What a fractional CTO is, when a company needs one, what one costs in Taiwan, and the practical questions that come up most often once we are working together.
What is a fractional CTO?
A fractional CTO provides the CTO function to a company on a part-time basis. The difference is in the work, not the hours: they own technical direction, architecture choices, vendor evaluation, hiring and technical governance — not writing code. The term is established in the US and Europe; Taiwan has no settled name for it yet, and some people say part-time CTO or technical advisor. It suits a company that already has software investment but cannot yet carry a full-time CTO's salary.
How is a fractional CTO different from a technical advisor, a vendor's consultant, or a freelance engineer?
The difference is whose side they are on, and how far their responsibility runs. A vendor's pre-sales consultant evaluates the solution they already have. A freelance engineer delivers what you specify and is not responsible for telling you whether the direction is right. A general advisor gives advice but does not stay with you through the decision. A fractional CTO's job is to make the judgement from your side: which work can be outsourced, how to evaluate a quote, when you need to hire a full-time engineer, and when vibe coding is not enough on its own. Put simply, a fractional CTO is the person who does the gatekeeping and the judging for you.
How big does a company have to be before it needs a fractional CTO?
It is not about size. It is about whether three things are true at once: you have ongoing software investment, the amounts or the consequences of your decisions have started to exceed the margin of error you can absorb, and nobody inside the company can judge whether a technical proposal is any good. For example, you have no senior technical staff in-house but you have already engaged an outsourcing firm. Or people inside have started vibe coding, and nobody is assessing security or how several people will maintain it. Conversely, if you already have a senior technical lead, or you simply need something already clearly defined to be built, you do not need one.
What does a fractional CTO cost in Taiwan?
There are no published rate statistics for fractional CTOs in Taiwan. Two reference points are worth having. In the US, fractional CTO providers publish rates that mostly fall between US$5,000 and US$15,000 a month, for 10 to 20 hours a week. At the Taiwan end, Michael Page's Taiwan Salary Guide 2026 puts the 75th percentile of an IT Director's annual salary at NT$3.8 million; that role is not quite the same as a CTO, but it works as an order-of-magnitude reference for what a senior technical lead costs. The right thing to compare our fees against is a full-time technical lead's salary, not a project quote from an outsourcing marketplace — the two buy different things.
Do you actually build things, or only advise?
We do, but building is not the main work. Assessment, planning, vendor evaluation and hiring gatekeeping are the core. In areas where no mature outsourcing market exists yet — AI infrastructure being one — or where a client's needs call for it, we will also help build it directly, or serve alongside a partner vendor.
Could you see my system and then go and build a competing product?
The contract states confidentiality and non-compete obligations. The more practical guarantee is that our business is built on continuing service relationships: competing with a client would put us against our own brand and our own business model. If there is a scope you are particularly concerned about, it can be named in the contract.
How do you charge?
There are two fee types. One is a one-off project fee, agreed by complexity and scope. The other is billed monthly. The monthly plans have no lock-in — you can change next month's plan, or stop, at any time.
How do I tell whether a vendor quote is too high?
That is exactly what the decision diagnosis is for. We lay the quotes side by side and go through scope, effort assumptions and deliverables line by line, then tell you which items are reasonable, which are padding, and which clauses to add before you sign. We do not take work from vendors, so the judgement is not on the seller's side.
Can an AI-built prototype go straight to production?
Usually not. Prototypes demo beautifully but often cannot hold traffic, cannot fend off attacks, and will not connect to real systems. What you can do is establish which parts of the prototype are worth keeping and which have to be rebuilt, then decide how much to invest in turning it into something you can operate — rather than waiting for it to fail in front of real users.
I'm not technical. How do I interview engineers?
We sit in and do the gatekeeping. CV screening, designing the technical interview, asking the questions and reading the answers are ours; judging whether the person fits your team stays yours. A single role fits plan one; ongoing hiring across stages and roles sits in plan two or three.
