Custom Software & AI Development.
Your Dedicated Tech Team in Hong Kong.

Public HK salary benchmarks (JobsDB, Talent.com, Michael Page, Robert Half) put a full-time CTO at HK$600,000–HK$1,200,000 per year in base salary alone. Add equity, MPF, medical, recruiter fees (typically 20–25% of first-year salary), a 3-month notice period, and 6+ months to ramp — the real first-year cost is closer to HK$2M.

With Astera you get CTO-level strategy plus the full delivery team (engineers, designers, DevOps) for one predictable monthly fee, starting in days instead of months. If your needs change, you pause or cancel with 30 days' notice — no severance, no awkward exit, no single point of failure if your CTO gets poached.

Typical timelines for our most common engagements:

• Web MVP — 3 to 6 weeks (discovery week → design → build sprints → launch).
• Mobile app (iOS + Android) — 6 to 10 weeks, including App Store / Play Store submission.
• AI / LLM integration — 3 to 8 weeks depending on data readiness and guardrails required.
• ERP or internal system — 3 to 6 months, usually in 2–3 phased releases.
• Legacy system rescue — 2 weeks to stabilize, 1–3 months to complete.

We only commit to a firm timeline after the Discovery Week, when we've seen your codebase, data, and integrations. Anyone quoting a fixed number on a 30-minute call is guessing.

Yes — and more importantly, the ownership is operational, not just legal. Here's exactly what you get:

• The GitHub / GitLab repository sits under your organization from the first commit — not ours.
• Cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, Vercel) is provisioned in your accounts with your billing — we get least-privilege access, not ownership.
• Figma files, design systems, and brand assets are delivered in your Figma org.
• We avoid proprietary SDKs and closed-source lock-in — the stack is open-source and portable by default.
• At handover you get a README, an architecture diagram, a runbook, and a 30-minute walkthrough video for any future engineer.

If you decide to bring it in-house or switch agencies, you walk away with everything needed to continue without us.

On the surface, offshore shops in South Asia or Eastern Europe look 30–50% cheaper per hour. In practice, total cost of ownership often ends up higher. Here's what we've seen rescuing offshore-built projects:

• Timezone friction — an 8–12 hour gap turns every question into a 24-hour round trip. A 2-day task becomes a 2-week task.
• Rework from misunderstanding — subtle requirements get lost in translation, especially anything involving HK-specific business rules, PDPO, or Chinese UX.
• Local compliance gaps — most offshore teams have never touched Octopus, FPS, PayMe, or Stripe HK, and don't know what PDPO requires.
• Hidden senior swap-outs — the senior you interviewed often doesn't do the actual work; juniors pick up the tickets.

Astera is Hong Kong-based: same timezone, same business culture, native Cantonese / Mandarin / English. The senior who pitches is the senior who builds. We've inherited enough offshore projects to know the real TCO math.

Yes — most of our clients are non-technical founders, business owners, and operators. This is literally what CTO-as-a-Service is for.

• We translate your business goals into technical strategy — you don't need to know Kubernetes from Kafka.
• Weekly demos are in plain business language (English or Cantonese), not jargon. We show working features, not Jira boards.
• We represent your interests in vendor conversations — hosting, API contracts, compliance — so you're not being sold to alone.
• We prepare board-ready progress summaries if you need to report up to investors or partners.
• If you want to learn more about the tech, we'll teach you; if you want to stay high-level, we respect that too.

The short answer: you should never be suddenly unhappy, and if you are, you're not locked in.

• Weekly live demos — you see real, working software every single week. Any concern is raised immediately while it's still cheap to fix.
• Daily Slack updates — asynchronous written updates from the team, so you always know what's happening.
• Month-to-month billing — no long-term lock-in on retainers. Cancel with 30 days' notice at any point.
• You keep the code — even if we part ways, everything built up to that point is yours, documented, and runnable.
• No litigation traps — our contract is in plain English and Traditional Chinese, not full of gotchas. Happy to walk through it with your lawyer.

Yes — rescue engagements are one of our most common starting points. Several of our longest client relationships began as failed hand-offs from another agency. Our rescue playbook:

1. Read-only audit (3–5 days) — we inherit the repo, infra, and documentation, then produce an honest report: what works, what is broken, what is salvageable, what should be rewritten.
2. Stabilization (1–2 weeks) — fix the most dangerous bugs, lock down security holes, restore deploys, set up monitoring so nothing silently breaks overnight.
3. Forward plan — re-scope the remaining work with realistic timelines based on what we found, not what the previous agency promised.
4. Execution — finish the original scope, or pivot if the original plan no longer makes sense.

We don't trash-talk the previous team in the report. The goal is to get you working software, not to win an argument.