Am I a bad founder? (I will not promote)

I co-founded a B2B SaaS startup two years ago that has done decently well. I am non-technical and so is my other co-founder. We started out young, like 21-years-old type young, so at that age, we both got full-time jobs to fund a full-time software developer we found off of Upwork to make the damn SaaS for us. We are so lucky to have found an amazing developer who inherited our shoddily-written codebase. She basically trained herself to be our lead developer after our last one quit unexpectedly, and she's worked for really low pay for a long time. She's pulled some crazy hours helping us over the months, too. But after we stopped getting client contracts for a few months, we decided to not keep paying her if we weren't making money. It was all in the name of "saving money." I've blindly followed that mantra for 2 years now, but I'm realizing it might not be right. My cofounder doesn't want to put money into this business anymore. He just wants to let it sit, and generate money when the contracts come around. I used to agree with this, only because he said so, but now I'm realizing this isn't right. I think I should take advantage of the opportunity to rehire our AMAZING developer who is really awesome and nice and talented, and kickstart the development of some necessary features so we can hit the ground running when we get our next contracts. I have about $100k in savings and $30k in the business bank account. I'm living off of the $30k at the moment, but I'm realizing: should I use that $30k to pay my developer to keep making our software better so it can generate even more money down the line? I'm really struggling with a scarcity mindset, fear, and greed, essentially. I've been conditioned by my business partner not to spend money on the business. Or am I just being naive?