DataPortia
On-premises industrial data acquisition with local AI
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.
2 Comments
This comment was deleted 6 months ago
Thanks Rugero, really appreciate the thoughtful comment!
The demo question is a real one. Most customers already have an OPC UA-capable PLC or SCADA system running — they just haven't exposed the OPC UA server yet. So the first demo is usually: enable OPC UA on their existing system, point DataPortia at it, and within 10 minutes they're seeing live data. No staging setup needed.
The trickier part is the sales cycle itself. The person who evaluates the software is often not the one who signs the purchase order — and yes, sometimes that person does still fax things. 😄 So keeping the trial friction as low as possible has been the biggest lever.
Good luck with LucidRepos — the "get someone to actually try it" problem really is universal. For us the turning point was making the Windows installer bundle PostgreSQL automatically. Removing that one setup step dropped a lot of early drop-offs.