A full-time technical leader costs a Shopify brand roughly $255,000 a year at the national median once benefits are included, plus a search fee of 25% to about a third of first-year pay, so close to $300,000 in year one before they ship anything. A fractional CTO costs less in total, from $96,000 a year for about one day a week on Broke Hold’s CTO Core plan, but more per day of work. Fractional is the better deal when you need senior judgment one or two days a week; full-time wins once you need four or five days a week, are building a software product, or have a development team that needs daily management.
Most Shopify brands in the $3M to $20M range reach a point where technology decisions start costing real money: which apps to keep, whether to move to Plus, how to fix tracking, what to build and who should build it. Someone has to own those decisions. The question is whether that person should be on payroll.
What a full-time hire really costs
The closest public benchmark is the Bureau of Labor Statistics category for computer and information systems managers. In May 2025 the median annual wage was $175,140, and the 90th percentile was $297,510. That category includes IT directors and technology managers as well as CTOs, so treat the median as a floor for a strong commerce technology leader, not a ceiling.
Salary is not the full cost. In the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026, benefits made up 31.5% of total compensation for management, professional and related roles. If benefits are 31.5% of the total, wages are 68.5%, and benefits equal 31.5 ÷ 68.5 ≈ 46% on top of salary.
Then there is the search. Retained executive search firms typically charge 25% to about a third of the hire’s first-year pay.
Worked example: year-one cost of a full-time hire
| Cost line | At the median | At the 90th percentile |
|---|---|---|
| Salary | $175,140 | $297,510 |
| Benefits (46% of salary) | $80,564 | $136,855 |
| Loaded annual cost | $255,704 | $434,365 |
| Search fee (25% to one-third of salary) | $43,785 to $58,380 | $74,378 to $99,170 |
| Year-one total | $299,489 to $314,084 | $508,743 to $533,535 |
The arithmetic for the median column: $175,140 × 0.46 = $80,564 in benefits, for a loaded cost of $255,704. The search fee is $175,140 × 0.25 = $43,785 at the low end and $175,140 ÷ 3 = $58,380 at the high end. Add either to the loaded cost and year one lands between about $299,000 and $314,000.
Those numbers leave out things that are real but hard to price: equity, recruiting time from the founders, the months it takes a new hire to learn the business, and the cost of a hire that does not work out.
What a fractional CTO costs
Broke Hold offers two fractional plans for Shopify brands and commerce SaaS teams:
- CTO Core, from $8,000 a month, for about a day a week of senior technical leadership.
- CTO Growth, from $14,000 a month, for about two days a week.
Both have a 90-day minimum, then run month to month. Both start with the $5,000 Commerce Tech Audit, which is credited in full toward the engagement, so it does not add to the cost if you continue.
| Option | Time | Year-one cost | Minimum commitment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-time hire, median | Full time | $299,489 to $314,084 | Salary, benefits and severance risk |
| CTO Growth | About 2 days a week | $14,000 × 12 = $168,000 | 90 days ($42,000) |
| CTO Core | About 1 day a week | $8,000 × 12 = $96,000 | 90 days ($24,000) |
CTO Core costs about 37.5% of a median full-time hire’s loaded annual cost ($96,000 ÷ $255,704), before counting the search fee. CTO Growth is about 66% ($168,000 ÷ $255,704).
The honest part: fractional costs more per day
Per day of work, fractional is more expensive. A median full-time hire at $255,704 loaded works out to about $51,141 a year for each day of the week they work ($255,704 ÷ 5). CTO Core is $96,000 for about one day a week. Even against the 90th percentile, $434,365 ÷ 5 ≈ $86,873 per weekday per year, fractional costs a bit more per day.
What you are paying for is not a discount on days. You are paying to buy only the days you need, to get someone who has already solved your kind of problem on other stores, and to skip the search fee, the ramp-up and the risk of a long commitment. If you genuinely need five days a week of technical leadership, buying them one at a time is the wrong deal.
