The questions worth answering up front.

Most engagements are fixed-price: discovery sprints, build-and-handover projects, automation work. You know the cost before we start. I’d rather scope hard and quote once than rack up an hourly bill.

Fractional CTO retainers are billed per day, monthly, with a 90-day review. If it’s not pulling its weight, we cut it cleanly.

I don’t publish rate cards because the right price depends on the shape of the work — but if we get on a discovery call, you’ll have a concrete number within a few days.

30 minutes, free, no slide deck.

I’ll ask about the problem you’re trying to solve, what you’ve already tried, what success looks like, and what you’re afraid of. You’ll get honest answers about whether I think I can help — and whether you should be hiring me, an agency, a full-time employee, or nobody at all.

If there’s a fit, I’ll follow up with a scoped proposal within a few days. If there isn’t, I’ll tell you on the call and try to point you somewhere useful.

It almost always does, and that’s fine.

Small in-scope tweaks: I absorb them. That’s part of doing good work.

Significant scope changes (new feature, new system, doubled-out timeline): we talk before anything is built. You’ll get a clear “this is in scope, this is a change, this is what the change costs” — in writing, before there’s a billing surprise.

I’d rather have an uncomfortable scope conversation in week two than an uncomfortable invoice conversation in week eight.

Handover isn’t a meeting at the end — it’s how the engagement is built from day one.

• Documentation is written as the build happens, not retrofitted.
• Runbooks for the boring, scary moments (rollback, restore, vendor-down).
• Code that reads like the team could have written it (because they should be able to maintain it).
• A short, recorded walk-through if it helps.
• Office hours for a few weeks post-handover if you want them.

The goal is for the team to own what I built so completely that I become unnecessary. That’s a feature, not a bug.

I’m one senior engineer. No junior pass-through, no project managers in the middle, no time-zone hand-offs. When you hire me, I do the work.

If a project is bigger than I can solo, I’ll tell you that early — and either bring in collaborators I’ve worked with before (with your sign-off) or recommend an agency better-shaped for the job.

I work with teams worldwide. Most of my clients are US- or AU-based; I keep a flexible schedule that lets me overlap meaningfully with both.

Async communication is the default. Synchronous time is reserved for the calls where it actually matters — discovery, hard decisions, the occasional pair session.

You do. All deliverables are yours, full IP transfer on payment. No royalty arrangements, no “powered by” footers, no licensing strings.

If a project uses an open-source library I’ve authored, that library stays open-source — but you have unconditional rights to use, modify and distribute everything I deliver inside your business.

Maybe not. The right answer is “yes” surprisingly often, and also “no” surprisingly often. Both deserve a real conversation, not a default.

The questions I’d ask:

• Is there a repeatable task in your business eating 5+ hours a week that’s mostly about reading, classifying, drafting, or summarising? Strong AI candidate.
• Would the AI feature change the customer’s experience in a way they’d genuinely value? Or is it AI for the press release? If the latter — skip it.
• Can you accept a 90–98% accuracy ceiling, with the rest handled by a human? If not, the use case may not be AI-shaped.

A discovery call will get you a clearer answer than any FAQ entry can.