Market intelligence for the EV age

Elbiil – whose name nods to the Danish word elbil, meaning "electric vehicle" – operates at the intersection of consumer data and manufacturer intelligence. On one side of the business sits a free B2C platform that helps Danish consumers find the right electric car and charging solution for their needs and budget. On the other: a paid suite of B2B analytics products for car manufacturers, where product and marketing teams benchmark competitors, track real-time pricing shifts, and model scenarios for new launches.

‍

The company collects upwards of 100 data points on every electric vehicle on the Danish market – price, leasing costs, range, consumption, equipment levels – and merges this with consumer preference data gathered from its B2C platform. The result is a dataset that no individual manufacturer could assemble alone: a complete picture of what competitors are doing and what customers actually want.

‍

Elbiil operates as a small team within a broader Danish automotive group. Daniel Andersen, who brings two decades of experience in data and BI consulting, wears many hats – data engineering, product development, customer relationships, and commercial strategy sit alongside his core role building the analytics platform. That breadth of responsibility is central to this story: every technology choice has to earn its place, and anything that demands specialist resource or heavy maintenance is a non-starter.

‍

When the legacy platform hit its ceiling

‍

When Andersen launched Elbiil’s B2B product, he built it on the platform he knew best: a legacy BI tool he had used for a decade as a consultant. It was a natural choice – powerful, familiar, and technically capable. But as Elbiil grew from an internal project into a customer-facing product business, three friction points emerged.

‍

The licensing economics did not suit a customer-facing model. Multi-tenancy required maintaining a separate data model for each customer – manageable with two or three clients, untenable at ten. And building a fully branded, white-labelled experience demanded software engineering resources that a two-person team simply did not have.

‍

“Building a fully branded product on our previous platform was possible, but it required a level of developer resource we simply didn’t have. The licensing model was designed for internal analytics, not for a product you want as many people as possible to use. We needed something a two-person team could actually build and scale on our own.” — Daniel Andersen, Co-Founder, Elbiil

‍

Legacy BI wasn't built for productization. It works for internal dashboards – but strains when you try to turn analytics into a scalable, customer-facing product.

‍

Why Astrato + Supabase

‍

Andersen was not shopping broadly. He knew the BI landscape intimately, and he knew what his product required. The shortlist was essentially two: the incumbent, or Astrato. No other tool matched what he needed.

‍

The first requirement was ease of use – not for Andersen himself, but for the end-users he might never meet.

‍

“You have to remember, we’re not building an internal tool. Our customers give access to their own teams — people we may never meet or onboard. So the product has to be self-explanatory from the moment someone logs in. That was non-negotiable.” — Daniel Andersen, Co-Founder, Elbiil

‍

The second was native writeback – critical for the scenario analysis at the heart of Elbiil’s product. The third was standard SQL, future-proofing the stack for when the team eventually grows. But the decisive factor was something Andersen had not expected to value as highly as he did.

‍

“When you work with the big BI tools, there’s no one to call. I didn’t know I was looking for a partner, but it became very clear after the first few meetings with Astrato that this would be a partnership – not just a licence. For a small team like ours, that changes everything.” — Daniel Andersen, Co-Founder, Elbiil

‍

The database choice followed similar logic. Andersen considered Snowflake but concluded it was over-engineered for a small team’s needs. Supabase offered the right balance: easy to use, cost-effective, and sufficient for Elbiil’s data volumes. A Danish ETL platform called Weld pulls data from multiple sources into Supabase, which feeds Astrato. The entire stack is lean, modern, and deliberately right-sized.

‍

Three weeks to a live product

‍

The timeline was set by a customer, not a project plan. A new B2B client was due to onboard in early January. Astrato access arrived at the end of December.

‍

“We had a new customer onboarding in January and got access to Astrato at the end of December. I had the data transferred and modeled within a week, and the product built in another two. Once your data is in place, Astrato makes it really easy to build – we were live within three weeks.” — Daniel Andersen, Co-Founder, Elbiil

‍

On the legacy platform, with separate data models per customer and developer-dependent embedding, a comparable timeline would have been inconceivable. The migration was not just a change of tool – it was a change in what was achievable.

