Retool is fantastic but truly priced for inhouse use cases only. My general advice with low-code / RAD is you only find out it’s showstopping limitation when you’re already too deep into it. It’s inevitable that something that seems obvious and simple to you will be nigh impossible on the platform, or at least require a series of expensive and brittle hacks. Use a common language to build the system your customers want, and accelerate your progress with coding LLMs if you want. You’ll own it, (hopefully) understand it, and can maintain it for year 2 and beyond operations.
What is your exit plan if Retool doesn’t fit your needs otherwise?
Depends entirely on how much per-customer/seat you can charge. Retool is fairly expensive, but they've just recently started offering external user pricing. It's $7-10/user/mo and caps at $4250/mo at 500 users, at which point additional users are free. At 4,250 users you'd be paying $1/user/mo. They also have embedded/portal type solutions now, so your users won't know they're logging into Retool. I'm not sure if you could support a free-user tier without likely violating their TOS, though it does depend on what your SaaS offers. You can host public-facing no-login-required apps for free.
Downsides? The app overhead can be bulky. It's not something users are going to quickly open, look at some stats, and close imo. If your use-case is users logging-into the platform and likely keeping the dashboard/whatever open for hours or indefinitely? That's a better fit.
Their support team needs a lot of work. They generally are slow to respond and don't understand their own products or pricing. A lot of what should be simple questions end up taking multiple back and forth emails where you find yourself explaining the nature of your problem/question to the support person. It's extremely frustrating to the point I've thought about abandoning them over how incompetent support is. That said, the CEO is really responsive to direct emails...
I spent a lot of time looking at options in this space for a similar need 1-2 years ago. I really wanted to use Retool but Retool’s pricing and lock in at the time just wasn’t appealing. A few other options I looked at were:
* Plasmic (open source)
* Jet Admin (proprietary)
* Budibase (open source)
* Appsmith (open source)
And a few others. Most had limitations around our need of multi tenancy/team oriented backend, or were too oriented towards internal tools, and I was worried about data lock in with the proprietary ones.
Ultimately I chose to go with Rails with Bullet Train. But this was right before LLMs became kind of the norm to hack stuff together. If I were to choose today, I’d probably pick Plasmic with some LLM hacked together TypeScript backend for a good balance between low effort dev velocity and future proofing, maybe with a BaaS like Supabase+Auth0. All the LLMs seem to be trained on a TypeScript-shaped shallow stack, and static typing gives a bit more protection against LLMs chasing the dragon.
Yes, Retool can be used for production and user-facing apps! Retool for External Apps is designed to build and manage apps for users outside your organization. It offers built-in login, authentication, access controls, and customizable user journeys. Many businesses have successfully used Retool for external applications, from real estate management to customer onboarding. https://www-redhumana.com
At some point you realize the whole thing could have existed as a node or flask app after locking yourself into limitations that simply don't need to exist. Prototyping is great with tools like this but if its not fully open source, not exportable to code, thus dependent on someone elses successful seed round... avoid it.
It's definitely used by some non-tech companies (think exercise companies, or property management) but not sure it's the typical HN crowd so you might not get war stories
it is ok to do proof of concept. But for production, user-facing app, how are you gonna make enough money with their pricing per user? It just doesn't make any sense from a cost perspective if you're creating consumer app or low margin sass app.
If you're bootstraped, does that mean you already have something? What is it and why do you want to replace it? Beware of large greenfield remake projects, these often fail spectacularly.
Can't speak about Retool but I wouldn't want to go away from standard software development life cycle with version control, release management and testing... And I definitely would want to avoid a proprietary platform. Isn't there an open source alternative?
We evaluated PayloadCMS to drive the backend of a mobile app and eventually settled on Directus because it supported heterogeneous collections which was something we had to have.
Directus also has a template for a multi-tenant app which sounds like something you might need.
Retool is fantastic but truly priced for inhouse use cases only. My general advice with low-code / RAD is you only find out it’s showstopping limitation when you’re already too deep into it. It’s inevitable that something that seems obvious and simple to you will be nigh impossible on the platform, or at least require a series of expensive and brittle hacks. Use a common language to build the system your customers want, and accelerate your progress with coding LLMs if you want. You’ll own it, (hopefully) understand it, and can maintain it for year 2 and beyond operations.
