Fractional CTO Linz

A fractional CTO leads engineering for a company that already has a product and a team. A fractional co-founder sits beside a founder before product-market fit and helps shape what gets built in the first place. Wavect offers both. Our Fractional Co-Founder program is for pre-PMF teams at EUR 400 per week. Fractional CTO engagements are for funded startups and scale-ups with revenue and an engineering team, starting at EUR 2,500 per month for CTO-on-Call and EUR 12,000 per month for an embedded operator. The work shape is different. Pick by stage, not by title.

Werkvertrag for fixed-price work (Tech Due Diligence, Discovery, fixed-price builds). Dienstvertrag-style retainer for the CTO-on-Call and Embedded Fractional CTO tiers. A Werkvertrag means we are legally bound on the scope and the deliverables, not on the hours. A retainer is a rolling weekly commitment you cancel without notice. Both are issued by Wavect GmbH (FN 575337i, Ampass, Tirol). We can sign under your standard MSA or use ours. Austrian-law jurisdiction is the default. We have signed under German, Swiss, US, and Singaporean law on past engagements.

Yes, in those cities plus the rest of Austria and Munich and Zurich. Christof is based in Vienna; Kevin in Tirol/Innsbruck. Between the two of us, every Austrian city plus Munich and Zurich is reachable by train without a flight, which is why on-site is only offered inside that DACH ground zone. On-site is always a surchargeable add-on: a separate line item covering travel time, train/hotel cost, and the on-site hours themselves. It is not bundled into the retainer or the fixed price. Use on-site for hiring panels, board meetings, vendor negotiations, and tough conversations that need a room. Day-to-day delivery runs remote, because remote-first delivers the work better and keeps your rate clean.

Remote only. The DACH ground zone above is where we offer on-site as a surchargeable add-on, because Christof and Kevin can reach those cities by train. Anywhere else (rest of Europe, the UK, the US, Singapore, Australia, the UAE, the rest of the world) runs fully remote: same SoW, same pricing, same two founders on every call. We do not fly for on-site work, even paid, because the travel time would dwarf the benefit and the delivery model already works at scale from a screen. Hire us if you want senior engineering leadership without the travel theatre.

Our specialist bench plugs in under the same SoW. We have 15+ vetted specialists we have shipped production work with (security, zero-knowledge, mobile, ML, IoT, DevOps). They join as Wavect sub-contractors. You sign one contract with Wavect and pay one invoice. We stay accountable for the outcome and for their quality. This is the difference between a fractional CTO with a network and a solo consultant who hands you to a freelancer with no shared incentives. If the work outgrows our bench too, we tell you and help you hire.

No. We charge cash, and that is the deal. We have run our own startups and we know the calculus on the founder side. Trading consulting hours for equity creates a misaligned incentive, an awkward cap-table line, and a difficult conversation when the engagement ends. If you want a true technical co-founder with skin in the game, hire a full-time CTO. If you want a fractional operator who is unambiguously on your side because you pay the invoice, hire us. Cash, monthly, cancel any week on retainer.

Minimum on a retainer is one calendar month. We do not run trial weeks because the first two weeks are mostly onboarding and the value shows up in month two. Fixed-price engagements (Tech Due Diligence, Discovery, fixed-price builds) have no minimum below the published price. Maximum is unbounded. Our longest fractional CTO relationship is in its third year. Most Embedded CTO engagements run 6 to 18 months and end when the full-time CTO is hired and onboarded. We help with that hiring panel as part of the work.

NDA is signed before the first technical conversation. We use yours, or our two-page template if you do not have one. All work product is assigned to your company on payment of the invoice (full IP transfer, no Wavect retained rights). Code lives in your repository under your accounts from day one. We do not host client code on our infrastructure. We do not use client work in our portfolio without written permission and we will sign a no-portfolio clause on request. Our case studies on this site are all written with client sign-off.

Yes. We have run the tech-side of fundraising and M&A processes, both as the company-side CTO and as the buyer-side diligence team. For company-side, we sit in the data-room calls, prepare the architecture deck, brief your founders for tech questions, and stay until close. For buyer-side, we run our Tech Due Diligence tier (from EUR 8,000 fixed) and produce a report your investment committee can actually use. We have never had a deal fall through because of our diligence work, but we have killed two on the buyer side.

We bill in EUR by default. USD or CHF on request. Austrian clients pay 20 percent VAT. EU B2B clients with a valid VAT-ID pay zero (reverse charge). Non-EU clients pay zero VAT. We are registered for OSS for EU B2C edge cases. Payment terms are 14 days net by default, 30 days for enterprise. Bank transfer, SEPA, Wise, and Stripe accepted. We do not accept crypto for fiat-billed engagements (we will discuss it for crypto-native client work case by case).

Because hourly billing pays us to be slow and punishes us for being good. Fixed price aligns our incentive with shipping. The catch is honest. Fixed price only works on scoped work, which means we say no to fixed price when the scope is genuinely uncertain. For genuinely uncertain work, we run a Discovery (EUR 3,500 fixed, 2 to 3 weeks) that ends with either a fixed-price offer for the build or a retainer if the work cannot be scoped yet. The Werkvertrag means we are legally bound to deliver what we signed, not to bill the hours we feel like.

Retainers (CTO-on-Call, Embedded CTO) cancel weekly. No notice period. You owe the current week. You do not owe any future weeks. If we missed the mark in the last week before you cancelled, email us, tell us why, and we refund the last week. No legal fight, no clawback paperwork. Fixed-price engagements are Werkvertrag. We are legally bound to deliver the scope. If we fail to deliver scope, the contract has the remedies (cure period, then refund of the unearned portion). We have never had to use that clause.

Toptal and Andela are talent marketplaces. They source individual contractors and route the contract through their entity. They do not run the engagement, do not own the outcome, and do not stay if your contractor leaves. We are a registered Austrian company (Wavect GmbH, FN 575337i). Two founders are on every engagement, with a vetted specialist bench under our SoW. One invoice from us, not many from a marketplace. Crew and similar fractional-CTO platforms typically place one consultant. We place two founders plus a bench. We compare in detail on the comparison page.