Many small businesses still manage data manually, copying and pasting across spreadsheets just to get a clear picture of operations. The ideal solution is smooth, automatic reporting, but without the cost or complexity of a full IT setup.
A lightweight approach is to combine a hosted database with an automation tool like n8n, Make, or Zapier.
After a simple experiment, I've found it's possible to set up a workflow for up to a few GBs of data/month with ~$50 monthly cost. This is a nice solution for small teams and businesses with some technical know-how.
A Simple Use Case
Imagine a business with orders coming in from two locations, each using a different payments system. Without automation, business owners must manually combine the data, creating a spreadsheet nightmare.
I tested a simple pipeline using Supabase and n8n. It pulls order data from both APIs, stores it in a unified Supabase table, and writes combined metrics to a Google Sheet. Here’s what I learned about skill requirements, speed, cost, and scalability.
Required Skill
Setting up workflows and a database needs a beginner-level understanding of REST APIs, authentication, and databases.
Even with experience, configuring n8n’s HTTP request nodes can be tricky, as the user has to select the right API calls, headers, and JavaScript mappings. AI assistants help, but you still need to understand the code to catch errors. For someone with no coding experience it could be overwhelming.
Speed
A simple workflow like mine took under a day to set up.
For a professional scenario with more complex data, logging, alerts, and dashboards (Grafana or Power BI), a seasoned developer might spend about a month building and testing the workflow. Non-technical users could take several months—but it’s doable.
Cost
For small data volumes (less than 1TB over a business’s lifetime), this solution is extremely cost-effective.
Scalability
This setup works well for small teams, but larger organizations or high-volume, complex data may find it unwieldy.
Frequent changes or inconsistent data can break workflows, and the UI-driven approach lacks features like version control, modularity, and robust testing found in pure code solutions.
Conclusion
Using a hosted database plus an automation engine is a lightweight, cost-effective solution for small teams needing automated reporting. It’s not plug-and-play for everyone, though. Some technical skill is required, which is probably why n8n markets itself for “Technical Teams.”
