A founder came to Paisley with a sweepstakes-based debt reduction platform. He had a slide deck, a name, and a vision for helping people pay off their credit card debt. No technical background. They spent months turning that into a full software blueprint: six user personas with a scoring model, a finalized onboarding questionnaire, Plaid integration for real-time credit card tracking, gamification, admin flows, everything.

The publicly available pricing for the API showed $0.10 to $0.25 per call. That’s what they modeled. That’s what the developer quoted. The founder had envisioned charging $4.99 a month. The math worked.

Then they dug deeper. The specific endpoint required wasn’t per-call pricing. It was $3 per institution per month. A user with three banks is $9 a month before paying for anything else. That broke the entire model. The vendor couldn’t give a straight answer on what happens at scale. The pricing wasn’t published. The sales team was slow. The numbers kept changing depending on who they talked to.

The developer wanted to keep going. Build around it. Cap the data refreshes. Have users manually upload their credit card statements once a month. Paisley stopped the build. Because a working prototype that loses money on every user isn’t an MVP. It’s an expensive mistake.

The moment the build stopped is the moment the value showed up. The blueprint was finished. The developer was ready. The technical workaround existed. Paisley said no. That call saved the founder from spending $10K on something that was no longer his product.