Like a lot of companies, we pay for Looker. Let’s say $150k a year, the average Looker licence1, roughly 300 seats. We are 3 data platform engineers at a company of about 500 people, and most of our week goes on the unglamorous stuff: keeping Snowflake fed, babysitting a dbt project that passed 2,000 models a while ago, and running the Airflow, Airbyte, DataHub and Kubernetes plumbing underneath it all.
In February, one of us built a thing on the side to host HTML files. It took an afternoon. 8 months later, and it’s already got as many weekly users as Looker in our company, maybe even more and Looker’s down a third.
A year ago I thought most AI output was slop, and most of it was. We made a few “chat with your data” demos, and they looked great on a toy schema with 4 tables, but never really worked at our scale. The SQL ran without errors, but the numbers were wrong. That’s much worse.
