Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you!
For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494. Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!)
Today, we have tens of thousands of paying customers, are ~cashflow-positive, and have substantial revenue. But we are yet still so far from changing how internal software is built. Our thesis is that a Visual Basic-like application builder is a better way of building a certain segment of software (namely, internal CRUD apps). If you have any feedback or ideas on how we can improve the product, please do let me know (in comments or via email).
Demo tips: Name your queries. Following along "query1, query2, query3" is confusing. You should following best practice (where it makes sense) during demos, and you're definitely not doing it.
The selling point of this tool shouldn't be for the developer, it should be for the manager. So add some "here are some other examples of tools we've created in a similar amount of time through a similar process" - then have UX's for different companies, industries, regions.
Non-technical management need ideas. This demo doesn't give it beyond "hey look you can create a button to update a table". So what? Every ERP and CRM SaaS has that!
(I work at Retool.) Appreciate the feedback! We are re-recording this video in the next few months. I'll make sure that we use better query names (and other best practices) in that video.
Hey David, late last year my cofounder convinced me to try out Retool so we can rapidly spin up a prototype for a potential customer.
We spun up the prototype in a couple of weeks without much hassle. It was a huge success. so much so that the customer who we created the prototype for decided to invest 6 figures into our business.
it's 6 months later, albeit we've outgrown the prototype, I've learnt valuable lesson in prototyping fast, like as fast as you can and get it out the door.
looking forward in seeing what retool can become next. more stability, or ability to write/perform some automated testing would be amazing.
Congrats. I think retool could be great, and I really wanted to use it for our internal tooling, but we operated in Australia and the lag was just nuts. Latency was over 1 second for a page view, compared to ~10ms for a locally hosted UI - it was unusable, and there didn’t seem to be any way to get a local server instance.
Hopefully this is something money can fix :)
the problem was the sum of UI latency to US(?) plus latency of serial API calls to get the data. We could probably have lived with a full rendering time of 100ms or so, but responsiveness requirements don’t scale linearly. So with a few round trips, it quickly became insurmountable.
Yes, this is something our infra team is working on right now. As of today, somebody in Australia, with a database hosted in Australia, experiences two round-trips in order to get data (client => our backend => database => our backend => client). We are working on deploying our database connector in far more regions so this won't be a problem. I think ETA is ~next two months? Will check in with team now...
An alternative is our self-serve on-premise product: https://retool.com/self-hosted/, which you can host in your own EC2. Given this latency issue is our fault, if you want a discount, just reach out to me; I'm david AT. Happy to provide a discount until we go multi-region with our backend.
Hi all, I'm Snir -- I lead engineering here at Retool.
I wanted to follow up on the above. Solving the round trip problem David mentioned above involves multi-region for our entire backend, inclusive of our DB. This is definitely a priority and something we plan on having by EoY.
Hi, thanks to both for your answers. I could see that it was a round trip problem, and it’s good to know you’re aware of it. Despite trying really hard, the latency made it unusable.
Also IIRC, there was way more than 2 round trips .. I think my UI made a few (GraphQL) API calls and they appeared to be serialised, so it really was in the order of 1-2 seconds for a page to load. This was 18 months ago so both my memory and your implementation might have changed since then.
In terms of using retool, unfortunately that particular ship has sailed for me, but I’ll be quite happy to reconsider it in any of my new projects once you have a solution that is a couple of hundred light-milliseconds closer :)
We are also having the same issue, even in Europe the round trips add up. Our sales team uses retool as their crm system and for them the slowness is quite painful. We will be self hosting soon, but it is some work so this is unfortunate.
Another topic of interest is managing queries. What happens if a database column is renamed for example? Now we manage it though stored queries in our db - this creates some dependencies and there is always a risk that old queries are no longer used or some query has not been updated. A single place to manage and overview all queries would go a long way (maybe this exists, I have only had a small part in the implementation).
In the exact same boat. Love retool and using it a lot for interfaces we want to whip up quickly, but the performance is terrible. We're just copping it at the moment since we don't have the time to invest in any other options!
Performance is our #2 priority for our engineering team this quarter. We have made some notable gains, but there is much more work to do. Thank you for the feedback and for sticking with us; we are hard at work on it, and expect to deliver more performance wins over the next few months. (If there are tips you want on improving app performance, feel free to reach out to me; we are happy to get an engineer from our side to help debug why things are slow.)
