What is fractional engineering? A plain guide for established businesses

Somewhere between “my nephew builds websites” and “we hired a CTO” sits a gap that most established businesses fall into. Your site, your servers, your customer data and the automations that hold your week together all matter commercially. They do not add up to a job you can hire for, and the people you have tried so far, an agency here, a freelancer there, never quite stuck around. Fractional engineering is the name for the model that closes that gap, and after twelve years in this field I think it is the most honest way to buy engineering at this size of business.

The short definition

Fractional engineering is engineering capability shared across a small number of businesses instead of employed by one. The same engineer stays with you on a monthly retainer, answerable for building and running your systems. “Fractional” describes the allocation and the cost. It does not describe the accountability, which is not divisible.

Where the model comes from

You have probably met the pattern in other departments. A fractional CFO gives a company real financial leadership for two days a month. A fractional CMO brings marketing judgement without a director’s salary. The logic is identical here. Most established businesses need engineering judgement and hands regularly, but not forty hours of them every week. Hire full-time and you pay for the idle hours. Do not hire at all and nobody owns the systems, which is how most of these businesses end up where they are. Fractional is the third option.

Two ways in, and one of them is not a rebuild

This matters more than the definition, because the definition sounds as though it only applies to new work.

The first route is build and run: the system is built here, and the same person operates it afterwards. The second is adopt and run: the system already exists and works well enough, and from a fixed date one person is answerable for it. Nothing gets built a second time. Most owners reading this have already paid for a system they intend to keep, and the second route is the one they need.

What I do not take on is salvage, meaning a system somebody else broke, handed over to be rescued. That is a different job with a different failure rate, and being plain about the line is what keeps the second route sane.

What the work actually is

A retainer month looks unglamorous from the outside, and that is rather the point. It typically covers:

• Monitoring and incident response, so you hear about a problem from me rather than from a customer
• Security updates and dependency maintenance across the site and the servers under it, with a check afterwards that the pages still render
• The improvements queue: performance work, new automations, small builds, content architecture
• A monthly note in plain language, so you always know what you have and what state it is in
• Being the person who answers when something breaks, including when it breaks at a bad hour

The difference from a support contract is ownership. A support desk resolves tickets against a system nobody there has met. A fractional engineer runs a system they built or audited themselves, which changes the speed and the quality of every decision made about it.

It is not a fractional CTO

The terms get blurred, so they are worth separating. A fractional CTO is an advisory role: strategy, hiring plans, architecture reviews, board slides. Valuable work, and nobody in that role patches a server. Fractional engineering is the delivery layer: the systems themselves, built or adopted, then maintained and improved. For most established businesses under about fifty people the honest need is the second one. Strategy questions still come up and still get answered. What changes your week is that somebody competent is holding the systems. The longer version of that comparison is in the CTO piece.

What it costs

A developer on a €90,000 salary in Germany costs €110,000 to €115,000 fully loaded, which is roughly €9,200 to €9,600 a month once you count salary, employer taxes, tools and management. That buys one person in one discipline.

Ongoing care here runs at four levels. Upkeep is €95 a month for the routine on a system built or rebuilt here. Above it, Maintain is €1,200, Partner is €2,500 and Embedded is €5,000, each covering infrastructure, web, data and automation together. Above Upkeep the fee is a cap on the monthly bill rather than a quantity of hours, so there is no allowance to run down and nothing to lose at the end of the month. The full breakdown sits on the pricing page, fixed and public, because a model that asks for trust should not hide its numbers.

The catch to screen for

Fractional has a failure mode and you should test for it: over-subscription. An engineer serving fifteen businesses is not fractional, they are thinly spread, and you will feel it the first time two of those businesses have a bad day at once. Ask any provider how many they carry at once. Three is my number, because three is where every system still fits in one head. Upkeep sits outside that count, since a system on the routine plan is built to need almost none of the attention the cap exists to protect. Whatever the number is, it should exist, it should be stated, and it should be small. How the cap works here is set out in the FAQ.

Whether it fits your business

The model fits if most of these are true. Your revenue depends on your site and systems working. Things have broken before and nobody could say whose job it was. You are past the cheapest-option stage and nowhere near justifying a €70,000 engineering salary. You want one accountable person rather than a rotation of strangers. It does not fit if you need a product team shipping daily, or if your systems genuinely do not matter to revenue yet.

If that reads like your business, what a retainer covers month to month is set out on the Operate page. The way to test the fit is the audit. It opens with a free conversation of about twenty-five minutes, which establishes whether this is a problem I can solve and which of the two routes applies. That conversation is shallow on purpose: it decides whether to look, and it is not the looking. The looking is the audit itself, €450, fixed before it starts and credited in full against a build or a retainer if one follows. The document it produces is yours whether anything follows or not, and the contact page sets out what it covers.