Analytics and monitoring decision

BIG

With only a product name and no feature or pricing detail available, a technical user can realistically build a narrow analytics/dashboard replacement (basic SQL connectors, charts, auth) in about a week, but the full commercial product's integrations, polish, and hosting are not reproducible from the supplied page.

Visit website

You pay

Not priced

No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.

You’d pay instead

$100one-off38 h to build

$50/mo3 h/mo upkeep

No published price to break even against.

Open-source builds that already do this

Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All BIG alternatives, with the arithmetic →

apache/supersetApache Superset is a Data Visualization and Data Exploration PlatformOpen on GitHub metabase/metabaseThe easy-to-use open source Business Intelligence and Embedded Analytics tool that lets everyone work with data :bar_chart:Open on GitHub

What a replacement has to do

Query a data source, visualize results, save dashboards, and share links.

What it still won’t have

Commercial polish, design and onboarding flows provided by the vendor
Pre-built connectors beyond basic SQL databases
Hosted scaling, managed backups, and formal support SLA
Any proprietary datasets, integrations, or platform-level features the vendor may provide

What remains hard

Product polish and ongoing maintenance

Read the build prompt

First-year cost

No published price

BIG does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.

Money you would actually spend

Keep paying

—

Subscription price × seats × 12

Build it

—

AI build —APIs + hosting —

Time you would spend

—

What you would spend

Your monthly price$/moAI to build it$ onceAPIs + hosting$/mo

What we assumed

Initial buildhrsMonthly upkeephrsYour rate$/hr

The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.

Runnable build prompt

Not run yet

Build a small self-hosted analytics dashboard app using React for the frontend, Node.js/Express for the backend, and Postgres for metadata and user storage. Core features: (1) connect to one external SQL data source (Postgres/MySQL) and run parameterized SQL queries, (2) create and save simple visualizations (line, bar, table) mapped to query results, (3) persist dashboards and visualizations in Postgres, (4) email/password user authentication and read-only shareable dashboard links, (5) Dockerfiles for frontend/backend and a docker-compose deployment with an nginx reverse proxy and auto TLS via certbot. Out of scope: multi-tenant billing, dozens of connector types, advanced alerting, and commercial-grade analytics pipelines. Include input validation, error handling, and unit tests for backend query execution and auth flows.

How we checked3 sources · 3/3 runs agreed · evidence score 64

How the score was reached

Partly verdict base52
An open-source build was found+5
3 cited sources+3
3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
Evidence score64

The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.

How scoring works →

Cited sources · 3

Every page the run actually retrieved.

official productBIG - Business Is a Game
open sourceapache/superset
open sourcemetabase/metabase

Integrity checks

What held up, and what did not.

✓ 3 independent runs, one answer✓ Citations limited to fetched pages! 1 moat recorded