Thanks for the reply! Sounds like your response to the parent — database connectors in other regions — will help resolve this. So we're happy to stick it out for now
Congrats. You guys are actually doing a 'holy grail' type thing and having some success, that's very cool. I don't think it's about 'what' these days, ideas are easy, but always in the 'how' i.e. how it's executed. Very impressive, well done.
Congrats on the funding and evaluation! At first, I was admittedly skeptical of yet another low code tool, but this seems pretty powerful. I think there is a large segment of the market that needs a drag and drop Visual Studio editor to build simple data workflows. Do you manage the underlying database for the customers, or are they connecting their own managed data stores? What are the most common use cases that you've seen large customers use this for?
Yes, that is our target market too. We don't think people will be building airbnb.com (say) in Retool, but not all software is like that. (In fact, we think most software is probably just CRUD apps, haha.)
We don't manage the database for customers; we instead connect to your data (whether it's behind an API or database). That was one of the first decisions we made — as a developer, if my data is already in postgres, I certainly wouldn't want to have to ETL / sync it anywhere. :)
Use cases: probably our most common use case is a CRM for a consumer company (e.g. Doordash). The reason that is so popular is because if you have (say) 1M orders a day, you aren't able to put that data in Salesforce anymore. And so the only way for you to manage all that stuff is by building custom software (instead of buying anything off the shelf). Retool is good at that: you can build CRUD-y screens very quickly. Retool, today, is not good at making everything pixel perfect (e.g. we have a grid layout engine, and you can't break out of the grid), but a CRM doesn't need to be pixel perfect.
Salesforce has a limitation of 50,000 records for any operation. 1,000,000 records for read-only operations.
If you go beyond that, you talk to Salesforce about it, because they can make adjustments for you - and you can likely afford it.
Salesforce will bend over backwards and make internal engineering changes for large customers, including adjusting governor limits, dedicating hardware and running backend queries directly for the customer.
Having any object / table in Salesforce > 1M rows is somewhat exceptional; doing that daily (using standard Salesforce capabilities) is off the charts -- just moving amount of data into Salesforce within a 24 hr window is questionable. Its built for B2B, where the data volumes are much lower, and conversely the kinds of operations / workflows you want to do on that data are typically more complex.
Wanted to say that I love your product. I've only started using it in the last two months, but it's the best backoffice tool I've had the pleasure to work with. You guys are really onto something. I wish you all the success.
A combination of building back-end services and retool admin apps to interact with them has been super successful for us. Congrats on the great product!
I do see you pivoted away from some developer tooling things, like mock APIs generated from your database schema (that was a thing previous, no?). While I see you have the mock api generator service, I seem to recall you guys had a more robust paid offering that would read your database schema and spin up a mock API.
Any reason you pivoted away from that product? I quite literally am in search of a company that will do this that doesn't also want to be our API provider in production.
EDIT: I also want to point out, I really like how mature the product has become from the time I looked into it last (I wan to say maybe a year ago, maybe year and half). Seriously considering replacing some internal admin functionality with it.
In the future, we'd love to make it more robust; we're currently working on a database-y product (think Airtable, but backed by postgres). It would be really cool to have mock data-generation built in to that product.
I have nothing todo with Retool, but I'm curious about the problem you are trying to solve. What do you want to consume the mock api?
a) Is this for rapid prototypes? (web? mobile?)
b) Do you have a microservice architecture and you want to mock out one of the services? (dev? ci?)
c) something else?
Lets say the generator looks at your schema and generates an api, how much would you want to tweak/customize that api?
Is the mock api returning data based on what's in the database? If so, can the mock api mutate data in the database?
Cloud services have a real problem, they don't all have nice emulators for data or seeding. I'd love to setup a sandboxed test database automatically, and seed it with random data based on that schema (and perhaps some heuristics, like intentionally breaking some entries or random incomplete data sets)
and I'd like do it without incurring the cost of maintaining this fully in house. I know in some cases, like with GraphQL, I can do this somewhat easy if I use a 3rd party service, I know with something like AppSync there is some potential to run it locally via an emulator, but honesty the DX story around Cloud services is kind of crappy, and this would go a long way in solving that story.
I've been really interested in trying retool since my head of ops pointed me to it a few months back. I think it should meet my use-case but I'm not entirely sure.
