The Hidden Engineering Cost of Looker Dashboards

Published May 15, 2025 | 4 minute read
Written by Lane Goedhart

What “Build It in Looker” Really Means for Your Engineering Roadmap

On paper, Looker looks like a shortcut. A flexible, enterprise-grade BI tool that lets you build powerful dashboards for your team or customers without reinventing the wheel.

So when someone on your team says, “Let’s just build it in Looker,” it sounds reasonable. Smart, even. Why build a dashboard feature in-house when Google already did it?

But here’s the part most teams don’t see until it's too late:

“Build it in Looker” doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s not a shortcut. It’s a commitment — and it comes with trade-offs that will shape your roadmap, your engineering resources, and your velocity in ways you might not be prepared for.

Let’s unpack what that choice really looks like.

It Starts With Good Intentions

Your customer success team wants better usage data.
Marketing wants campaign dashboards.
Product wants cohort analysis.
Your early customers are asking for visibility into their data.

Everyone’s aligned: we need dashboards.

Looker seems like the answer. It has drag-and-drop dashboards, access control, and the ability to query from your warehouse. You spin up a trial. You embed a test dashboard. You check the box.

But over the next few months, here’s what creeps in.

1. You’ve Introduced LookML, Not Removed Engineering

Looker’s data model language — LookML — is powerful. It lets you define business logic, relationships, and metrics cleanly across your data.

But LookML is not plug-and-play.

To get anything useful out of Looker, your engineers or data team now need to:

  • Model every table you want to expose

  • Maintain that model over time as your schema changes

  • Debug joins, relationships, and performance bottlenecks

  • Translate stakeholder questions into LookML definitions

You haven’t freed up your developers. You’ve just given them another place to write logic, one step removed from code — but still just as sensitive to errors and drift.

2. You’ve Shifted the UX Burden to the BI Tool

Dashboards inside Looker are built like dashboards — not like your product.

That means:

  • UI/UX is out of your control

  • Performance and loading feel different from your app

  • Embedded dashboards live in iFrames that can’t match your frontend logic or layout

  • Navigation, theming, and responsiveness are limited by Looker’s design system

It feels bolted on — because it is. And your users notice.

You’ll spend cycles trying to “skin” Looker to match your app. That effort adds up. And even when you get it close, it still feels like a dashboard someone else built, not a feature in your product.

3. You’ve Created a New Layer of Access Complexity

Want to show each customer only their own data?

You’ll now be managing:

  • Access filters in Looker

  • Embedding credentials or OAuth tokens

  • Data scoping logic across different user types

  • Role-based views, all driven by LookML logic

This is fragile. A single mistake in your model, or a forgotten row-level security rule, and one customer sees another’s data.

That’s not just a UX problem. That’s a trust problem. And a security one.

4. You’ve Added a Vendor Dependency to Your Core Product

Every time Looker updates their API, changes embed behavior, or updates pricing — your product is impacted.

You now rely on a third party to deliver a feature your customers use every day. That limits how fast you can ship changes, and how much you can customize based on user feedback.

It also introduces real risk. If a bug or regression hits their embed layer, your customers feel it. And you’re stuck waiting for their team, not yours, to fix it.

5. You’ve Delayed the Moment Your Customer Sees Value

Here’s the most important part: dashboards are often the first thing a new customer looks for.

They want proof that the product is working.
They want visibility into their usage or ROI.
They want to understand what’s happening.

Every second that dashboard takes to load, every extra login step, every “ask your admin for access” moment — that’s time your user is getting cold.

Embedded dashboards should be instant. Seamless. Built into the product. When they’re not, you extend the time-to-value. Some users never make it through.

What to Do Instead

If you want dashboards that:

  • Match your product visually

  • Respect row-level data security

  • Scale to every customer without LookML overhead

  • Don’t require ongoing engineering maintenance

…you probably don’t want to build them in Looker.

That doesn’t mean Looker’s bad. It’s great for internal BI at mid-market or enterprise scale. But if you’re a startup, or a growing SaaS platform, and you’re embedding dashboards into your customer experience — it’s the wrong tool for the job.

There are better ways to serve your users.

How Lemonado Helps

Lemonado is built specifically for SaaS teams embedding dashboards into their product.

  • One dashboard template serves every customer

  • You control the design, branding, and UX

  • Parameter signing ensures users only see their own data

  • You can deploy in minutes — no LookML, no setup fatigue

We’re not a BI tool with an embed option. We’re a product-first data platform, designed to help you show value inside your app, fast.

If your team is still saying “Let’s build it in Looker,” take a beat. Ask what that really means for your roadmap.

And if you're ready to give your customers visibility without the baggage, try Lemonado for free and launch your first embedded dashboard today.

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