Get in touch
A Product Engineering Studio

Build your product with a senior tech team, hired by the hour.

9io is a small team of senior engineers, with a fractional CTO, a designer, a product manager and QA. We build your product, keep it running, and bill only for the hours we work. You get a whole tech team without having to hire one.

Tell us about your build See how it works
What we build

One team. Every layer.

Most builds are bought in pieces — design here, code there, hosting somewhere else. We take a product from the screen your users touch to the servers it runs on, and keep it running afterwards.

Interface

The part your users touch.

Web and mobile apps with a designed interface, not a default one — accessible from the first checkpoint.

Product engineering →
Services

The part that has to hold.

APIs, payments and the third-party systems nobody documented — with the architecture decided by someone accountable for it.

Fractional CTO →
Data & AI

The part that has to be right.

Pipelines you can trace, and AI features tested on every change — plus the honest answer when you don't need AI at all.

AI engineering →
Infrastructure

The part that keeps it running.

Infrastructure as code, continuous deploys and alerting from day one — live before the product is even finished.

How we work →

Most products don't stall on the idea. They stall between the demo and production. That's the part we're for.

What we do

Four ways to work with us.

Build your product

Web and mobile apps taken from a blank repository to real users — or a stuck one rescued and finished.

Product engineering →

Lead your tech

A fractional CTO who owns the technical decisions — architecture, security, what to build first. A day a week, or more.

Fractional CTO →

Be your whole team

Engineers, design, product and QA working as one team on your product, sized up or down as the work changes.

Dedicated team →

Add AI that holds up

AI features that work in production, not just in the demo — and honest advice when you don't need AI at all.

AI engineering →
What we build with
TypeScriptReactNext.jsReact NativePythonFastAPINodePostgresRedisKafkaPyTorchLLM APIsVector searchAWSGCPDockerKubernetesTerraformGitHub ActionsPlaywright
How it works

Three steps, no surprises.

Tell us what you're building

One email is enough. No forms, and no sales call you have to sit through.

Get a proposal with names on it

Who'd do the work, how many hours, and the rate for each person. No management fee, no hidden extras.

Watch it get built

A staging link early on and a short update every Friday. You're invoiced only for work that's landed, and 10% waits until you've accepted it.

Scale up, scale down, or stop Your code, in your repository, from day one 90-day warranty on delivered work All the terms →
The math

You don't need a $300k hire to get senior people.

Hiring a CTO
$300k–$400k a year

Roughly what a full-time CTO in the US costs, all in. That's one person — the team still has to be hired around them, and the salary runs whether or not there's product to build that month.

Working with 9io
The CTO and the team, by the hour

The same seniority, for the hours the work actually needs — a day a week or a full push. It comes down between pushes and stops when there's nothing to build.

$300k–$400k is a commonly quoted range for a fully loaded US CTO, not a researched statistic. We don't publish rates, because they depend on which roles you need and for how long — the proposal sets them out before you sign anything.

Our own product

We build and run 9io Alpha, a market research platform.

It scans two stock markets every day, runs AI research on what it finds, and connects to two brokers. We designed it, built it and keep it running — the same way we'd build yours.

Take a look →

An engineering showcase, not investment advice.

  • ScanningEvery stock on India's NSE and the S&P Composite 1500, on every cycle.
  • ResearchSeparate AI passes argue the case for and against, then one verdict with its reasoning kept.
  • TestingEvery rule is tested on data it has never seen, so nothing gets tuned to look good.
  • RunningLive on our own infrastructure, with continuous deploys and alerting from day one.
In production today
Before you get in touch

Questions we get a lot.

What does it cost?

You pay by the hour for the people doing the work, invoiced twice a month for work that is already done. Rates depend on which roles you need and for how long, so they are written into the proposal before you commit to anything.

How soon can you start?

Usually within a couple of days of agreeing a proposal. If we cannot start that quickly, we will say so rather than take the work and sit on it.

How long does a build take?

A first version that does one thing properly usually takes weeks. Live data, a pile of integrations or rules you have to comply with will push that out, and we will tell you before you start rather than halfway through.

Do I own the code?

Yes. It sits in your repository from the first commit and becomes yours as you pay for it. There is no handover at the end, because nothing was ever kept on our side.

What if it isn't working out?

The first stretch of work is meant to leave you with something whole: a running foundation, the architecture written down, and a fixed price for the rest. After that you can carry on with us, take it to another team, or stop. There's no retainer to unwind.

When shouldn't we hire you?

If you will need twenty engineers on staff this year, that team belongs in-house. If a form or a database query solves your problem, you do not need AI for it. We would rather tell you than sell you the bigger version.

Get in touch

Tell us what you're building.

A few lines is enough: what it is, where it's at, and what's missing. You'll get a straight answer about what it would take — and if we're not the right fit, we'll say so.

admin@9io.ai Send an email

Replies come from the person who'd do the work.