Questions founders ask us

For the right project, yes. We talk to about 40 founders a month and roughly 4 of them are a fit: their product is too much for a no-code or AI app builder, but small enough that an experienced CTO driving professional AI tools can build it in a day. Most take one day and about a quarter take two. We'll tell you up front which yours looks like, so there are no surprise extra days.

We'll tell you on the intro call and point you somewhere better. If Lovable or Replit can do it, we'll say so and you'll save your money. If it needs a CTO and a developer or two for a few months, we'll say that too.

An MVP in a Day costs $3,000. An Architecture Review is also $3,000. Any follow-on day is $2,000, and a half-day follow-on is $1,000. There's no commitment before you decide to book.

Because the work starts well before 9am. Before we meet, we read everything you've sent, draft the spec and the data model, and set up the project, so the day itself is spent building. Follow-on days don't need that prep, so they cost less.

A working product deployed to the internet, with a proper architecture, a real database, sign-in, email and the security basics. You also get the code, a written spec, and every account the product runs on, all in your name.

You do. The code, the repository, the hosting, the domain and every tool account are created in your name from the start. There is nothing to transfer at the end and nothing locking you in.

The AI does most of the typing, but an experienced CTO decides the architecture, designs the database, reviews what the AI writes and throws out what's wrong. That's the difference between code that only works in a demo and code that a developer, or you, can keep building on.

That's what the Architecture Review is for. We spend a day in your code, fix the foundation and the patterns before they get expensive, and leave you with something you can keep building on.

We usually recommend TypeScript throughout; a front end built with Mantine, on Next.js if the MVP needs server-rendered public pages or Vite and React if it doesn't; a NestJS back end, cleanly separated from the front end; PostgreSQL on Cloud SQL with Drizzle for the database; Clerk for sign-in; Stripe for payments; Resend for email; Capacitor only if the MVP needs a mobile app; and Cloud Run in your own Google Cloud account for hosting. It's a modern, proven stack, and every part of it is a recommendation: if your project has a good reason to use something else, we use something else.

No. Most founders who do this aren't. You'll be in the room for every decision that matters, and you'll leave understanding how it's built. Founders who want to learn along the way, usually do.

Either. If you're in or near Boston, we work side by side at Venture Lane, and lunch is on us. Otherwise we do it over a video call from anywhere in the world, which works just as well.

No. A day runs about 9am to 7pm, but you can split it into two sessions of about 4 hours on different days. We're not strict about it; some sessions run to 6 hours.

You can hand the code to any developer, keep building it yourself, or come back for follow-on days to build the features that are too complex to do alone. Follow-on days are $2,000, or $1,000 for half a day.

Dev shops run on one model: margin. Whenever you hire one, you're paying at least twice what the work should cost. And if you're not technical, you can't check what they're doing, so the best you can hope for is that they happen to build it correctly.

If your product is too big for a day with us, the answer isn't a dev shop. It's a CTO and a developer or two, which is exactly what FastCTO was created for.