cost to run each month after it is built? Servers, licenses, API consumption. It is the invoice nobody shows in the proposal.
- Can I talk to one of your clients? Not a quote on the website. A person.
If you want us to look at it with you
At Elevatec we do both, and that forces us to be honest about which one you are missing: if we sell you the one you do not need, we pay for it when it has to be redone.
Book a thirty-minute call. Bring the three questions above answered and we leave with a clear answer: CTO, agency, both or neither. No strings attached. And if the answer is "neither", we will tell you that too.
Frequently asked questions
No, and it should not try. A fractional CTO spends two or three days a week leading, not coding. If you put them to building, you pay an executive rate for developer work and lose the distance they need to question what gets done. What they can do is come with a team behind them, which is a different model: an agency with leadership included.
Some offer it, but there is an obvious conflict of interest: the agency gets paid to build, so its judgment about what to build will never be neutral. When the agency decides the scope, the scope tends to grow. Judgment works when whoever provides it does not earn more by recommending more work.
A fractional CTO at two or three days a week runs between 3,000 and 6,000 euros a month in the Spanish market. An agency charges per project or per dedicated team, and the range is as wide as the brief. What is worth comparing is not the price of each but the cost of getting it wrong without judgment: a platform rebuilt after eight months costs more than a full year of CTO.
With judgment, not hands. A fractional CTO for one or two months defines what gets built, with what and in what order, and writes the brief. Then an agency executes with them supervising. Starting with the agency without that step is the most common way to end up with a well-built product that solves the wrong problem.
When what you want already exists as a tool. Before building a CRM, try GoHighLevel or HubSpot. Before commissioning a booking app, see whether Calendly solves it. Before a training platform, try Moodle or Kajabi. Configuring an existing tool well is almost always cheaper and faster than building a new one, and a good fractional CTO is the first to tell you so.
You do not, and that is the problem. You can check references, ask to speak to clients and make sure code and accounts end up in your name, but judging whether the proposed architecture is reasonable requires knowing architecture. That is exactly the gap a fractional CTO fills during agency selection: a few hours of their time saves months of a badly framed brief.