For years, "being data-driven" has meant one thing: using dashboards. A team models the data, governs it, makes it trustworthy and then hands you a fixed pane of glass to look through. You can see your business but you can’t touch it. This was not meant to be the destination. 

At Lightdash, we’re asking a more interesting question: what would you build on your data if you could create anything with complete data accuracy? We’ve introduced Lightdash Data Apps to answer exactly this. 

Build with your data, instead of just plotting it

Dashboards are the lowest common denominator of how to share data insights. While they don’t serve any specific use case, they are great as a thin (but very horizontal) way to view data. 

The reality is that different teams need the same information in different formats and different contexts. Marketing may need a deck, the exec team will need a report, and the finance team may need a forecasting model. With Data Apps, you can build all three from the same data so each stakeholder gets exactly what they need.

This is what real data activation is: making your data work for you, instead of relying on passive insights from a dashboard. And the value shows up fast. Your team stops re-using the same dashboard every time someone wants it sliced differently, and stakeholders get something they'll actually use.

How to start building with your data 

With Lightdash Data Apps, you can describe what you want in plain English, and Lightdash builds it for you, on your governed semantic layer.

Type 

"Build an app showing customers at risk of churning based on product usage." 

and you get a working, deployed app in minutes that you can immediately share with your team. You can upload your company theme, so it's on-brand by default, and the underlying data is always up to date.

Why not just let an LLM build it?

Building an app was never the hard part; a lot of tools will let you do this. However, trusting that the app is using the right data and making it easily shareable and governed is tough. When you start reusing apps built by LLMs and sharing them widely, things start to break and people stop trusting the numbers. 

With Lightdash, every data app you build runs on your governed semantic layer. The numbers trace to metric definitions everyone already trusts, permissions carry over so each viewer sees only their own data, and every query is visible so anyone can check the math.

Teams are already building with it

The team at Holded has been building custom apps on their own data and using them across the business.

"With Data Apps, we can create any kind of visualization with validated data from our semantic layer and integrate it into our dashboards. Basically, we can build anything we can imagine now."
- Jordi Somoza de la Osa, Data Analyst @ Holded

They’re not alone. OakNorth, a UK bank, started building apps to report on things their dashboards could never quite deliver. They're now at 128 data apps built across the company.

You can watch Oliver run through a few more examples of data apps customers have built with Lightdash:

Stop staring at your data. Start building with it. 

Data Apps are available in Lightdash today. Open your project, hit New → App, and describe what you want.

Here are a few prompts you can start playing with:

• Turn this month's revenue numbers into a slide deck for the board meeting.

• Build an interactive forecasting tool the sales team can filter by region and rep.

• Build an app showing last quarter's NPS scores next to revenue

If you’re not a Lightdash customer, get in touch to see how you can start building Data Apps today.