Collaboration & Productivity Software

These businesses build the connectors, add-ons and small utilities that sit inside Google Sheets, Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) and the rest of Google Workspace, pulling data in from ad platforms, CRMs, call tracking systems and other sources so it lands somewhere useful without anyone copying and pasting. Hire one and what typically changes is that a report which used to take an afternoon to assemble by hand now refreshes on a schedule, a mail merge that used to be a manual slog through a contact list runs itself, or a PDF that used to be a static attachment becomes something you can track opens and clicks on. The output is usually a working spreadsheet, dashboard or automated send, not a strategy deck.

The person looking for this is usually a marketer, agency account manager or small business owner who has hit the limit of doing reporting and admin by hand. They're logging into five ad accounts every Monday to export numbers into a client report, or maintaining a Google Sheet that breaks every time a platform changes its export format, or sending the same document to fifty people one at a time because they don't have a proper mail tool. Sometimes it's a call tracking problem — knowing which ads or pages actually generate phone calls — or a follow-up problem, where replies to outreach emails get missed because there's no reminder system. None of this is complicated work individually, but done manually every week it eats real time and introduces errors that show up in client-facing reports.

The fix is almost always some form of pre-built connector or automation layer rather than custom development, which is what makes these tools quick to install and cheap relative to hiring an engineer. Where they differ is in which data sources they cover, how often data refreshes, whether they live natively inside Sheets and Looker Studio or run as a separate dashboard, and how pricing scales — per connector, per account, or per row of data moved. Some are narrow and do one job well, like a single ad platform to Data Studio connector or a call tracking widget; others try to be a broader data pipeline covering dozens of sources. When comparing them, check integration coverage against your actual stack first, then look at refresh reliability, setup effort without engineering help, and whether the pricing holds up once you're managing several client accounts rather than one.