My wife thinks I'm wasting my time building a SaaS. She might be right.

The performance-based pricing model you're describing is the hardest type of SaaS to execute, but also the most defensible if you can make it work.

Here's why it's hard: you're not just building a tool, you're building attribution infrastructure. To charge only when it works, you need to definitively prove causation — that your intervention is what saved the customer. Churn is messy. Was it your email sequence that stopped them from canceling, or did they just change their mind? Did your feature prompt work, or were they already going to upgrade?

The SaaS companies that charge £300-500/month regardless of results aren't doing it because they're greedy. They're doing it because proving ROI at the individual customer level is genuinely difficult. They shift that measurement burden to you.

But if you can crack the attribution problem, you've built something remarkable. Because the moment you can say "we saved you Customer X, here's the receipt," you're no longer selling software — you're selling saved revenue. And saved revenue is infinitely easier to justify than "access to a dashboard."

The question that will determine whether this works: can you define "it works" precisely enough that both you and your customer agree on what counts as a save? If you can nail that definition early, everything else gets easier.

The fact that you're questioning it means you're being honest with yourself, which is more than most founders do.

One thing that helped me reframe this: stop measuring progress by revenue alone in the early days. Measure by learning velocity — are you understanding your users better each week? Are you getting closer to the problem?

The founders who waste time are the ones who build in isolation for months without talking to users. If you're iterating based on real feedback, you're not wasting time — you're investing it.

Also, having a skeptical partner is actually a superpower. They force you to justify every decision, which makes you a sharper thinker. Use that friction productively.

The "pay only when it works" model is brilliant. Most SaaS founders get this backwards — they charge for access to the tool, not for the outcome.

Your wife will come around. Mine thought I was crazy too, building an AI secretary after forgetting her mom's birthday. Then she saw the first paying customer notification at 11pm on a Tuesday.

The look changes from "you're wasting time" to "okay, maybe you know what you're doing."

The dinner-to-laptop grind is real. But there's something about building your own thing that a 9-5 can never replace. Keep going.

yeah been there. my girlfriend gave me that same look for a solid six months while i was building stuff after work every night. the thing that helped was when i stopped talking about the product and started showing her the actual numbers, even when they were tiny. like "hey, someone paid me 9 quid for this thing i built" hits different than "i'm working on my startup."

the pay-only-when-it-works model is a genuinely smart angle btw. churn tools that charge regardless of results always felt backwards to me. if you can nail that, it's a real differentiator.

keep going. the people who think you've lost the plot usually come around once something clicks.