Kamran Ul Haq
Fractional CTO for founder-led SaaS

A new build,
or an old one.
Both need an owner.

I build products from scratch, and I take technical ownership of the ones already built: AI-built, inherited, or abandoned by the team that made them.

28 years in production systemsFixed scope, fixed priceWritten decisions weekly

Consulting

Four engagements, three of them about a product that already exists. If something already exists, the question is what is actually wrong and what is the smallest change that fixes it. If a rewrite is the honest answer, I will say so, and a new build is planned only after that. Either way you get it in writing before any code is committed.

You cannot read your own product.
It was built with AI tools, or by a contractor, or by you at two in the morning. It works. You are afraid to touch it.
Nobody has audited the money path.
Payments, refunds, webhooks, reconciliation. It processes. You do not know what happens when it fails twice in a row.
You inherited a system.
The person who built it has gone. Nobody can tell you what breaks next, or what it will cost when it does.
A decision is due.
Hire, rewrite, raise, or walk away. You need a technical read that is not from the person selling you the answer.
You have a budget and no product yet.
The money is there and the developer decision is not made. Without a written scope, the scope becomes whatever the first developer felt like building.
Your first build went wrong.
You have paid once, you know what it cost, and you want the second attempt to be structured before anyone writes code.
01

Technical Diagnosis

For a product you cannot evaluate, from someone you have no reason to trust yet.

From $3,200or £2,600
Two weeks. Fixed price.
What you get
What is actually wrong, with evidence: traces, dumps, query plans, the failure replayed.
The three risks that matter, ranked by what they cost if they happen.
A plain answer on fix or rewrite, including when rewrite is the right call.
A costed sequence your team can execute with or without me.
02

Product takeover

For a product built by an agency, a contractor who left, or a team too busy to look. The dangerous parts made safe: payments, auth, integrations, the deploy nobody wants to run.

Quoted per piece
One to three weeks. Fixed scope per piece.
What you get
The failure path made boring, then proven boring under test.
Boundaries that stop the fix from spreading into everything else.
Legacy .NET, Web Forms, WCF and SQL Server work, when that is what is in the way.
03

Technical ownership (fractional CTO)

For a product that needs an owner, not another pair of hands.

From $6,000or £4,800
Monthly. One to two days a week, three-month minimum.
What you get
Technical direction, and the decisions behind it written down.
Hiring: what to look for, what to reject, how to test for it.
Vendor and agency oversight, so you are not paying for a status meeting.
Weekly written decisions, one scheduled review, a fixed monthly fee.
04

New build

For when the diagnosis concludes that the honest answer is a new product, not a repair.

Priced after the diagnosis
Offered after a paid diagnosis. Fixed-price plan first, then staged delivery.
What you get
A scoped, costed plan before any code: what ships first, what it costs to run.
The architecture decisions that are expensive later, made now, in writing.
Staged delivery, so you can stop after any stage and still own something that works.
The first developer hired against a written scope instead of a conversation.
Proof
Ubme — event marketplace
I wrote 100% of the backend: every API, every service, and the payment layer underneath them. Each organiser runs their own Stripe account, which means onboarding and KYC, split payouts, platform fees, refunds, chargebacks and reconciliation, all inside one system. That is the difference between having used a payment API and having operated one. It is also why the first question I ask about your product is usually about money.
Production rescue, with evidence
Low CPU and high latency is not a normal signal. Before changing a line of code, I read the wait stats, the thread pool, the plans, and the retry behaviour. The expensive fixes are the ones made before the cause is known.
How it works
01
Diagnostic call
Thirty minutes on the product, the symptom, and the constraint. No charge, no deck.
02
Written scope
Scope, outcome and price in writing before any work starts.
03
Delivery
I work inside your repository and your release process. You get a written decision every week.

Start with a technical diagnosis

Tell me what the product does, what it is doing wrong, and what you need to decide. I reply within one business day and tell you honestly whether I can help.

Products

Production-Grade Tools

I build and run my own products. Five of them are live and sold to real customers. It is why the advice survives contact with a release, and why I will tell you when a feature is not worth building.

LeadzTrak
LeadzTrak
Your lead pipeline, built into LinkedIn.Live · Shipping

A Chrome extension that adds a CRM panel directly onto LinkedIn. Save profiles, draft outreach messages, set follow-up dates, and track your pipeline — without ever leaving a profile page. Features AI enrichment, follow-up reminders, team workspaces, and analytics.

ThreadTrak
ThreadTrak
Find the 5% of replies that actually matter. Reply in 30 minutes.Live · Shipping

A Chrome extension for X/Twitter that maps reply threads, surfaces high-value conversations, and turns reply chaos into a clear follow-up queue. Filter noise, reply with context in view, and stop losing important conversations to the feed. One payment, lifetime access.

