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Looker · Business Intelligence

You're paying a platform fee, a per-seat fee and a BigQuery bill for one semantic model.

Looker charges a £52,000 platform fee, £400-£1,665 per user per year, and a BigQuery query bill that often dwarfs the licence — all to run a LookML semantic layer that dbt now does in your repo. We rebuild the model, dashboards and embed layer your team actually uses — and you own all of it.

Your Looker contract

You currently pay
£24,000 / year
Estimated savings with a rebuild
-£51,000
over 3 years
Over 5 years
-£35,000
Pays for itself in
113 months

Based on a one-time rebuild of £75,000 plus £16,000/yr hosting & maintenance. A precise quote follows your audit.

Get your detailed savings report & a fixed-price quote.

Why Looker is costing you

The Looker features people actually complain about

We've mapped each core Looker feature to what users gripe about — and how a tailored rebuild fixes it. Click any card for sources and the deep-dive.

Trusted by teams who stopped renting

GitGuardianSidecare

Don't take our word for it

Illustrative
“We were drowning in per-seat renewals for tools we half-used. The rebuild gave us exactly the workflow we needed — and we own it outright now.”
EF
Eric Fourrier
Co-founder · GitGuardian
Illustrative
“They cut through the bloat, shipped the 20% we actually relied on, and our annual software bill stopped climbing every renewal.”
AR
Anna Rossin
Operations · Sidecare

How a rebuild plays out

The problem, our process, the implementation and how we run it.

Replacing a £99k/yr CRM with software they own

50-person B2B SaaS company

Illustrative
≈ £150k saved over 3 years · paid back in under 11 months
  1. 1The problem

    The team was on Salesforce Enterprise at ~£99k/year but used only contacts, a deal pipeline and a handful of reports. Every renewal climbed, and a simple workflow change meant booking a consultant. Most seats sat idle.

  2. 2The process

    Over a two-week audit we shadowed sales, ops and leadership, logged every feature actually touched in 90 days, and cut the 80% nobody used. We produced a fixed-price quote and a 3-year savings projection before a line of code was written.

  3. 3The implementation

    We rebuilt contacts, a custom-stage pipeline, activity logging, email sync, dashboards and role-based permissions as a bespoke app. Their historical data was migrated and validated, and we ran the new system alongside Salesforce until the team signed off.

  4. 4The run

    We host, monitor and maintain it on a flat annual fee — no per-seat tax, no renewal uplift. New workflow tweaks ship in days, not consulting engagements. They own 100% of the code and data.

Killing the contact-tier tax on a marketing stack

E-commerce brand, 40-person marketing team

Illustrative
Bill no longer scales with contacts · six-figure 3-year saving
  1. 1The problem

    HubSpot Marketing Hub costs scaled with a growing contact list, not usage. A 40% renewal jump — driven purely by list size — forced the conversation. They used landing pages, forms, email campaigns and basic automation; everything else was shelfware.

  2. 2The process

    We audited the live campaigns, forms and workflows, mapped the data model, and scoped a replacement covering exactly those features. The quote was fixed and the savings modelled against their projected contact growth.

  3. 3The implementation

    We rebuilt the contact database with segmentation, landing pages and forms, email campaigns and sequences, automation workflows, lead scoring and campaign analytics. Contacts and campaign history were migrated, with a parallel run before cutover.

  4. 4The run

    Flat hosting and maintenance means their bill no longer grows with their list. They own the data and the code, and we handle deliverability, uptime and changes.

How it works

A proven path from overpriced SaaS to software you own.

1. Audit

We map the features your team actually uses in your current SaaS — and ruthlessly cut the 90% you don't. You get a fixed-price quote and a savings projection.

2. Rebuild

We build a bespoke replacement around your real workflows. Same outcomes, none of the bloat, fully owned by you.

3. Migrate

We move your data across, run both systems in parallel until you're confident, then flip the switch with zero downtime.

4. Host & maintain

We deploy, host, monitor and maintain it on a flat annual fee. No per-seat tax, no surprise renewals, no vendor lock-in.

The team behind it

Senior engineers and designers who've shipped this dozens of times.

David Geismar

David Geismar

Product

Leads product and discovery — maps the 10% of your SaaS you actually use and turns it into a lean spec your team will love.

LinkedIn
Jasbir Singh

Jasbir Singh

Engineering

Leads the build — designs, ships and maintains the bespoke replacement, including hosting, security and reliability.

LinkedIn

Questions, answered

Won't we lose the LookML model we've already invested in?+

LookML is proprietary so there's no clean export, but the metric definitions inside it translate well to dbt — same warehouse, same joins, same dimensions, expressed as version-controlled SQL with tests. We extract Explores and dimensions from your LookML files, rebuild them as dbt models, and run Looker read-only for 60-90 days during cutover so nothing breaks.

What about row-level security and user attributes?+

Those are real Looker features and we replicate them in the warehouse: Postgres RLS, Snowflake row access policies or BigQuery authorised views, driven by SSO claims. The rules become SQL in your repo, reviewable in pull requests, instead of a Looker user-attribute table no other tool can read.

How long does the rebuild take?+

Typically 14-18 weeks: 4 weeks auditing the LookML model and Explores, 8-10 weeks building dbt models, dashboards and the embed layer, and 2-4 weeks running parallel with Looker before turning off the licences at renewal.