I run an experimentation program and I think retool might give me a way to build views on experiment performance for me and my stakeholders, but what I think it may be missing is some way of running statistics on the data, perhaps using python or R.
Data "about" my experiments (descriptions, tags, dates & times, stakeholder details etc) lives in airtable. I think I can get that into retool using sequin, right?
Performance data lives in bigquery. Sessions, clicks, conversions - all that stuff.
Right now I build ad-hoc reports in R/excel/data studio but as our velocity increases I need to streamline this.
I think what I'd like is for a stakeholder to be able to select the experiments and timeframes that they're interested in from a list, then behind the scenes the ID details to then be used to run a query in bigquery and that to pull back performance data. I'd like to show that in charts and tables on screen with how much impact the experiments have had (I think so far this should be reasonably straightforward with retool), but crucially I want to calculate confidence bounds for each metric.
Is there any way of bringing Python or R into the data flow somehow to do the heavy statistical lifting?
Am I looking at this the wrong way? Should I be trying to pre-calculate this nightly as some sort of scheduled job and just use retool as a presentation layer?
Retool PM here. This sounds like a good use case for Retool! (I built something similar to join performance data with metadata using Retool in my last role).
While we don't currently support using Python or R in apps, we do have something new shipping soon that'll make it easier to run heavier statistical lifting server side. If you're interested in a beta access, or even pairing on a build session, let me know at jane@retool.com.
Also, I think pre-calculating values and storing them in a database table is a smart idea if your velocity is increasing and you want folks to be able to access reports themselves. Your users will get a snappier app and you'll have a historical record of experiment results to reference.
Just to say that we're actively switching away from retool because you insist on charging £10 a month users who are a simply view form thats already built. I can understand charging for building and launching a form, I can understand charging something for a view only, but the same as builder? na I think not. Good luck with your pricing
A long time ago, I was at their offices and I asked them about this. If this is a limiter for you, I'm sure you could get a customized pricing plan from them if you reach out.
I believe AppSmith is a FOSS alternative, otherwise.
Thanks for mentioning Budibase. I'm the cofounder and I'd like to add one or two points.
On top of Retools functionality, Budibase also comes with an automation platform, internal db and a lot more flexibility when it comes to design and deployment.
It's certainly not a cheap SaaS, but if you get enough value out of it - it makes sense. For your use-case, it sounds like it doesn't scale and you can't justify the pricing structure they've setup.
The best thing you can do is what you've already done. Post about it publicly, let your AE know.
Hope Appsmith, Budibase, Tooljet, Bubble, et al work out!
I'm sorry; we are actively working on our pricing model right now. (We today launched a 5-seats-for-free plan: https://retool.com/blog/new-free-plan-2022/.) I think charging for end-users does make sense, but we need to think about exactly how much (as you note). Thank you for your feedback!
Oh, while we are actively thinking about pricing, if Retool is out of budget for you, please do reach out to david AT. We are always happy to be flexible on price; our goal is to convince more people that Retool is a better way for building CRUD software, not to maximize revenue. We never want pricing to a blocker for anybody. (Reaching out to me is obviously not a long-term solution, but is a good one while we think about what our future pricing plans look like.)
I think charging for end users does make sense too in the context of building internal tools, it just means that other use cases (e.g. building public apps) is not possible.
Love retool! This new 5-seat plan will mean we can get started with Retool internally properly now on a trial basis, and hopefully upgrade in the future when we decide to roll it out!
(Although there do seem to be some bugs with the new plan - it keeps repeatedly telling me that i'm not licenced to edit things and that my trial is over so I can't quite start using it yet).
Also I can't use it for my personal projects as the commercial model doesn't quite work, so I use AppSmith for that.
Hi there, super happy the new Free plan would work well for you!
I’d try visiting our billing page under settings/billing and see if you can select the free plan from there. If that doesn’t work, send me a note at antony@retool.com and we’d be happy to fix this.
I jumped on to see a demo and got stuck at the start where it wants me to add DB credentials. First thing is that I just wanted to fool around to see what I can do with it - it would be nice to have some playground DB for that instead of having to connect an existing set.
Second thing - I'd be kind of hesitant giving access to my production DB to it this way. Do you consider adding some credentials store so I could feel that you guys cannot use it from your side (in case you get hacked)?
