Five ways to work together. Each with an honest caveat.

→ best_fit: You know what you want built and roughly when it needs to exist. A launch, a replatform, a design system, a first revenue product.

→ duration: Four weeks for a focused design system, up to about nine months for a substantial platform build.

→ billing: One fixed price against a signed scope, invoiced at agreed milestones. Discovery is quoted separately and credited in full to the build.

→ included: Architecture and technical direction, design, implementation, code review, QA against a written definition of done, launch support and handover documentation.

→ how_to_start: Send a brief. We run a short scoping conversation, then quote discovery as its own fixed fee. You approve discovery, we produce the scope, you approve the scope, we build.

→ wrong_when: The scope genuinely cannot be defined yet, or you need us to keep changing direction indefinitely. Both belong in a sprint or a retainer.

→ best_fit: You know the problem but not the solution, and the cost of being wrong is low. Exploration, a technical spike, an unfamiliar integration, a rebuild of one broken flow.

→ duration: Two-week cycles, rolling. Each cycle has one agreed goal and one agreed deliverable.

→ billing: A fixed fee per agreed cycle, quoted before the cycle starts and renewed at the next one. The studio keeps the speed gain; you keep the budget certainty.

→ included: A goal, a working increment, a short written read on what was learned, and a recommendation for what to do next.

→ how_to_start: Pick one problem. We agree the goal and the definition of done for a single cycle, then re-decide at the end of it.

→ wrong_when: You need all of it delivered on one date. Rolling cycles will never feel like a deadline to you, however disciplined we are about them.

→ best_fit: A live product whose bottleneck is demand rather than features. You have a site or app that works and is not being found, tried or bought.

→ duration: Six months minimum, because compounding channels need a full loop before you can judge them fairly.

→ billing: Fixed monthly fee for a defined capacity. Indicative band: $3,000 to $12,000 per month, sized by site size, market competition and whether content is included.

→ included: Technical SEO work, content and on-page programmes, paid media management where in scope, analytics instrumentation, and a monthly written read on what moved and why.

→ how_to_start: A discovery and measurement pass first. If analytics are not trustworthy, month one goes on instrumentation and the rest of the budget is better spent afterwards.

→ wrong_when: There is no site or product to grow yet, or nobody on your side can act on findings. A retainer without an internal owner buys idle capacity.

→ no_guarantees: We do not guarantee rankings, traffic levels or revenue. No honest agency can. Anyone who guarantees a position on page one is either lying or about to renegotiate.

→ best_fit: You have more work than one team can hold and you want ownership of streams rather than tickets. Multiple products, or a platform plus a marketing site plus a migration.

→ duration: Six months minimum. Shorter than that and the ramp-up cost lands entirely on you.

→ billing: Fixed monthly fee sized to the pod. Indicative band: $18,000 to $45,000 per month depending on pod size and seniority mix.

→ included: A tech lead who owns delivery, engineers, a designer, and growth capacity. A shared board, a weekly written status, and demos you can attend.

→ how_to_start: Define the streams, not the tasks. We size the pod against the streams, agree what your side owns, and start with a two-week onboarding into your codebase and process.

→ wrong_when: There is one stream of work, or nobody on your side can make prioritisation calls. A pod without internal decision-making is a very expensive meeting schedule.

→ best_fit: There is real technical risk but no senior technical leader accountable for it. Architecture choices, hiring a first engineering team, vendor selection, due diligence, board or investor questions.

→ duration: Three to twelve months, typically an initial decision period followed by a lighter oversight cadence.

→ billing: Quoted per engagement after scoping. As a market reference point only, virtual security leadership (vCISO) engagements commonly run $3,000 to $15,000 per month in 2026. That is a third-party market band, not our pricing, and a CTO engagement is scoped rather than priced from that band.

→ included: Architecture and stack decisions, technical plan, hiring guidance and interview support, risk review, vendor and cost evaluation, and written decision records your team can act on.

→ how_to_start: A focused assessment of the current situation and the decisions in front of you, with a written recommendation. If the answer is that you need engineers rather than a CTO, that is what you will be told.

→ wrong_when: You actually want a pair of hands on a build. Buying fractional leadership to get delivery capacity is the most common mismatch we see, and it fails on both sides.

This is guidance, not a quote. If your situation sits between two rows, the scoping conversation is where that gets settled.