Senior technical leadership, embedded.
The person who decides what gets built and why, plus the team that ships it. Most months that is a department's output from a handful of people.
$5,000 to $15,000 a month, scoped by the hours you need. Month to month.
Deciding what gets built is everyone's side job.
The founder makes architecture calls between sales calls.
A capable developer picks the stack they used last time.
An agency quotes whatever you described, which may not be what you needed.
Each choice is defensible on its own. Together they add up to a system nobody would design on purpose, and the one person who knows how the pieces connect becomes the bottleneck for every technical decision.
Hiring a full time CTO fixes it in about six months, for north of $250,000 a year plus equity, if you can attract one. Most companies at this stage keep improvising, and the improvisation compounds.
Direction and execution, in the same engagement.
The person who makes the call answers for it, and the engineers start building it that same week. An advisor would leave you to find them. Your team takes its technical questions here instead of to your phone.
Numbers from shipped work.
701 commits shipped to main on one engagement, across 70 active working days
3 apps shipped in about 45 days
89 backend service modules, plus two proprietary tools no CRM sells
The commit and module counts come from git history on the shipped branch, the same source our client reports read from.
We count commits, active days and named features. Line counts stay out, because they flatter whoever generated the most boilerplate.
Twenty years of delivery dates that did not move.
Zack spent twenty years in Hollywood visual effects. Senior Technical Director on more than fifty features, including The Day After Tomorrow, 300, The Avengers and Alita: Battle Angel. A feature film is a hard deadline run by hundreds of people, on pipelines stitched together from software never designed to talk to itself. Then Zack became Director of AI at a $150 million company and learned where AI delivers and where it falls apart.
That is the judgment this retainer buys.
"Rapid Impact built an automation for my business that saved us 140 hours in the first three weeks. Their service paid for itself in just one month."Elsa Martinez · Elsa Martinez Law
How a month runs.
Audit and direction
We map what you run today, where the work leaks, and what to build first. You get the reasoning behind every call.
Ship weekly
Work lands in your repositories as it is built. The commit log is your status update.
Report and re-aim
What shipped, what it cost, what it changed, what is next. When priorities move, the roadmap moves with them.
$5,000 to $15,000 a month.
Scoped by hours · quoted after the audit · no tiers
The leadership
Architecture, build versus buy, and the roadmap. The calls that are expensive to get wrong and cheap to get right early.
The build team
Engineers shipping against that direction every week.
The Toolbox
The six Toolbox tools, at no extra cost while you are on retainer.
If it stops earning its place, say so and we stop, with no exit fee.
Worth being honest about, both ways.
This fits if
- You are roughly $500K to $10M+ and scaling past what manual process can carry.
- You have real moving parts: several tools, a team, live workflows, customers depending on them.
- You need systems rather than more complexity, and you can tell the difference.
- You want a partner, and you are done with vendors you brief and chase.
Look elsewhere if
- You are still finding what works. Spend the money on finding it.
- You want set it and forget it. Systems that touch a live business need an owner.
- The work is something we would not put our name on.
Before you book.
Is the monthly number really the whole price?
Yes, for the retainer: the leadership, the build team and the Toolbox. Your hours decide where you land between $5,000 and $15,000, quoted after the audit. A large one off platform is quoted separately as a Custom Build, before any work starts.
How is this different from hiring an agency?
An agency executes the brief you wrote, and the hard part is usually writing the right brief. We write that brief with you, build what it calls for, and report every month on whether it worked.
Who actually does the work?
One to three people working with AI coding agents. That is how the output stays high on a small headcount.
Do we own what you build?
You do: your code, your repositories, your infrastructure. Access to your own systems never depends on staying a client.
Start with the audit.
Twenty minutes with Zack, or nine with Acro, on how your operation actually runs. Either way you leave with your Automation Intelligence Brief, free and yours to keep.
If you are making architecture calls between sales calls, booking the audit is the right decision.
We work with founders building something that deserves to last, and we cap at 20 clients so the work stays senior.