When a full-time hire is the better choice
- You need four to five days a week. If the work keeps one person busy most of the week, every week, a full-time leader is cheaper and more present. At that point even CTO Growth leaves gaps.
- Technology is the product. A commerce SaaS company whose software is what customers pay for needs a technical leader who lives inside the product every day, shapes the architecture and owns the roadmap long term. Fractional can bridge to that hire, or help run the search, but should not replace it.
- You manage a development team daily. Once you have several in-house engineers who need daily standups, code review, hiring and career management, that is a full-time job.
- Culture and continuity matter more than cost. A full-time leader is part of the leadership team in a way a part-time advisor is not.
When fractional fits
Fractional tends to fit a Shopify brand when most of the build work is done by agencies, freelancers and app vendors, when decisions are frequent but not daily, and when no one inside the company can judge whether a technical recommendation is sound. That describes most brands in the $3M to $20M range. The job is less about writing code and more about deciding what gets built, holding vendors to a standard and making sure the numbers the business runs on are correct.
What a fractional CTO actually owns in month one
The first month should produce a clear picture of the stack and a short, ranked list of what to fix. Here is what that looks like in practice.
- Access and ownership. An inventory of every system: Shopify staff accounts and permissions, domains and DNS, apps and their billing, theme code and who can deploy it, ad accounts, email and SMS platforms, and any custom code. Confirming the business, not a former contractor, owns all of it.
- The audit. The Commerce Tech Audit covers the app stack and its cost, storefront speed on real mobile visitors, tracking accuracy between Shopify, GA4 and ad platforms, integrations and data flow, and security basics.
- A ranked fix list. Each issue sized by what it is likely costing and how hard it is to fix, so the first projects are the ones with the clearest return.
- Vendor oversight. Taking over the technical relationship with agencies and developers: reviewing estimates, setting acceptance criteria and checking work before it ships.
- A 90-day plan. What gets done, by whom, in what order, and how you will know it worked.
The fix list is often not what the team expected. At a Shopify golf brand where Broke Hold is the fractional CTO, our first diagnostic found a weak add-to-cart rate and an email platform that was connected but driving almost no sessions, which made email flows the highest-value fix. That kind of finding is the point of month one: putting effort where the evidence says the money is.
If you want to see what the numbers look like for your situation, the fractional CTO calculator compares a full-time hire against both plans. Details on the engagement are on the fractional CTO page, and you can send a short note to get a written answer within one business day.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a fractional CTO cost?
Broke Hold’s CTO Core plan starts at $8,000 a month for about a day a week, and CTO Growth starts at $14,000 a month for about two days a week. Both have a 90-day minimum, then run month to month, and start with the $5,000 Commerce Tech Audit credited in full.
How much does a full-time CTO cost a Shopify brand?
Using the BLS median for computer and information systems managers ($175,140 in May 2025) and benefits at about 46% on top of salary, the loaded cost is about $255,704 a year. Add a search fee of 25% to about a third of first-year pay and year one comes to roughly $299,000 to $314,000. Senior commerce leaders are often paid above the median.
Is a fractional CTO cheaper than a full-time hire?
In total cost, yes, as long as you need one or two days a week. Per day of work, no. Fractional costs more per day than a full-time hire, so if you need four or five days a week, hiring full time is the better deal.
What does a fractional CTO do for a Shopify store?
They own technical decisions and vendors: which apps to keep, what to build, how tracking and integrations work, whether a platform change makes sense, and whether agency work meets the standard. Month one usually means a full inventory of access, an audit and a ranked list of fixes.
Can a fractional CTO help hire a full-time one later?
Yes. A common path is to use fractional leadership until the need grows to most of the week, then use that person to define the role, interview candidates and hand over.
Scott founded Broke Hold. He works hands-on across ecommerce operations, automation, cloud infrastructure, and integrations, works as the fractional CTO for Shopify brands, and builds and runs Broke Hold's own software, including VPS Snaps and DingPack. He served in the U.S. Navy Reserve.