Technical Co‑Founder & CTO as a Service
We give you what a technical co-founder gives you - architecture, technical
direction, and someone accountable for what ships - without the equity and
without hiring a development team. The code gets built by our factory,
running in your environment, under a process we own.
PR #482
Build
passedTests
passedStaging
liveVerdict
approved to ship
Reviewed by a person, within one business day
The problem
A technical co-founder costs you a large share of your company, permanently, and you
can't undo it if it goes wrong.
A developer costs less, but a developer without architecture produces expensive mistakes. The code gets written. Whether it was the right code is a question nobody in the room can answer.
What most founders actually need is the judgment, not the typing.
What we do
Four things, and they all point the same way: nothing ships that we wouldn't sign.
[01]
Architecture, technical direction, system design. You bring the ideas and the business requirements. We turn those into specifications that can actually be built.
This is where the money is. Reviewing a plan costs a fraction of reviewing the implementation of a bad plan, and we review the plan before a line of code exists.
[02]
We install a dedicated instance of our development pipeline in your environment. It follows a strict process on every ticket. Every pull request gets its own live staging environment. Build failures and escalations route to our team automatically, so you hear about problems from us rather than from production.
You pay for the tokens it consumes. The factory itself is included.
[03]
Every change lands on staging before it lands anywhere else. We review it and give you a straight verdict: approved, approved with changes, or not ready to ship.
Guaranteed within one business day.
[04]
Build, test, deploy, staging infrastructure. Set up at the start, maintained by us for as long as we work together.
What you keep
Your code
Your accounts
Your infrastructure
Your product decisionsThe factory runs in your environment, not ours. There's no platform to be locked into and
nothing to unpick if you stop working with us.
You decide what ships. We make sure what ships is worth shipping.
How it works
One loop, from ticket to shipped, the same way every time.
You raise a ticket describing what you want.
The differentiator
We review it and shape it into a proper specification.
Review happens before a line of code exists — the cheapest place to catch a mistake.
The factory builds it.
Every pull request gets a live staging environment.
We review staging within one business day and give you a verdict.
Failures escalate to our team automatically.
You ship.
How we work together
Everything is written down and nothing gets lost.
That's the only scheduled meeting. The agenda comes from what's in the system.
Architecture questions, specifications, reviews, escalations — all through the ticketing system built into your factory instance. Written answers, on a record, that you can go back to.
That's the longest a staging review ever waits.
Two ways to start
Existing product
We make your codebase ready for this way of working — documentation the factory can use, test coverage that gives it feedback, CI, staging environments, and the factory itself installed and configured.
That's a one-off setup engagement, quoted based on the state of your code. Then the monthly service starts.
Starting from nothing
We build the first version with you over two to three months. The factory, the pipeline, and the staging setup get built as part of that work.
Then you move onto the monthly service with no setup fee, because the setup is already done.
pricing
The service
$5,000/month
What's included
Architecture and technical directionSpecification review, before code existsThe factory, installed in your environmentThe review gate, with a verdict in one business dayCI and pipeline ownershipThe weekly callToken costs are yours and go directly to the provider. Setup or the MVP sprint is quoted separately.
For comparison, a technical co-founder costs you a permanent share of the company. This is a monthly invoice you can stop.
Who we are
DB2 is an engineering firm of around twenty people, with 92% client retention. We
build and run finance, which sees more than 30 million downloads a month, and we've been building software for 15 years.
The pipeline your code moves through is the same one we use on our own products.
Still got questions?
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One call to see whether this fits what you're building.
