Jim carried this idea for years
before anyone would build it.

Saevious began as something Jim Zuur could not put down. Not a business plan — a conviction that shopping online had quietly stopped working for the person doing the shopping, and that it would keep not working until someone built the alternative.

He was not wrong, and being right about it changed nothing. An idea is only worth what someone is willing to spend on it, and what this one needed was months of somebody’s life before it would do anything at all.

So he looked for someone to build it. That search took years, and for most of them the answer was no — not a hostile no, just the ordinary kind. People were interested. Interest is cheap. Nobody was willing to spend the time.

A few said yes. That turned out to be its own problem. One couldn’t do it. One started and gave up. One kept working but wanted a different thing, and slowly bent the idea toward the thing he wanted instead. Each time, Jim ended up back where he started, still carrying it.

It is an unglamorous stretch of the story and we would rather leave it in. Most of what happened to this idea was nothing happening to it.

Jim met João at church.

Not at a pitch night, not through a recruiter, not on a founder matching site. They got talking, and it turned out the developer he had been looking for and the person who already agreed with him about why it mattered were the same person. That is the part neither of us could have arranged.

Everything you can use on this site was built after that conversation.

We want shopping you can trust more than Amazon or Google. That sounds like a boast; we mean it narrowly and literally. On those sites the position of a product is for sale. What you see first is what someone paid to put there, and you are not told which is which.

There are no adverts on Saevious. There is no promoted placement, no paid ranking, no retailer who can buy their way above another. Search results are ordered by how well they answer what you asked and nothing else, and we keep the full price history so a discount has to prove itself against what the thing actually used to cost.

Commissions. That is the whole answer.

If you buy something after finding it here, the retailer pays us a small share of that sale. You pay the same price you would have paid going direct. That is the only way money reaches us — we do not sell adverts, we do not sell placement, and we do not sell anything about you.

It is a deliberately narrow way to run this. It means we only earn anything when the thing we showed you was worth buying, which is the incentive we want to be under.

The details of that arrangement are set out on our disclosure page.