--- title: "I Built a SaaS, People Wanted to Pay Me, So I Took It Offline" description: "The story of Estimate Calculators - a tool I spent years thinking about, finally built, then pulled offline the moment it started working." canonical_url: "https://johnsimeone.com/blog/i-built-estimate-calculators-then-took-it-offline" last_updated: "2026-05-02T08:27:52.775Z" --- I spent years thinking about building [Estimate Calculators](https://estimatecalculators.com). Years. Not weeks, not months. Years of "I should really build that" while doing client work. Then I finally built it. People signed up. An affiliate program brought in more signups. People were heading towards becoming paying customers. So I took it offline before any of them did. That probably sounds insane. Let me explain. ## The idea I couldn't shake If you've ever run a service business - or built websites for people who do - you know the problem. A potential customer lands on a plumber's website, a landscaper's site, a web design agency's page. They want a rough idea of cost before they pick up the phone. But there's no way to get one without filling out a contact form and waiting for someone to get back to them. I'd been building these estimate calculators for clients for years. First as WordPress plugins. Then as Vue.js components inside WordPress plugins. Each time, custom-built for that specific client. Each time, thinking "this should be a product." The concept is straightforward. A business sets up a calculator with their services, questions and pricing. A customer steps through it, picks their options, and gets an instant estimate. The business gets a lead with all the details already filled in. Everyone saves time. ## How the builder works When I finally built [Estimate Calculators](https://estimatecalculators.com) as a proper product, I went all in. Laravel 11 backend, Vue 3 frontend with Inertia.js, the full stack. The builder lets you create a calculator with a hierarchy: **Calculator > Services > Questions > Answers**. Each service has a base price. Each answer modifies that price. The final estimate is the base amount plus whatever the customer selected. ```text Service: Kitchen Renovation Base price: £5,000 Question: What size is your kitchen? Small (+£0) Medium (+£2,000) Large (+£5,000) Question: Do you need new appliances? No (+£0) Basic range (+£1,500) Premium range (+£4,000) ``` Simple maths, but the builder makes it drag-and-drop. Reorder services, reorder questions, reorder answers. Everything is customisable - colours, fonts, contact form fields, email templates. When a customer submits, they get an email with their estimate reference, and the business gets a notification with all the details. I built colour presets, font presets, a template system where you could clone other calculators as a starting point. The whole thing. ## The subdomain era The first proper version hosted calculators on subdomains. You'd sign up, build your calculator, and it would live at something like `estimate.yourbusiness.com`. Cloudflare handled the DNS and SSL. This actually worked well for the businesses that used it. But from my side, managing custom hostnames at scale was a maintenance headache I didn't want. Every DNS misconfiguration, every SSL renewal issue, every "my subdomain isn't working" support ticket - that was on me. I also built an embed system using iframes with CSP headers for domain restriction. You'd get a script tag, drop it on your site, and the calculator would load in an iframe with dynamic height resizing via postMessage. This was the better approach, but at the time I was still pushing the subdomain model as the primary option. ## The part where I took it offline Here's where it gets stupid. The tool was working. I had an affiliate program running. People were signing up. I'd built Stripe integration with four subscription tiers - Free, Starter, Pro, Premium. Nobody had actually paid yet, but people were moving in that direction. And then I had a moment of clarity that felt more like a moment of panic. I realised I didn't actually want paying customers. Not because the product was bad - I genuinely think it's good. But because paying customers need support. They need bug fixes. They need new features. They need the thing to not go down on a Tuesday afternoon while I'm deep in a client project. I didn't have time to maintain and improve it properly. And the thought of someone handing me money for something I couldn't commit to felt worse than just pulling the plug before it got to that point. So I ripped out the Stripe integration entirely. Dropped the subscription tables. Took the Laravel tool offline. Left the marketing site up because... honestly, I don't know. Optimism, maybe. The idea that I'd come back to it. ## What I should have done Looking back, the mistake wasn't building the tool. The tool is solid. The calculator builder, the customisation, the email system - all of it works exactly how I wanted it to. The mistake was treating it like a SaaS when it should have been a lead magnet from the start. I didn't need four subscription tiers. I didn't need an affiliate program attracting paying customers I couldn't support. I needed a free tool that people would use, that would sit on their websites generating estimates, and that would funnel them back to me when they needed custom development work. The same lesson [Service Area WIZARD](https://serviceareawizard.com) taught me, actually. Build something useful, give it away, let it do the marketing for you. ## What's coming back I've already done most of the work for the next version. The subdomain model is gone. The embed system is now the only option - a single script tag on any page, any platform. No DNS configuration, no hosting headaches, no "my subdomain isn't working" emails. ```html ``` Drop that on your site. Done. The calculator loads, the customer fills it out, the estimate gets sent. No subdomains, no iframes to configure, no Cloudflare DNS records to set up. The tool will be free. No subscription tiers. No payment processing. Just a monthly quota on estimates, which for most small businesses will be more than enough. I'm not rebuilding it because the old version was broken. I'm rebuilding it because I finally worked out what it's supposed to be. Not a SaaS product that generates revenue. A free tool that generates trust. And leads. Mostly leads. ## The uncomfortable truth The hardest part of this whole thing wasn't the code. I've been building these calculators in various forms for years - WordPress plugins, Vue components, full Laravel apps. The technical side is the easy part. The hard part was admitting that I built a business model I didn't actually want to run. I wanted the product to exist. I wanted people to use it. I just didn't want the responsibility that comes with taking their money. That's not a failure of the product. That's a failure of self-awareness that took me way too long to correct. The marketing site is still up at [estimatecalculators.com](https://estimatecalculators.com). The tool itself is coming back - simpler, free, and without the weight of subscription tiers I was never going to support properly. Sometimes the best thing you can do for a product is stop trying to charge for it.