‍

One data layer, five products

‍

The three-week migration was not an endpoint. It was the beginning of a pattern.

‍

Ninety-five per cent of Elbiil’s data is shared across all customers – the same cars, the same market, the same competitive landscape. Rather than duplicating this for every client, Andersen built a single shared data layer with customer-specific views controlled by semantic-layer filters. No coding, no separate data models, no duplicated maintenance.

‍

“Before, we had to maintain a separate data model for every customer. Now we maintain one data layer for everyone and control what each customer sees through the semantic layer. That’s a huge reduction in maintenance – and it means we can onboard a new customer without rebuilding anything.” — Daniel Andersen, Co-Founder, Elbiil

‍

But the architecture does more than cut maintenance. It enables rapid product creation. Each customer gets a tailored workbook drawing from the same underlying data, and Andersen can iterate on product design in real time – often in collaboration with the customer themselves.

‍

“We’ve never wanted to build one app for everybody – not all companies are the same. Astrato is flexible enough that we can tailor each product to what a customer needs, without duplicating the work. One data layer serves everyone; from there, it’s easy to make changes, large or small.” — Daniel Andersen, Co-Founder, Elbiil

‍

A key differentiator for Elbiil’s customers is the ability to model scenarios on the fly. A manufacturer can enter a hypothetical leasing offer or spec a new vehicle and immediately see how it stacks up against the competition – all powered by Astrato’s native writeback.

‍

“Having writeback as a native solution in the BI tool is very rare. Our customers can enter a new leasing offer or spec a new vehicle and immediately see how it performs against the competition. That kind of on-the-fly scenario analysis is super attractive for them – and we didn’t need to build it ourselves.” — Daniel Andersen, Co-Founder, Elbiil

‍

The results speak for themselves.

‍

“We started with one product for one part of the industry. Within three months, we’d built two more – including one for commercial vehicles, which is a completely different audience. By the end of the year, we’ll probably have five products, each generating its own revenue. That wouldn’t have been possible on our previous platform.” — Daniel Andersen, Co-Founder, Elbiil

‍

No onboarding required

‍

Elbiil’s end-users are product managers, marketing leads, and commercial analysts at car manufacturers. They are data-literate but not data specialists. They need to open a dashboard and immediately understand what they are looking at – without training, without a call with Daniel, and often without any prior exposure to the tool.

‍

“We built ad-hoc reporting so customers can filter for whatever data they need and get a dynamic report with a click of a button. In many cases, onboarding hasn’t even been necessary – they just jump in and start using it. That tells you the product works the way it should.” — Daniel Andersen, Co-Founder, Elbiil

‍

For a product that Elbiil may never get to walk a customer through in person, this is a meaningful validation of both the design choices and the underlying platform’s usability.

‍

Support as a force multiplier

‍

It is a theme Andersen keeps coming back to. For a small team without deep bench strength, access to expertise on demand is not a nice-to-have – it is the difference between shipping and stalling.

‍

“No matter how much documentation a company creates, there will always be edge cases. With Astrato, I can reach out and get an answer instantly – and that’s prevented us from getting stuck. We don’t have a big team with all the expertise, so being able to draw on theirs has been a huge accelerator. Without that, it would have taken much longer.” — Daniel Andersen, Co-Founder, Elbiil

‍

Every hour that Andersen does not spend stuck on an edge case is an hour he can spend building the next product. For Elbiil, Astrato’s team functions less like a helpdesk and more like an extension of the company’s own capabilities.

‍

What’s next

‍

Elbiil’s roadmap for the coming months includes a fully embedded, white-labelled experience so customers interact with Elbiil’s brand without seeing the underlying platform. Scheduled reporting is next – automated market updates delivered daily or weekly to customers’ inboxes. More sophisticated scenario analysis through writeback is in development, and there is early thinking about deploying Astrato on the B2C side of the business as well.

‍

The pattern is now repeatable: one dataset → multiple products → continuous monetization. Five products by year-end is the target. 

‍

“The people behind Astrato know the existing tools inside out. They’ve taken the best of what’s already out there and made it accessible, easy to build with, and complete out of the box. You don’t need extensions. You don’t need add-ons. Everything you actually need is already there.” — Daniel Andersen, Co-Founder, Elbiil

‍