ZenSavvy gives you a CTO
A technology leader who steps in part-time to own architecture, vendors and priorities, with the accountability of a full-time CTO and none of the fixed cost.
38%
of failed startups ran out of cash; the second most common cause, at 35%, was building something nobody needed
CB Insights, 2021
45%
average cost overrun on large technology projects, delivering 56% less value
McKinsey & Oxford University, 2012
31%
of software projects finish successfully; the rest slip, get cut back or get cancelled
The Standish Group, CHAOS Report 2020
$171K
median annual salary ($171,200) for a U.S. computer and information systems manager, before benefits
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2024
70%
of digital transformations fall short of the goals they set out to hit
McKinsey, 2023
10-20%
of the technology budget meant for new product gets diverted to paying down technical debt
McKinsey, 2020
0
full-time roles you have to open to get technical judgment in the room
ZenSavvy, service model
The expensive decision is almost never the visible one.
It is the vendor picked without comparison, the platform that trapped your data, the system rebuilt twice.
Who in your company says no to a bad technical decision?
Technology decisions get made in pieces: a vendor a friend recommended, a platform that was on sale, a system someone’s nephew put together. Each decision looks reasonable on its own, and together they add up to an operation that is expensive to run and hard to change.
A fractional CTO takes that map and sorts it out: what stays, what gets replaced, in what order and on what budget. They compare vendors, review contracts and architecture, and say no when no is the right answer. They do not sell development hours; they sell the correct decision.
The deliverable is a technology plan with priorities, budget and owners, reviewed each quarter against what actually happened. Your team or your vendors execute it; we are accountable for the decisions being right and for the plan moving.
The cost of not doing it
It bills you two years later: when migrating costs more than choosing well would have, when the vendor raises the price because they know you cannot move, when a system has to be rebuilt that should never have been built that way. By then nobody remembers who made the call, but the invoice still shows up.
The first deliverable is an assessment: an inventory of your systems, vendors and contracts, what each one costs you, where the real risks are and which decisions are due in the next twelve months. You can act on it immediately, with us or without us.
If your operation is simple and your technology decisions are already sound, we say so and there is nothing to sell. Fractional CTO work pays off when several areas are open at once and the cost of getting it wrong is already high.
| Area | Status | Urgency |
|---|---|---|
| Servers and hosting | Oversized | 30 |
| Licenses and subscriptions | Duplicated | 24 |
| Backups and continuity | Never tested | 90 |
| Access and passwords | Shared | 85 |
| Operations system | Undocumented | 45 |
Free first session and summary included
Book the assessment →The areas and statuses shown are an example. Your assessment comes from your real systems.
Week 1
We catalog everything there is: systems, servers, licenses, contracts, vendors and access. Subscriptions nobody uses and backups nobody ever tested show up almost every time.
Week 2
You get the map: what each area costs, where the real risks sit and which decisions cannot wait. No jargon, in the language you already use to make business decisions.
Quarterly
We set the quarter: what gets done, in what order, on what budget and who owns each item. It gets reviewed at the close against what actually happened, not against what was promised.
Ongoing
We step into decisions as they come up: comparing vendors, reviewing a contract, interviewing a developer, signing off an architecture. We are the technical judgment at the table, not one more vendor.
We answer any request in under 24 hours.
A full-time CTO costs a senior salary every month, whether or not a decision comes up that month. Fractional means you pay for leadership when you need it and scale it up when the project grows.
We take no commission from anyone and resell no licenses. That is exactly what makes it possible to compare vendors honestly and say no, even when the no takes work away from us.
We explain the technical decision in terms of cost and risk so leadership can decide, and translate the business goal into requirements so the technical team can execute. Most projects fall apart in exactly that gap.
We do not advise from the outside: we also build software, mobile apps and AI agents. When we say something can be done in six weeks it is because we have done it, not because we read it somewhere.
First comes anything that can stop the business: backups nobody ever tested, a server with no redundancy, an account with a single key. Before optimizing anything, make sure it does not fall over.
Duplicated licenses, servers twice the size they need to be, subscriptions for people who left. This is what pays for the engagement fastest, and it is almost always sitting in plain sight.
A decision that locks you in is worth less than a slightly worse one that lets you leave. We review contracts, data portability and who owns what before anything gets signed.
The best architecture is the one your people can operate. Choosing something only an outside specialist understands creates a dependency that bills you the day that specialist stops answering.
We favor decisions that hold up at double the current load without a rebuild. We do not over-engineer for a future that may not arrive, but we do not pick something that breaks next year either.
Per-person access, second factor and encryption. A data incident is not measured by what it costs to fix, but by the customers who do not come back.
How fast does it show? The assessment and the map land in two weeks. Recurring-cost savings usually show in the first quarter, because those are decisions that execute quickly. Architecture changes are planned by quarter and measured by year.
Fractional CTO work pays off when several technical areas are open at once and decisions already cost money. If your technology fits in a couple of tools and nobody has to decide anything this year, you do not need it.
Companies that grew faster than their technology, or that are about to make a decision that is hard to reverse.
When technology is not an open front, buying leadership means paying for decisions nobody has to make.
If your case sits on the right, we say so in the first session and there is no proposal. If it is a one-off project, we take it as a project rather than as ongoing leadership.
Pricing
Contracted by the quarter. The price comes from the number of fronts to be held, and it is defined in writing before we start.
Technology leadership is not billed by the hour or by deliverable: it is contracted by the quarter, and the price depends on how many decisions and how many fronts have to be held. It is defined in writing before we start.
Tell us which technology decision is in front of you, or which part of your operation worries you. We come back with a map of what exists, what it costs and what has to be decided in the next twelve months.
Book my assessment →We reply in under 24 hours.
What people always ask us
A fractional CTO is a chief technology officer who works for your company part-time, with the same accountability for decisions a full-time CTO would carry. They own architecture, compare vendors, review contracts, set the technology plan and answer for it being executed, but you pay for the time you actually need instead of a full-time role.
A consultancy delivers a document and leaves. Fractional CTO services stay inside the decisions: stepping in to compare a vendor, sign off an architecture or interview a developer, and answering for the outcome through the quarter. We also review the plan against what actually happened, not against what was promised.
Pricing is based on the monthly hours your company needs, and that number comes out of the assessment. The useful comparison is this: the median U.S. salary for a computer and information systems manager is $171,200 a year before benefits (BLS, May 2024), and the fractional model exists precisely because almost no mid-sized company needs that entire role.
Both, but deliberately kept separate. We build custom software, mobile apps and AI agents, and that is what lets us know what is realistic to promise. When we are leading, we compare vendors honestly even when the answer is that we should not be the ones doing the work.
No. We take no commission from anyone and resell no licenses. That is what makes the recommendation worth anything: if we were paid by the vendor, our opinion of that vendor would be worthless.
That works very well. In that case we are the counterweight: reviewing architecture, bringing judgment to the big decisions and helping leadership evaluate technical proposals. We are not there to replace your team or audit it, but to give it someone to argue with as an equal.
Yes. We help define the role, screen candidates and run the technical interview. It is one of the places where missing technical judgment shows up most expensively: a bad developer hire costs several months of salary and, usually, a system that has to be rebuilt.
Yes. The entire engagement is remote and works the same wherever your company is. Assessment sessions, quarterly reviews and decision support all happen over video, and everything we deliver is in writing.
