Our product is starting to get more and more requests for custom reports. I’ve built some basic tables with filters and exports to Excel/PDF, but they fall short of the nuance our customers need, especially those in regulated markets.

One customer needs full first names but only the first letter of the last name. Another needs a very specific JOIN with an entity almost no other customer cares about. To accommodate, I’ve been building custom Looker reports for each customer, which won't scale well.

I started looking into how other SaaS companies solved this. Many built their own SQL-like query languages:

- Salesforce -> SOQL - Shopify -> ShopifyQL - Stripe -> Sigma

All of them seemed to address the same problem I’m seeing: customers have unique reporting needs that no-code GUIs can’t handle. A drag and drop builder is great for non-techies, but most real requests require joins and transformations, and I’m trying to avoid becoming a consulting shop for every customer.

I'm particularly impressed by Stripe Sigma because of how they combine SQL with an LLM layer. Users can ask for a report in plain English, customize it in a lightweight BI tool, and edit the query only whenever needed.

Has anyone gone through this or have advice on alternative approaches? I’m open to any direction here.