We have something for exactly this situation shipping very soon! Happy to give you beta access if you'd like to drop me a quick note from the email you signed up with (eeke@retool.com).
Well, no wonder your business has great traction when you are so involved :)
Thank you for the invitation! I've just sent you a msg from an inbox starting with tylkointernet
On your second question, there is a zero-trust way of using Retool via our self-hosted version, which installs in a few minutes via Docker (https://retool.com/self-hosted/). If you want, you can even fully airgap your Retool instance such that no data goes in or out. (In the future we are also thinking about how we can integrate with credentials stores!)
Wait, how new is the new free plan? A co-worker of mine linked me this recently saying it might be good for some internal tooling (which I totally agree!) and I wanted to hack around with it in anger on my own first before being comfortable making any sort of pitch internally for it but when I checked the free plan (at the time) it put me off. But now it looks like quite a bit more friendly...
I'll check it out again myself if there is a useable free plan! We are paying 20k per year for some apps we got hooked on for free - nothing beats actully trying product and I'm often so busy it takes 45 days to get back to something
Must be pretty new. I used it earlier this year and was also turned off by the free plan. It used to be for one admin and you could only look at it through the editor view.
Hey, I started a free trial a while back and didn't have the time to dig in, but this post made me go back and check it out. I have a red message bar at top saying "Your trial has ended. You will be unable to create or edit Retool pages."and it seems I can't use the new free plan.
Hi there, so sorry to hear that. I’d try visiting our billing page under settings/billing and see if you can select the free plan from there. If that doesn’t work, send me a note at timofey@retool.com and we’d be happy to fix this
Took a few minutes but I realized that white downgrade was clickable. The color and text difference threw me off.
I do have a question about plans if you happen to know the answer. I see there's an option to share an app publicly (I'm assuming this wouldn't require people to log in to view?), but when I select it I'm shown and error that my current plan doesn't support this. But when I go to view the plans none of them mention a public view feature so I have no idea which one I would actually need for that.
Also do you guys have any programs to sponsor small open source projects with free or discounted higher tier plans? I'd love to migrate my open source project over (a dashboard that tracks various metrics), but I would need the publicly viewable options and I'm not sure I can cover the cost since I'm doing this pro-bono.
I just sent you an email. We love open source, and would love to support you in any way possible!
On public apps: we are in the process of creating a separate pricing package for that based on something other than users (e.g. pageviews). Since you're working on an open source project, we're happy to offer it to you for free; will follow up over email.
Founder of DronaHQ here - a semi bootstrapped retool alternative with hundreds of customers. As someone playing along side in this huge market - this is awesome news to hear and congrats to the retool team.
If you're interested in an open source alternative to Retool, checkout Budibase.
On top of a drag and drop visual builder, Budibase comes with an automation platform (like zapier) , internal db, and a lot more flexibility when it comes to design.
We launched our cloud product 7/8 months ago and we just hit the 40,000 companies using Budibase.
Budibase is open source and you can run it on Docker, K8s, Digital Ocean, Raspberry Pi, ARM, and more.
To David and the team at Retool - congrats! I'm the cofounder of Budibase and it's wonderful to see you push the industry forward. But we're coming to get you :-)
Yes. I have not tried it in a while, but it's live eval when binding was better than Budibase, and it has some components Budibase does not (report generator, scanner, signature).
Retools UX is different from Budibase. Budibase separates the dev process into 3 stages; data, design, automate - where Retool is sort of like visual basic (everything in one). We used Visual Basic a lot in previous roles and we decided we could build something uniquely better.
One other thing Budibase has is a public API, which allows you to use Budibase as a backend (with different frontends including Next js, Svelte). It's also great for inter-operability.
With Retool, you must write JS to build an internal tool. With Budibase, writing code is optional. Our main goal with Budibase is to make it as accessible and flexible as possible. Open source is a great driver of this.
Once again, it's been a while since I touched Retool and it is a very solid platform and I am sure there are more things it provides over BB.
Budibase is tackling the same problem in a different way, from being open source and a different UX, to barrier to entry. We feel this is a better strategy in the long-run.
Will you be increasing your OSS financial support? Retool uses many Open Source libraries, and given your financial position, it seems incommensurate with the total support to date of $50,250. [0]
As someone on the product side I am getting more bullish each day on low-code tooling as it gets increasingly hard to source and retain engineering talent.
