Your Brighton dashboards look impressive and disagree with each other, so nobody in the room trusts the occupancy number

A data pipeline with core dashboards starts around £25k to £42k in Brighton, while a full governed BI platform runs £55k and up. Most of the cost is the data plumbing beneath the charts, not the charts themselves.

Because they pull from booking, POS and accounts systems that define metrics differently, so each chart is honest to its own source and none agree. A custom BI build fixes the definitions and pipeline first, which is why a Brighton operator can finally trust the occupancy figure.

Yes. With a clean data layer, a custom dashboard can forecast Brighton's seasonal occupancy or enrolment early enough to act on, rather than reporting demand after the booking window has closed. Forecasting quality depends on the data foundation being solid.

You can. A custom build often keeps your existing visualisation tool and fixes the data layer feeding it, so the investment goes where the problem actually is. The developer should recommend keeping what works and replacing only the shaky foundation.

Because a dashboard is only as trustworthy as its data, and reconciling sources, agreeing definitions and building reliable pipelines is where the real work lives. A Brighton developer who spends the budget on visuals over the data layer is building something that will not be trusted.

Yes, you should own the pipelines, the governed data layer and any custom code. Insist on this in Brighton so you can change BI tools or maintainers without rebuilding the foundation.

That depends on your needs, and a good build makes freshness explicit, from near-live for occupancy to daily for margin. Ask the developer to state how current each metric is rather than implying everything updates instantly.

Core dashboards on a clean pipeline ship in 8 to 12 weeks, and a full governed platform up to 18. Brighton operators often phase it so the most-argued metric is fixed first to rebuild trust quickly.

Yes, if your data already lives cleanly in one place, Power BI or Tableau on top of it may answer your questions without a custom build. Invest in custom BI when disagreeing sources and untrusted numbers are the actual problem.

If you have analysts who explore data visually all day, Tableau Creator at $75 per user per month earns its price, and Viewer seats at $15 keep the total reasonable for a small team. The math flips once you have hundreds of viewers or need dashboards inside a customer-facing product, because per-seat pricing scales with your audience while a custom build does not. Run the 3-year seat cost before deciding; that horizon usually makes the answer obvious.

A one-page brief beats a 40-page requirements document: the business problem in plain words, who will use the system, the 5 to 10 workflows it must handle, the tools it must connect to, and your budget range and deadline driver. You do not need wireframes, a specification, or technical vocabulary; producing those is the agency's job during discovery. Stating a budget range up front is the single best move, because it gets you honest scoping instead of a quote engineered to win the meeting.

A custom build gives you direct control over the controls auditors ask about: single sign-on, role-based access, audit logs, encryption, data residency, and deletion workflows. For HIPAA specifically, you can keep protected health information inside your own cloud account under a business associate agreement with your host instead of trusting a third-party BI vendor's handling. Expect compliance work to add 2 to 4 weeks and roughly 10 to 15 percent to the build, so raise it in the first conversation, not after design is done.

Nothing dramatic, if the engagement was set up correctly: the code sits in your repository, hosting runs on your cloud account, and a handover document explains how to deploy and operate the system. Any competent replacement team can then take over in days rather than months. If the agency controls the repo, the servers, or the domain, fix that now, because renegotiating access during a dispute is the most expensive place to discover the problem.

For testing whether anyone wants the product, yes, and Bubble's paid plans start at $29 a month, which is the cheapest validation you will ever buy. The ceiling arrives with complex data relationships, heavy integrations, performance at a few thousand users, and the fact that you cannot export a Bubble app to servers you control. A path many Digital Heroes clients take: prove demand on no-code, then rebuild custom once revenue justifies it, treating the no-code version as a paid prototype rather than a foundation.

Ask them to walk you through the data model of a past project, not a portfolio of pretty charts, because dashboard failures are almost always data modeling failures. Good answers mention specifics like star schemas, dbt, incremental refresh, and how they handled a source schema change after launch. Then ask for a fixed-scope discovery phase with a written data audit as the deliverable, so you judge their real work for a small spend before committing to the build.

Digital Heroes builds custom business intelligence dashboards systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. The work is delivered remotely: our engineers work from Delhi and Lucknow, leadership is in New York, and some team members live in London and Sydney and work remotely from there. We have no office in Brighton. You can chat with the team directly, and every form gets an email reply within 24 hours.