Know what your dev team actually shipped - before you approve every invoice.
Ghost CTO Oversight is continuous, independent monitoring of your dev spend. Every week, we translate your GitHub activity, tickets, and sprint evidence into plain English. Every billing cycle, you get an evidence-backed payment recommendation before the money leaves your account.
$2,500/month flat · month to month · no code knowledge required
- Checkout retry flow merged and live
- 9 tickets matched to repo activity
- 18h billed to “backend optimization”, limited output
- Commit spike two days before invoice
- 01Which feature does the optimization support?
- 02Map billed hours to tickets or PRs?
Your invoice says 140 hours. GitHub shows plenty of activity. But what actually got done?
When you’re not technical, outsourced development is a black box you pay to keep closed. You see commits, pull requests, and tickets moving across a board. You get confident-sounding updates from the agency. Then the invoice hits. And you’re still stuck wondering:
- Q1Did this sprint actually move the product forward?
- Q2Are we paying for real progress or just activity?
- Q3Why did simple features take so long?
- Q4How much of this is new work versus quietly re-fixing last month's work?
- Q5What should I ask without sounding like I have no idea what I'm talking about?
Every report you receive is written by the people who bill you. It’s a self-graded exam. No other five-figure monthly expense runs on vendor-graded verification.
This isn't a code review. It's a new layer in how you run the company: dev spend oversight.
Ghost CTO Oversight is an independent translation layer. We read commits, pull requests, review depth, ticket-to-work alignment, and rework patterns. Then we tell you in founder language: what shipped, what’s unclear, whether evidence supports the invoice, and precisely what to ask.
You’re not buying reports. You’re buying the ability to say “yes, pay it” - and mean it.
Ghost CTO Oversight, everything included.
One flat monthly fee. A one-time baseline in the first month, then continuous oversight every cycle after.
- 01Baseline Dev Spend Audit (repo, PRs, tickets, latest invoice)
- 0260-minute walkthrough call
- Weekly founder-readable reports (Red / Yellow / Green)
- Pre-payment invoice review & Confidence Score
- Risk signal monitoring (vague commits, pre-invoice spikes)
- Agency meeting prep (evidence-backed questions)
- Investor-ready progress summary
- Direct founder Q&A
Set up once. Covered every cycle after.
- 01
Connect the evidence
Read-only access to GitHub, Jira, or Linear. Ninety seconds, no engineer required, nothing your agency can quietly hide.
- 02
Baseline audit
We review your last billing cycle end to end and walk you through what we found on a 60-minute call.
- 03
Continuous oversight
Weekly founder-readable reports and a pre-invoice Confidence Score, every cycle, before the money goes out.
Founder-readable, evidence-backed, decision-oriented.
- 14 pull requests reviewed
- 9 tickets matched to repo activity
- Checkout bug fix appears legitimate
- Admin dashboard shows real implementation
- 18 hours billed to “backend optimization” with limited visible output
- Several commits were formatting-only or dependency cleanup
- Activity spike two days before invoice submission
- QA / rework not separated from net-new work
- 01Which shipped feature does the backend optimization support?
- 02Can you map these billed hours to specific tickets or PRs?
- 03How much of this invoice was rework versus new development?
- 04What is actually live in production from this period?
Built for founders technical enough to know something feels off, but not technical enough to prove it.
- Non-technical founders without a technical cofounder
- Raised a seed round or shipped an MVP
- Spending $10K+/month on development
- Working with agencies or offshore teams
- You have a trusted internal engineering lead reviewing the work
- You do not have access to your repo or tickets
- You are spending under $10K/month on development
$2,500/month. Flat. Month to month.
No tiers, no per-seat math. Frame it against spend: at $15k/month, it’s one-sixth of a single month’s spend to verify everything.
If the baseline audit and first report don’t tell you at least one thing you didn’t know, we refund the month.
Straight answers.
No. Oversight does not start from accusations. We review delivery evidence, invoice alignment, and risk signals so you can have a more informed conversation. Most cycles come back mostly green.
It usually improves it. Good agencies welcome a founder who asks precise, evidence-based questions. Oversight gives you better questions, not drama, and keeps the conversation factual.
No. That is the entire point. We translate the technical work into plain English so you can make a clear business decision about whether to approve payment.
No. Read-only access to GitHub, Jira, or Linear is enough. If that is not available, we can work from exports, invoices, ticket history, and sprint notes.
No, and we do not try to. Oversight makes no legal or fraud claims. It shows what is verified, what is unclear, and what needs explanation before you approve payment.
Probably not. If you have a trusted engineering lead reviewing the work, you already have this layer. Oversight is built for founders who do not.
That is a good outcome. You get to approve invoices with evidence behind the decision instead of a guess, and an investor-ready summary of real progress.
Dev spend is recurring, so verification has to be too. A one-time audit ages out the moment the next sprint starts. Oversight covers every billing cycle.
Twenty minutes. We look at your setup, confirm you have the access we need, and tell you honestly whether Oversight is a fit. No pressure, no obligation.
Stop approving dev invoices based on vibes.
Ghost CTO Oversight · $2,500/month flat · month to month
Ghost CTO is not a code review. It’s invoice confidence for non-technical founders.