This is one of the most common questions founders ask me, usually after a 2am server crash or right after they've realized their co-founder has no idea what the current tech stack actually is. Here's the uncomfortable truth: there's no single right answer. But there are definitely wrong moves.
I've worked with founders who tried hiring their first full-time engineer when they had 2 customers. I've also seen fractional CTOs who stuck around for three years after the company had clearly moved to needing full-time leadership. Both situations were expensive mistakes.
Fractional makes sense if:
You need tech leadership without needing someone writing code every day. This happens more often than people think.
- Pre-product-market fit. You're still experimenting with the product, pivoting, trying different markets. You need someone who knows how to architect quickly and say "that'll take three weeks, not three months." But you don't need a full-time CEO-of-engineering yet.
- You have a technical co-founder doing the building. They need a peer to push back on architectural decisions, help with hiring, and cover weekends. Fractional works here if your technical co-founder is genuinely strong.
- You're a non-technical founder with a small engineering team (1-2 people). You need someone to help you hire, set standards, and know if your team is actually shipping or just treading water.
- You've got a specific technical debt or architectural problem. Sometimes you bring someone in for 6 months to help you migrate off of something, then they leave. That works fine as fractional.
Real pattern we've seen
A SaaS founder brought us in fractionally when they had hit 40K ARR with two engineers. Within six months, one engineer had left and the other was burned out. We helped them hire a strong engineering manager, restructured the codebase to make it less dependent on the departed engineer's knowledge, and stayed on for another three months while the new manager found their footing. Once they had their first hire settled, we moved to advisory. Two years later, they've got eight engineers and everything's fine.
Full-time is better when:
You need someone who wakes up thinking about your technical problems. Not just weekends—all the time.
- You've reached product-market fit. Now you're not experimenting anymore, you're scaling. You need someone who knows the codebase inside and out because they've been living in it daily.
- You're trying to hire and build a team. New engineers want to work with people, not a ghost. A fractional CTO working 8 hours a week isn't there for code review, pairing, or mentoring.
- Your infrastructure or reliability is starting to matter. If your platform is down for four hours on a Friday night, you need someone who can respond, not someone who texts back Monday morning.
- You're in a competitive market where speed matters. Marketplaces, social, anything where timing is critical. You need full-time technical leadership making real-time decisions.
- You're heading toward a Series A. VCs will ask to meet your CTO. "He works with us three days a week" is not the answer they want to hear.
Red flags to watch for:
You've got a fractional CTO but they're actually doing full-time work. I see this constantly. A fractional who's on Slack eight hours a day, in every meeting, pulling all-nighters during launches. You're basically paying someone part-time rates to work full-time. That person will burn out or leave. Just hire them full-time.
Your team doesn't know what the fractional CTO is doing. If your engineers can't tell you what they discussed in their last sync, something's wrong. Either the fractional isn't communicating, or they're making decisions in a vacuum.
Your fractional CTO is hands-off. Some fractional CTOs just show up for steering meetings and never get their hands dirty. That's consulting, not leadership. You need someone who actually knows what's hard about your codebase because they've fought with it.
You hired a full-time CTO and they're completely disconnected from your team. This is less common but happens when you hire someone senior who comes in with their own ideas about how everything should be done. They design systems in a vacuum, engineers hate them, people leave. Full-time doesn't fix a bad hire.
The cost thing (nobody wants to talk about)
A fractional CTO at good rates is probably $200-400/hour. If they're working 20 hours a week, that's $40-80K per month. A full-time CTO in most markets is $180-250K salary plus equity, so $15-20K per month. But that fractional person is also probably not focused on you—they're working with three other companies, and you're fighting for their time.
A bad full-time hire costs you more than salary: it's the team members who leave because the CTO was toxic, the six months spent fixing architectural decisions, the hiring time to replace them. A bad fractional is easier to exit because the contract is shorter, but you've still wasted money and momentum.
The transition (if you do it right)
If you start with fractional and it's working, there should be a natural endpoint. Usually it looks like this: the fractional CTO helps you hire your first engineering manager or senior engineer. That person takes over daily technical decisions. The fractional scales back to advisory calls once a month. Three months later, you might not need them at all.
The mistake is clinging to fractional forever because it's cheaper, even though you've outgrown it. You end up with a team that's leaderless on technical strategy, everyone guessing at what the vision is, and the fractional CTO not being present enough to actually push the company forward.
If you're trying to figure out which path makes sense for your company, that's exactly the kind of decision we help with. Book a call and let's talk through your specific situation.