Whist it might comes with downsides and limitations I think the positives in terms of time-to-market and cost outweigh these on balance for many types of needs (not all for sure).
As a pragmatic software engineer: same. The code by default era can’t end soon enough, we shouldn’t be carrying the burden of our own inferior versions of things that already exist. A decade from now we will look back on the amount of code written now as a puzzling artifact of the past.
Code when a ceiling has been reached with existing tools is the future — a ceiling which is getting higher and higher, thanks to Retool etc.
Why are the only options residing yourself to vendor lock-in or developing everything from scratch? There are plenty of open source tools, components, libraries, etc that can be used to speed up the pace of development without having a situation where you’re at the whim of your vendor because you’re unable to export your work into another form. I love the idea of creating tools that allow less technical people to build software or technical people to build software faster - but why can’t those tools be ones that allow you to export the final product into a universal format?
As someone who has built software since 1999 across a variety of platforms, open and closed source, the amount of boilerplate you have to write to create the most common objects is still astounding, no matter how many open source libraries I pull in. (often the more you use, the worst it gets)
Also "vendor lock-in" occurs in open source. Most code that gets written day-to-day is written by developers who are not qualified to work on the underlying libraries they depend on. We are locked into our server frameworks, our database engines, our front-end frameworks, our authentication library, etc.
I feel like “vendor lock-in” is fundamentally different when you’re (a) not paying for the underlying libraries and don’t have to worry about future price hikes (b) can edit and modify the underlying source code to suit your needs.
It also seems like you and I are having very different experiences with how much boilerplate we need to write to get simple programs working. In streamlit[1] for example you can get a dashboard up and running in minutes.
> we shouldn’t be carrying the burden of our own inferior versions of things that already exist
Why would people building software today need to do that? There are excellent, “batteries included” polished versions of plenty of the things we need to build software: package managers, developer tools, machine learning libraries with the latest algorithms, testing & CI/CD tooling, UI components, web servers, databases, etc. There’s even entire applications that are FOSS, if you want to build a new tool there’s nothing stopping you from adding whatever you want to a pre built FOSS application like LibreOffice, Calibre, etc.
i see it differently. if you build too much internal software/tools on PowerApps. your company is tied to Microsoft for a long term since there is no easy way to jump from PowerApps to another low code platform without redo.
Vendor lock-in is just the price of using a vendor, and one which is often overwhelmingly worth paying. What you are saying is true, but it's not really enough of a detraction to justify building everything in-house.
From the other side I can't imagine using no-code and inhering that tech debt when the equivalent software can be written by 1 skilled SWE in a day(ish), is it really cheaper than about 10 quality manhours (~$5k)?
If you’ve ever worked in the real world, you’d know that the technical debt produced by developers who think they can build no-code alternatives in 10 hours is far worse than any technical debt these tools could produce.
10% of the code we write produces 90% of the value: retool etc. allow us to spend much less time on the 90% of code that isn’t valuable to the businesses we work for.
I disagree.
I've been cranking out CRUD APIs with libraries in very little time. If something gets too complex you toss it away and maybe keep just the data model
What retool offers is a nice UI on top of CRUD apps
Cool, but I lived without it for my entire career (and I thought of building something like retool for about as long)
Was a little tongue in cheek, but we're talking CRUD not complex systems; modern tooling has dramatically expedited the speed at which we can churn out such things, I see no reason to drag it out unnecessarily.
Not bashing retool ofc, I think it's a great product for tech sectors that don't have access to top SWEs.
Bingo. The surface level value prop of these tools are: enable your ops staff to create/manage biz processes. The underlying value prop is: don't spend expensive dev time creating internal tools.
45M at 3.2B valuation? Who's drinking that koolaid?
EDIT FTFA
>>>The funding, which Retool has described to me as a Series C2, is coming from Sequoia Capital, Stripe co-founders John and Patrick Collison, GitHub’s former CEO Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, Daniel Gross and Caryn Marooney, the former VP of Comms at Facebook who is now a partner at Coatue. All are previous investors in the company. The round comes on the heels of the company raising a more modest $20 million Series C in December 2021 (which valued it at $1.85 billion).
1.4% of shares. As I said in another thread, where the valuation was based on 4.7%, it’s one thing to do an evaluation on a 10% sale. I think we should be couching anything under N% with a pound of salt, and looking askance at anything under 2N%.