What is your exit plan if Retool doesn’t fit your needs otherwise?
Depends entirely on how much per-customer/seat you can charge. Retool is fairly expensive, but they've just recently started offering external user pricing. It's $7-10/user/mo and caps at $4250/mo at 500 users, at which point additional users are free. At 4,250 users you'd be paying $1/user/mo. They also have embedded/portal type solutions now, so your users won't know they're logging into Retool. I'm not sure if you could support a free-user tier without likely violating their TOS, though it does depend on what your SaaS offers. You can host public-facing no-login-required apps for free.
Downsides? The app overhead can be bulky. It's not something users are going to quickly open, look at some stats, and close imo. If your use-case is users logging-into the platform and likely keeping the dashboard/whatever open for hours or indefinitely? That's a better fit.
Their support team needs a lot of work. They generally are slow to respond and don't understand their own products or pricing. A lot of what should be simple questions end up taking multiple back and forth emails where you find yourself explaining the nature of your problem/question to the support person. It's extremely frustrating to the point I've thought about abandoning them over how incompetent support is. That said, the CEO is really responsive to direct emails...
I spent a lot of time looking at options in this space for a similar need 1-2 years ago. I really wanted to use Retool but Retool’s pricing and lock in at the time just wasn’t appealing. A few other options I looked at were:
* Plasmic (open source)
* Jet Admin (proprietary)
* Budibase (open source)
* Appsmith (open source)
And a few others. Most had limitations around our need of multi tenancy/team oriented backend, or were too oriented towards internal tools, and I was worried about data lock in with the proprietary ones.
Ultimately I chose to go with Rails with Bullet Train. But this was right before LLMs became kind of the norm to hack stuff together. If I were to choose today, I’d probably pick Plasmic with some LLM hacked together TypeScript backend for a good balance between low effort dev velocity and future proofing, maybe with a BaaS like Supabase+Auth0. All the LLMs seem to be trained on a TypeScript-shaped shallow stack, and static typing gives a bit more protection against LLMs chasing the dragon.
Yes, Retool can be used for production and user-facing apps! Retool for External Apps is designed to build and manage apps for users outside your organization. It offers built-in login, authentication, access controls, and customizable user journeys. Many businesses have successfully used Retool for external applications, from real estate management to customer onboarding. https://www-redhumana.com
I'm competing in this space, though my solution is still in development. There's a wait-list you can sign-up for if you like: https://aiconstrux.com
At some point you realize the whole thing could have existed as a node or flask app after locking yourself into limitations that simply don't need to exist. Prototyping is great with tools like this but if its not fully open source, not exportable to code, thus dependent on someone elses successful seed round... avoid it.
Retool launched a way to do this a few months ago: https://retool.com/blog/external-apps
It's definitely used by some non-tech companies (think exercise companies, or property management) but not sure it's the typical HN crowd so you might not get war stories
it is ok to do proof of concept. But for production, user-facing app, how are you gonna make enough money with their pricing per user? It just doesn't make any sense from a cost perspective if you're creating consumer app or low margin sass app.
If you're bootstraped, does that mean you already have something? What is it and why do you want to replace it? Beware of large greenfield remake projects, these often fail spectacularly.
Hey thrw42A8N,
I've done a large greenfield rebuild before, which was a success - but I will never do that again. It ate my life.
I do have a bootstrapped product already in the market, but this is a second, unrelated product for a different audience....a new project entirely.
First project is Node + React but considering Retool for a v1 for this next project.
PayloadCMS was recently front page
Can't speak about Retool but I wouldn't want to go away from standard software development life cycle with version control, release management and testing... And I definitely would want to avoid a proprietary platform. Isn't there an open source alternative?
I believe Appsmith is open source, and self-hostable. Never used it, so I'm not sure if it's fully or partially open.
Thanks for that - I hadn't come across PayloadCMS.
Retool seems to support basics like version control, release mgt etc but the platform risk of a proprietary platform is certainly a concern.
I would also recommend looking at Directus (https://directus.io).
We evaluated PayloadCMS to drive the backend of a mobile app and eventually settled on Directus because it supported heterogeneous collections which was something we had to have.
Directus also has a template for a multi-tenant app which sounds like something you might need.