Technical co-founder & CTO as a service
Human judgment, machine execution
01 / The problem
The problem this solves
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.
02 / What we do
What we do
Four things, and they all point the same way: nothing ships that we wouldn't sign.
We do the thinking
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.
We run the factory
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.
We own the gate
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.
We own the pipeline
Build, test, deploy, staging infrastructure. Set up at the start, maintained by us for as long as we work together.
03 / What you keep
What you keep
The 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.
04 / How it works
How it works
One loop, from ticket to shipped, the same way every time.
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You raise a ticket describing what you want.
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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.
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The factory builds it.
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Every pull request gets a live staging environment.
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We review staging within one business day and give you a verdict.
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Failures escalate to our team automatically.
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You ship.
05 / How we work together
How we work together
Everything is written down and nothing gets lost.
One call a week
That's the only scheduled meeting. The agenda comes from what's in the system.
Everything else in writing
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.
One business day
That's the longest a staging review ever waits.
06 / Two ways to start
Two ways to start
You already have a 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.
You're 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.
07 / Pricing
One number, monthly
- Architecture and technical direction
- Specification review, before code exists
- The factory, installed in your environment
- The review gate, with a verdict in one business day
- CI and pipeline ownership
- The weekly call
Token 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.
08 / Who we are
Who we are
Automaze is an engineering firm of around twenty people, with 92% client retention. We build and run yfinance, which sees more than 30 million downloads a month, and we've been building software for 35 years.
The pipeline your code moves through is the same one we use on our own products.
09 / FAQ
Frequently asked questions
The things founders ask before the first call.
Do we still need developers?
No. That's the point. If you have developers, they work alongside the factory and we review their work the same way.
Who owns the code?
You do, entirely. It's in your repositories, on your infrastructure, from the first commit.
What happens if we stop?
You keep the code, the pipeline, and the staging setup. The factory instance and the service stop. Nothing needs unpicking.
What if we disagree with a review?
Then we talk about it. The verdict is our professional opinion, recorded so you can see the reasoning. You decide what ships — it's your product.
How much of your time do we get?
One scheduled call a week, plus async work through the ticketing system with a one business day turnaround on staging reviews. Larger pieces of work outside that get quoted separately.
Can you work with our existing team?
Yes. The review gate and the specification process apply to whatever produces the code.
Is this an AI product?
No. It's an engineering service. The factory is how we deliver, not what you're buying. What you're paying for is judgment about what to build and whether it's safe to ship.