New: AI & text-to-SQL on your own SupersetBook a demo
A Specialty Retailer · Retail
A specialty retailer replaced Tableau and saved $180k per year
A 300-location specialty retailer migrated from Tableau Server to D23 managed Superset and cut its BI licensing bill in half while improving dashboard performance.
$180k
saved per year vs. Tableau
10x
faster dashboard load times
120
dashboards migrated in 6 weeks
The challenge
The retailer was spending over $360k per year on Tableau Server licenses for 500 users. Dashboard load times exceeded 30 seconds for the highest-traffic reports, and the two-person BI team spent more time administering the Tableau infrastructure than building new analytics. Leadership wanted to cut costs without reducing analytical capability.
How D23 helped
- Migrated 120 Tableau dashboards to Apache Superset on D23 over six weeks, with D23's data team handling the translation.
- Connected BigQuery (the retailer's primary warehouse) and a Postgres transactional database as data sources.
- Rebuilt margin, sell-through, and inventory dashboards with Superset's caching layer — load times dropped from 30s to under 3s.
- Used D23's AI text-to-SQL to let merchants explore margin data by product, location, and season without filing BI requests.
- Eliminated Tableau Server administration entirely — D23 manages all upgrades, scaling, and backups.
“We expected to trade some capability for cost savings. Instead we got faster dashboards, better self-serve, and a team that actually helps us build things instead of just keeping the lights on.”