AlgoTrak
AlgoTrak
Professional crypto trading bot — ship in hours, not months.Live · Shipping

A production-grade algorithmic trading bot for Python developers and quantitative traders. 14 configurable strategies (SMA Crossover, RSI, MACD, Bollinger Bands, VWAP, and more), 5 exchange integrations (Binance, Bybit, Kraken, KuCoin, OKX), full risk management module with stop-loss and circuit breakers, 51-test pytest suite, Docker deployment, and a 200-page platform guide. Full source code under MIT license — one-time purchase, no subscription.

XConnect
XConnect
Your DMs are full of relationships you forgot to close.Live · Shipping

A Chrome extension that turns your X DMs into a real pipeline. Save prospects while you scroll, track where each conversation stands, send template-based messages, and never lose a warm contact to a missed follow-up. Local-first data storage, optional AI assistance with your own key. Free tier available.

Xcraper
Xcraper
Audience intelligence for X power users.Live · Shipping

A Chrome extension that captures X profile data as you browse and exports it clean — so you can filter, sort, and act on it instead of reconstructing it from memory. Capture profiles, followers, following lists, and post snapshots. Export to CSV or JSON. Local-first, runs entirely in your browser. Free forever with a generous quota.

What I Learned —

Articles

Technical Articles and Notes

Production rescue, lost causes, and what actually breaks.

What I Learned

An agent with access to every internal API is not an assistant. The production work is the tool boundary.

The most expensive decision is not the framework. It is the dependency nobody can remove.

What I Shipped

Thirty years, four panics, and the one kind of developer that actually gets replaced. The full essay is live.

What Broke

Low CPU with high latency is not a healthy signal. Start with SQL Server wait stats.

Providers retry. The bug is when a duplicate event changes business state twice.

Experiments

A slop filter for my own drafts.Oct 3, 2026

Every draft now runs through a small script that flags the telltale AI writing patterns before anything ships. It catches me more than I expected.

Product Decisions

The reasoning behind product choices — what we built and what we killed.

About

Fractional CTO for founder-led SaaS

I take technical responsibility for products, whether I am building them from scratch or taking over one that already exists: the AI-built prototype with paying users, the platform whose author has left, the integration everybody is slightly afraid of.

I have operated what I built. Ubme's backend is entirely mine, including the payment layer where every organiser runs their own Stripe account. Five of my own products are live. 28 years across product engineering, architecture, and delivery leadership.

1990
The Beginning

Started coding as a teenager. Fell in love with building things that worked. Shipped my first commercial software before the dot-com bubble burst. Learned early that shipping beats perfect — a lesson that still drives every product I build today.

2000
Enterprise Scale

Built enterprise systems serving thousands of users. Learned that software lives or dies by its users — not its architecture. Discovered the transformative power of automation and never looked back. This decade shaped my conviction: software should remove friction, not create it.

2010
Founder Era

Founded multiple companies. Launched products that succeeded and products that failed. Every failure taught something a success never could — about markets, about timing, about resilience. Built the muscles that matter: knowing what to build and what to kill.

2020
Building in Public

The workshop is always open. LeadzTrak, ThreadTrak, AlgoTrak, XConnect, Xcraper — each product solves a real problem I've lived. InboxForge and ForgeFlow are on the bench. Same hunger to create leverage through code. Now sharing the journey as it happens — the wins, the breaks, and everything between.

Many successes. Many failures. Still building.

Contact

Start With a Diagnostic

Send me the system, the symptom, and the outcome you need. I will tell you whether I can help and what a focused first engagement would look like. I reply within one business day.

Email
heloo@kamranulhaq.com — best for project inquiries.
Use the contact form →

Also on Social Networks

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Workshop

On The Workbench

Projects being shaped, tested, and hardened.

InboxForge
Enterprise email marketing, running on your own infrastructure.Building

A self-hosted email marketing platform that orchestrates the entire lifecycle of bulk email campaigns through deep AWS SES integration. Think Mailchimp, but running on your own hardware — with fully automated subdomain provisioning that creates DNS records, SES identities, and DKIM signing without ever touching a DNS control panel.

ForgeFlow
Your content pipeline, from blank page to published — without the busywork.Building

A local-first, AI-powered social media content planning operating system. Built for solo founders, indie hackers, and small teams who need to produce content consistently without starting from a blank page every time. Batch-generate posts from a topic and tone, organize in a full workspace, drag-and-drop schedule onto a calendar, and export in one click.

Newsletter

Dispatches From The Workshop

Production rescue, lost causes, and what actually breaks. One dispatch every other week.

Technical notes on legacy .NET, production failures, API integration, and AI. Delivered straight to your inbox.