I don’t know what N should be. People seem to generally accept its < 10, possibly < 5. But at N=1 it’s definitely too small of a sample size.
We actually didn't need the money (we're cashflow-positive). In fact, we haven't touched the money from our Series B (in 2020) nor our Series C (in 2021). But raising money is helpful because a) it gets prospective customers interested in the product (oh, X company raised, let me check out what their product does), b) it gets prospective employees interested, c) it allows people externally to see that the company is making progress rapidly (I wish we could post revenue metrics here, but I... think that's a bad idea?), and d) we sold very little in this round (1.4%, so there is minimal dilution to employees), for those advantages.
TBH, fundraising is kind of like charades: it's a way to signal you are doing well, without telling people your private company metrics. I wish we never needed to fundraise, and could just focus on building great products and working with customers instead. :)
Human bias at its finest - e.g. social proof. It's the classic "you don't get fired for hiring IBM" notion. If you were a CIO and chose Retool but it flopped, no one could say "what the hell was the CIO thinking by choosing a company that could go under tomorrow".
I think fundraising is more about setting a price on the company. I mean, now we know retool is valued at 3.2 billion, it is probably 20-40x revenue, may be more.
Are you using this opportunity to let employees sell stock to investors as secondary? Because giving employees liquidity for their ESOP would be a great reason, other than marketing and feel-good.
So you have $125M in your bank account, you're fcf+ and don't need capital but decided to give up your equity for another $45M. so now you have $170M in your bank account yielding 0%, for which you paid the cost of your equity, which I can assure you is in the triple digits... because you wanted a techcrunch article for prospective customers and employees, which you could have spent <$10m of the cash that you didn't need for? And 1.4% might seem like little dilution, but might be worth doing the math of the cost on a $$ basis? If y’all do well, which I’m sure you will, the cost will not be trivial.
A suggestion: if you want to really show progress and get a lot of press, do a buyback from employees/early investors instead. Signals to the world the level of confidence you have in your own stock.
With names like the Stripe founders and the GitHub founder on the list, perhaps fundraising is also a way to get those well-connected people's skin in the game? They might be good routes to new customers or other connections good for growing the business.
Couldn't a $ 3 billion valuation cut both ways as far as recruiting is concerned? If the companies current ARR is extremely disconnected from the valuation (say the valuation is 100x ARR), then I would think most experience prospective employees would be running for the hills based on what is going on in public markets right now. Lots of stories going around of employees working many years and left with no upside for those years of work after joining a company post a big raise like this. The upside was baked in before they joined.
Wouldn't saying "we're actually profitable" be better? a) you still get into news (though for a different reason), b) gives prospective employees sense of stability, c) being profitable seems like good progress in my book, and d) no dilution for existing employees, not even a little.
Not especially so. Profitable could mean many things and doesn't carry scale or risk. Doing a funding round means you were externally assessed at a value, and that investors are willing to take a certain level of risk on your company. Nothing the company says can carry that weight or detail while still keeping their metrics private.
Well, this headline is a great summary of what these valuations mean: you are worth 3.2 billion on paper, but have only 0.05 billion. That's a 70x magnifying glass for your wealth. To be a millionaire on paper, register a corp, ask a friend to invest 15k for 3% of the company, and you're officially worth a million. You'll still need a second job, though - rent isn't free.
Because "human capital" (no matter how dehumanizing it sounds) is the best one, people with money want to invest in people with great minds. Otherwise investors's money will evaporate because of for example inflation. Also, throwing couple of millions into a growing company means "i want to be part of it and take back some revenue hoping it'll be huge".
Congrats. We're big fans of Retool! We're a neobank and use Retool for all of our internal customer service, operations and compliance apps.
Our subscription is now up for renewal and it looks like we're in for a big price increase as we transition from a handful of shared users to 50+ named users + granular permissions. We're still a very small startup (<5 developers but lots of external customer service people using Retool) so hopefully we can find a way to take the company size (and not just the number of seats) into account.
Hey there, this is Alex from the Retool team. Thanks again for being a Retool customer :)
Glad that Retool has been useful for your internal operations and support teams. I work with a number of our banking & fintech customers and would love to see what apps you've built.
I also want to make sure that you have what need as you head into renewal with more users. Mind shooting me an email so I can connect you with the right people? I'm alex[at]retool.com.
