From my experience (mostly startups), real time analytics is generally overkill, esp. from a BI perspective. Unless your business is very focused on real time data and transactional processing, you can generally get away with ETL/batch jobs. Show executives, product, and downstream teams some metrics that update a few times per day saves a ton of money over things like Snowflake/Databricks/Redshift stuff. While cloud services can be pricey, tools like dbt are really useful and can be administered by savvy business people or analyst types. Those candidates are way easier to hire compared to data engineers, sql experts, etc.
