Can we replace a $150k Looker with a bucket of HTML files?

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. Tech influencers keep posting about software being dead, and some say they’ve cancelled and vibecoded all their SaaS subscriptions. They say AI is going to kill B2B SaaS.2 SaaS is dead, apparently, so can we replace our enterprise BI tool? Share of "self-hosted" GitHub repos Meanwhile, "slop" on Hacker News Left: share of new GitHub repos described as "self-hosted". Right: share of Hacker News comments saying "slop".3 The slop got good 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. Then Claude Code with Opus 4.5 got really good. Like, really good. In early January adoption across the company skyrocketed. It could work in our repos and use our tools. Also, it could run a query to check the numbers before answering. That mattered a lot more than getting a clever-sounding response. Within a few weeks, people in finance, ops and marketing who had never opened a terminal were prompting all day. All of a sudden everyone was prompting, and nobody was clicking. Around this time, Claude started spitting out a lot of HTML. You would ask for an analysis and you’d get a single file with charts, and honestly, some of those pages looked better than our Looker dashboards. The problem was that it would live in someone’s Downloads folder. To share it, they would attach it in Slack and hope. This was way before Anthropic shipped shareable artifacts for Team and Enterprise (June 2026), and we really needed a way to share this new kind of dashboard. One day Maddy from our team said she’d just put them all on a web server, with an internal domain name. By the end of the day she had vibe-coded the whole thing: a small service that stored …