The costliest decision is the one nobody makes.

The signal is always the same: a process that matters is held together by a spreadsheet only one person knows how to update, and when that person is on holiday the company slows down. Or you asked for a quote and what came back is a standard package that covers almost all of your case, where the missing piece is exactly why you were looking.

I build web apps, mobile applications and internal tools that talk to the systems you already run rather than sitting beside them. The first thing I assess, though, is whether building is needed at all: quite often part of the problem goes away by configuring what you have properly, and I tell you that part before the quote rather than after.

GDPR-compliant software is built out of four decisions taken before the first line of code: which data not to collect at all, how long to keep what you genuinely need, where it is stored and who may see it. Those are design choices, not documents to file away. The field nobody ever fills in, the tax code asked for out of habit, the log kept forever because nobody decided when to throw it away: those are the points where an internal tool turns into a problem months after release. So deletion carries a deadline written into the code rather than into a procedure, permissions are designed by role before any users exist, and every field collecting something about a person has to have someone who can say what it is for. The processing register and the privacy notices stay your lawyer's or your DPO's work: I do not write them, and anyone selling them to you alongside the software is selling you two different trades.

What I build is yours: code, access, documentation. You are not tied to me in order to change it, and if you hand it to another supplier one day they find things where they expect them. It is the opposite of the vendor lock-in you are probably trying to get out of.

You have to pick a platform and the three offers on the table say incomparable things. You sign contracts with technical vendors without knowing whether the price is fair. Whoever writes code in the company is good but has nobody more experienced to think things through with, so architecture decisions get made alone, in a hurry, while chasing a delivery date.

That is the work of a Fractional CTO (or CDO, or CIO, depending on where the problem sits): I step in where a wrong call is paid for years, and stay out when I am not needed. Platform choice, architecture review, assessing contracts and suppliers, and the technical counterpart the company currently does not have.

Three things I do not do. I am not here to replace your IT provider, and if they are doing well I will be the first to say so. I am not a full-time employee dressed as a consultant: renting a person by the day is the opposite model to this one. And I do not make the decision for you: I bring it to the point where it is yours and informed.

Anyone publishing a monthly subscription with a number of calls included is selling you a capacity decided before knowing how many decisions you have. A company choosing an ERP while reorganizing its team needs a day a week; a company with two choices ahead of it this year needs half a day a month, and paying for the first when you need the second is money thrown away.

So we agree the cadence, put it in writing, and I change it when the need changes. What stays fixed is the way of working: I am inside the company while things get done, with the people who work there and on your systems, which is the Forward Deployed Engineer approach applied to decisions instead of to code.

A minimum duration does make sense and I will name it: under three months a governance role produces nothing verifiable, because time is what shows whether the decisions taken hold. Past twelve, if I am still useful, you probably need to hire someone and my job becomes helping you choose who.

The first call is free. If the starting point is a review (architecture, contracts, the state of the technical team), the assessment starts at €750 and ends with a document listing the open decisions, what each one implies and the order worth taking them in.

If you are starting from a tool to be built, that work starts at around €5,000 and rises with how many systems it has to touch.

The ongoing role is agreed monthly, on the cadence that is actually needed, and you will not find a tier with calls included here because that would be a number decided before knowing the problem. If you prefer a supplier who publishes one, they exist and that is fine: just know that the number is not your cost, it is their average.