About Decode Data

Built by engineers tired of writing the same SQL.

London, UK Founded 2025 Google Cloud Marketplace BigQuery-native

In the data field, we are always striving for simplicity. I know this because I have spent almost 20 years working directly with data, and I have learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, that complexity compounds.

It compounds in query costs, in storage bills, in engineering time, and in the quiet accumulation of pipelines that nobody wants to touch.

When GA4 replaced Universal Analytics, it introduced one of the most structurally hostile exports I had seen pushed to production at scale. Nested arrays for every parameter. Evolving schemas. No consistent field access. To get page_location and page_title out of a page_view event, you write 18 lines of SQL. Which is an issue if you want to do anything useful with the data at all.

I had seen this pattern before. Complexity that feels manageable at first, until it isn't. Every team hitting the GA4 BigQuery export faces the same wall. It is not a unique problem. It just had no good solution.

So we built one.

"The goal was simple: resolve the complexity once, as close to the source as possible, and get out of the way."

The result is a pipeline that costs almost nothing when idle, scales linearly when active, and requires no maintenance after the initial deployment. Deploy once, run forever. That is not a marketing claim. It is a design constraint we held to throughout.

GA4 is the first connector. The pattern is repeatable: find a widely-used data source with a structurally complex export, resolve that complexity once, deploy it natively into the customer's environment. No platforms, no data extraction, no external dependencies. There are other data sources with the same problem. We plan to build connectors for those too.

01

Data access should be democratic

Junior analysts and senior engineers should query the same clean tables. The complexity of GA4's export format is an infrastructure problem. It should not become an analyst's daily problem.

02

Infrastructure should be invisible

You hired analysts to think about insights, not to maintain pipelines. When infrastructure works correctly, it disappears. Decode Data is designed to disappear into your stack.

03

Connectors, not platforms

Platforms extract your data, add infrastructure, and add a monthly bill whether you use them or not. A connector deploys into your environment, runs on your existing compute, and costs nothing when idle. Simpler, cheaper, and your data never leaves your project.

  • [ 1 ]

    BigQuery-native by design

    Everything runs inside your BigQuery project. No data leaves your environment. There is no external compute, no intermediate storage, no third-party data handlers. The transformation happens where the data already lives, using infrastructure you already own.

  • [ 2 ]

    Metadata-driven and maintenance-free

    GA4's event schema evolves constantly and without warning. Decode Data adapts automatically. New event parameters are captured without schema migrations, manual updates, or engineering intervention. Each partition is processed exactly once unless upstream changes are detected.

  • [ 3 ]

    Serverless and cost-efficient

    There are no servers to provision, patch, or scale. Idle costs are negligible — if no new data is detected, only a minimal metadata scan runs. Active costs scale linearly with data volume. For most teams processing under 10,000 monthly sessions, that means $3–8 per month.

  • [ 4 ]

    Zero lock-in, full portability

    The output is standard BigQuery tables — flat, clean, documented. Connect Looker Studio, Tableau, Power BI, dbt, Dataform, or any SQL client. Export to AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage. Switch tools without touching the pipeline.

4 members
Jim Barlow

Jim Barlow

Product

Senior Data Engineer with nearly 20 years of hands-on experience. Has spent years writing about GA4's structural complexities on Medium, reaching analytics engineers and data analysts across the industry. Built Decode Data to solve the problem he kept encountering for client after client.

David R Lindahl

David R Lindahl

Growth

Growth and SEO strategist with 20+ years across digital marketing, analytics, and product. Specialises in technical SEO and AI optimization, with a track record spanning hospitality, legal tech, and SaaS.

Michael Scott

Michael Scott

Finance

Chartered certified accountant with a Big-Four background (KPMG) and an MBA. Has worked across audit, financial control, and business advisory for clients ranging from start-ups to listed multinationals. Now a fractional CFO specialising in growth businesses and tech start-ups.

Jose Ignacio Rondon Medina

Jose I. Rondon Medina

Engineering

Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer. Has been building custom web and data solutions for global clients since 2018. Specialises in BigQuery, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, and Pub/Sub, with Python as his primary language. Previously built end-to-end GCP architectures for clients in the US, Germany, and Switzerland.

Deploy in under 5 minutes

Ready to set your data free?

Install Decode GA4 via Google Cloud Marketplace and have transformed data in under an hour. No credit card required — you only pay for what you process.