Business intelligence (BI) is the activity of extracting strategic information from big data. The benefits of this activity for enterprises span from the reduction of the operative costs due to a more sensible internal organization to a more productive and aware decision process. To be effective, BI relies heavily on the availability of a huge amount of (possibly high-quality) data. The steady decrease of costs for acquiring, storing and analyzing large knowledge bases has motivated big companies to invest in BI technologies. Until now, instead, SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Companies) are excluded from the benefits of BI because of their limited budget and resources. In this paper we show that a satisfactory BI activity is possible even in presence of a small budget. Our ultimate goal is not necessarily that of proposing novel solutions but providing the practitioners with a sort of hitchhiker’s guide to a cost-effective web-based BI. In particular, we discuss how the Web can be used as a cheap yet reliable source of information where crawling, data cleaning and classification can be achieved using a limited amount of CPU, storage space and bandwidth.