Answers on emergesource

Your developer disappeared

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Someone built your software. They were good, or good enough. Then the replies got slower, then they stopped, and now there is an invoice arriving every month from an account nobody can log into and a website you are afraid to touch.

This is the single most common reason people call me, and it is worth saying plainly: it is a recoverable situation almost every time. It does not feel that way from the inside, because the thing you have lost is not really the code. It is the ability to make a decision about your own business without asking someone who is not there.

You inherited a codebase

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are a few ways to end up here. You acquired a company and the software came with it. The founder who wrote it left. An agency built it, the contract ended, and the handover was a zip file. Or it has simply been running so long that everyone who understood it has moved on.

However you got here, the position is the same: you own something that works, you cannot safely change it, and every estimate you get for touching it comes back either suspiciously cheap or unbelievably expensive.

What a fractional CTO costs

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fractional CTO pricing is all over the place, and most of what is published is written to sell you one. Here are the market ranges, what moves the number, and how I price my own work.

The market, in real numbers

Monthly retainers run from roughly $3,000 to $15,000, depending on cadence and how hands-on the person is. Senior people who bill by the hour typically charge $250 to $500.

Fractional CTO, agency, or hire

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are four ways to get software built and kept running, and most of the comparisons written about them are written by one of the four. Here is the version that assumes you might reasonably pick something other than me.

The question is not which is best. It is which gap you actually have, and most people misidentify theirs — usually as a capacity problem when it is a decision problem.