Everything people ask before connecting their first repo — including the uncomfortable questions.
NovaCTO is an autonomous technical oversight platform — an AI CTO for non-technical founders and investors. It connects to your GitHub/GitLab and cloud accounts with read-only access, continuously analyzes code quality, delivery speed, security risk, and cloud spend, and reports what matters in plain English: a five-minute Monday Brief each week, plus real-time alerts for anything that can't wait.
No — it replaces technical blindness, not technical leadership. A great CTO sets strategy, hires, and makes judgment calls no software should make. What NovaCTO takes over is the continuous watching: the part of the job that is monitoring, pattern-spotting, and translation. For companies too early for a $250k hire, it's the oversight layer they otherwise wouldn't have. For companies with a fractional or full-time CTO, it's the always-on signal that makes that human dramatically more effective.
Those are excellent tools built for engineers — their dashboards, metrics, and alerts assume a technical reader and require one to act on them. NovaCTO reads similar underlying signals but is built for the opposite audience: the owner, CEO, or investor who cannot read those dashboards and shouldn't have to. The output isn't a chart; it's a conclusion — "here's what happened, here's why it matters, here's what to ask" — in language a non-engineer acts on immediately.
Read-only OAuth access to your repositories, and optionally read-only billing/usage access to your AWS or Google Cloud account. It cannot write code, merge, deploy, change infrastructure, or spend money — and you can verify the granted scopes yourself in your own GitHub or cloud console. Revocation is one click and takes effect immediately. Full details on the security page.
No. Code is analyzed in ephemeral, isolated environments and discarded when analysis completes. What we keep is derived metadata — metrics, trends, findings, and your health score history. Your source never sits in our database, which means it can never leak from our database.
Yes. This is the product's entire reason for existing — the bar for every sentence in a brief is "would a smart, busy, non-technical founder act on this without googling anything?" Every finding comes paired with the exact question to raise with your team. If a brief ever confuses you, we treat that the way engineers treat a crashed server.
Nothing in their workflow changes: no agents, no SDK, no bots on pull requests, no new process, no CI changes. Whether you tell them you've added oversight is your call — many founders do, and confident teams generally welcome it, since objective reporting also makes good work visible.
No, and we've designed it not to become one. NovaCTO reports on the health of the work — coverage, review discipline, delivery flow, spend, risk — not stack-ranked individual productivity. Tools that score engineers by commit count make engineering cultures worse, and we won't build them. The one person-adjacent signal we do raise is bus-factor risk (too much critical knowledge held by one individual), because that's a danger to the company and an unfair burden on that person.
Early-access pricing: Founder at $149/month (up to 3 repos), Scale at $449/month (up to 15 repos, agency oversight, benchmarking), and custom Portfolio plans for funds. Founding-customer pricing is locked for life, and your first two Monday Briefs are free — no card required. Details on the pricing page.
Connecting takes about 4 minutes. Your first brief arrives the following Monday and includes a historical baseline — so brief number one already covers months of your repository's story, not just one week. The most common first-brief findings are cloud waste and untested changes to revenue-critical code.
It's one of the most common reasons people sign up. NovaCTO baselines your agency's output, quality, and staffing patterns and reports drift over time — with the evidence to keep every conversation factual. There's a full page on agency oversight, and a guide on the nine agency red flags worth knowing even if you never use us.
Tokens are revoked immediately; derived analytics are deleted within 30 days. Since we never stored your source code, there's no code to delete. No retention tricks, no phone call required.
Free, no card, one click to revoke. Judge us by what your own Monday Brief finds.