Data Analytics CostWhat a data build
really costs.
Data pricing is all over the place, because sometimes the right answer is a cheap tool and sometimes it is a real build. Here is a straight breakdown: what drives the cost, when off-the-shelf wins, and honest fixed pricing from £16,000 when custom is genuinely worth it.
app.yourmarketplace.com
Live marketplace
Two-sided liquidity, one platform
Supply and demand, matched. Listings, search, payments, and trust — built to move volume.
Recent activity
NNew listinglive
BBroker onboardedverified
EEnquiry matchedsent
PPayment cleared£4,200
Platforms and marketplaces we have built and worked on
sellyourboat.ioKompiPaybusesforsale.comeuropeanyachtbrokers.comLoopa
What drives costWhere the money
actually goes.
A data build costs what it costs based on the state of your data and how far it has to travel to become useful.
01
Number of sources
One clean source is simple; many messy ones multiply the work.
02
Data quality
The cleaning and pipeline work to make data trustworthy is the hidden cost.
03
Internal vs customer-facing
Customer-facing analytics is a product feature — it costs more, rightly.
04
One-off vs live
A report is cheap; live infrastructure that stays current costs more.
05
AI / retrieval layer
Making data answerable in plain language adds build and inference cost.
Sometimes the cheapest data solution is a tool, not us
Search for data analytics cost and you will find everything from near-free to six figures, and unusually for this kind of work, the low end is often the right answer. For a lot of businesses, internal reporting on fairly standard metrics is best handled by a configured off-the-shelf BI tool — cheap, quick, and perfectly good. If that is your situation, we will tell you, even though it is a smaller engagement for us.
A real custom build earns its cost in specific cases: when analytics must live inside your own product, when it is customer-facing and your users see it, or when your data and questions are specific enough that no off-the-shelf tool answers them well. In those cases our pricing is fixed — from 16,000 GBP for a focused analytics layer, from 30,000 GBP for a larger build — and you own the result outright.
The most common way to overspend on data is paying to build custom where a tool would have done. We would rather point you to the cheaper answer and keep your trust for when a build genuinely is worth it.
The hidden costThe pipeline is where the money quietly goes
When people picture a data build, they picture the dashboard — the charts, the interface. But the dashboard is usually the cheap part. The cost lives upstream, in getting your data in, cleaned, reconciled, and modelled so the numbers on that dashboard are actually correct. Messy data across several sources is the single biggest driver of what a data build costs, and it is almost always underestimated.
This is why two data projects that produce similar-looking dashboards can cost wildly different amounts. One had clean data in one place and a clear question; the other had inconsistent data spread across five systems that first had to be made to agree with each other. The visible output looks the same; the work behind it does not.
Understanding this is the key to budgeting data work honestly. When we scope a build, we scope the pipeline realistically rather than quoting the pretty part and discovering the hard part later. That is how you avoid the classic data-project overrun.
The cost-saving moveAnswer the most important question first
The way to control the cost of a data build is the same as everywhere else we work: do less, first, and do the part that matters most. Data projects balloon when they try to model every source and build every conceivable view up front, before anyone has confirmed the data layer even delivers value.
A focused analytics build inverts that. From 16,000 GBP, it answers your single most important question — with a real pipeline, a clean model, and a dashboard your team can trust — rather than boiling the ocean. You get a working, trustworthy answer in front of the people who need it, fast, and you prove the data layer earns its keep before investing in scaling it.
If that first answer changes decisions, you expand with confidence and evidence. If it does not, you have spent 16,000 learning that cheaply, instead of a much larger sum on infrastructure nobody ends up using. Prove the value, then scale it.
ProofWe price with confidence because we run data at scale
The reason we can quote a data build as a fixed price, rather than a wide range hedged against the unknown, is that we operate real data at scale ourselves. sellyourboat.io is a Wall & Fifth venture handling over 12,000 structured listings across 18 countries, with search and a Claude-powered retrieval layer that answers from that data — all built and run by us.
Having made a large, messy, real-world dataset genuinely useful and kept it running in production, we know where the work actually is — the pipeline, the modelling, the reconciliation — and where it is not. That is why we can price a focused build at 16,000 and a larger one at 30,000 with confidence, instead of padding every estimate against surprises we have already handled on our own platform.
We have also handled transactional and payments data across client work including KompiPay. The pricing is grounded in operating real data, not estimating it.
ProofPricing grounded in data we run at scale
sellyourboat.io handles 12,000+ structured listings with search and AI retrieval, built and run by us. That is why we price data work with certainty.
£30k
extensive build, fixed
12,000+
records we run live
Fixed pricingThe numbers, plainly
When a build is genuinely the right call, here is what it costs. No hourly meter, and you own the result.
Analytics Layer
from £16,000
A pipeline, a clean model, and a dashboard that answers your most important question.
Extensive Build
from £30,000
Multiple sources, richer dashboards, roles, and the infrastructure to scale reporting.
Embedded Partner
from £8,000 /mo
Ongoing senior involvement, if you want a partner in evolving the data layer over time.
Get a straight price
for your data build.
Tell us what data you have and what you are trying to learn from it. We will tell you honestly whether it needs a build — and if so, what it costs.