From Excel hell to on-premises AI analytics — how I built a data tool for factories

I'm a solo developer from Finland. For years I did automation consulting work for industrial companies — factories, energy plants, water treatment facilities. They all had the same problem: valuable process data sitting inside their OPC UA systems, completely unreachable for day-to-day analysis.

Their options were expensive:

• Add a SCADA reporting module for €20,000+

• Send data to a cloud platform and pay per tag, per month, forever

• Hire someone to build custom exports into Excel and pray nothing breaks

None of that made sense for a 20-person plastics factory or a district heating plant.

So I started building DataPortia. A self-hosted web application that connects to OPC UA automation systems, stores everything locally in PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB, and gives engineers a clean browser-based interface for dashboards, trend charts, and automated PDF/CSV reports. One Windows installer, batteries included.

The first customer went live in 2023. Then a second. Then I realized I had something worth packaging properly.

The AI addition

Last year I integrated Ollama so engineers can run local LLMs against their own process data — anomaly detection, trend forecasting, cost optimization analysis, and plain natural language Q&A. No API keys. No data leaving the factory. Just: "why did energy consumption spike on Tuesday night?" answered by a model running on the local server.

Where I am now

• Version 2.22 shipped

• Real paying customers in production environments

• Solo, bootstrapped, profitable on a small scale

• Available on Windows and Linux

I'm posting here mostly to learn from others who've built and sold B2B software to industrial SMEs. The sales cycle is long, the buyers are conservative, and "just try the free trial" doesn't always work when you need IT approval and an OPC UA test server.

Happy to answer questions about the technical side, the OPC UA world, or what it's like selling software to people who still fax purchase orders.