Hey there, and thanks for using Retool! I’m a PM at Retool working on supporting more external-facing use cases like yours – if you’re open to it, would love to chat about the app you have in mind. Mind shooting me an email at Jamie@retool.com
Would love to learn more about your neobank! Would you be open to sharing the name? For context, I work as a PM for a company that has launched a bank product on a baas. Always looking for ways to help improve our internal tooling :)
Congrats to the team! Retool is a fantastic product. I commend the vision of the founding team to keep the focus on internal tooling and "devs" as the core of its market. I wish more people realized that "no-code" is a delusion. You need someone to create the logic, and wire things together. The right approach is the re-tool approach. Give devs the ability to create powerful tools by helping them focus on what's important.
I have ported a backoffice app from Phoenix LiveView to a Retool(Frontend) + Vercel(Api) + Supabase(database) collection and it's holding out really great. The primitives of Retool (autoupdating queries, transformers, direct integration to the database, staging and production environments) makes feature development super fast. You guys are on to something great, keep going strong.
Congratulations on the funding! I built multiple unusual internal apps for our product last year. Retool is now in my list of "must have" for any thing I build.
The build process took a bit of time and I had to hire an expert on Upwork. Not everyone might persevere. A gallery with examples of varying complexity would make the sell easier.
I've always been interested in Retool, but have a baseline requirement of any tool syncing back to Git. Is there a reason you don't allow that in the SaaS version?
We probably should support that. What's happened is we initially built the feature for an on-prem customer and never bother supporting that for the cloud version (since anybody who wanted it would just use the on-prem version). Let me follow up with the team now and see how much work it would be to bring it to cloud. Thank you for the feedback!
Retool is awesome tool, because of the introduction of some workflow in retool my team as able of 200% more perfomance in 3 months, i managed the team and shifted the tools in last months so quickly an re adapted, is fucking insane the amount of possibilites
I think retool is a great framework to build internal apps. Customers always wonder of what they can build with a framework. I wonder what were strategies that you used to solve this problem.
100k/y minimum for getting more than 5 users a d single sign on is ridicoulous. I would really like to use retool and grow with it but thats just insane for a startup.
Does this remind anyone else of FileMaker Pro? I remember I used FileMaker in my teen years (mid 90s) to build an application to help my parents manage my condo building expenses. Very simiilar concept but of course the world has changed since then, so today you'd need what retool offers (connectivity to cloud databases, building web app vs macos apps, etc). But it's funny how after 20 years old ideas become new again.
Metabase is great! I was using it 4 - 5 years ago and it was shocking how good it was as OSS.
It depends on your use case: Metabase is designed for BI (i.e. reading large amounts of data and chating it); Retool is designed for apps that write back to databases / APIs. Metabase (TBH) is better at charting (they have nicer charts, better caching, etc.). But it doesn't support writing back to APIs or databases. For example, if somebody on your team is asking "what was our revenue last month", Metabase is going to be better for that. But if your team wants an app that "shows possibly fraudulent orders, with a button to cancel & refund them", Retool is better for that (and Metabase wouldn't allow you to do that).
Appreciate the honesty - speaks volumes about you and the company.
We're very much solving for the BI usecase right now but as we start staffing up the ops part of our company, we're not going to be able to build all those internal tools ourselves. Looks like Retool would step in there nicely.
Question. I looked at the demos and the documentation. It seems like Retool can do low volume ETL. In my case, I want to pull Smartsheets data into Tableau which is our reporting tool. Is this an appropriate use case for Retool? Specifically, I want to use the Retool online version.
I really want a single retool docker image that I can just run locally to test it out. I think the last time I tried finding that it didn’t exist, and I didn’t really feel like setting up a whole docker compose stack just to see if it worked.
Fairly different - for one, Retool isn't the system of record; they're not storing any of your data, more of a back-end agnostic UI layer.
The user is pretty different too, Airtable generally targets business users who may otherwise reach for a spreadsheet, whereas Retool is focused on developers who might otherwise reach for React Admin (or something).
So a company that produces something which “RAD” tools have tried to do since approx 1990 is valued at how much again? Read a product description from a RAD environment such as Delphi or VBA or a 4GL like Rational and you will find almost the same language.
I would not touch this with a ten foot pole; it’s a massive lock in / walled garden.
Hi there - I’m a PM here working on mobile use cases. I’d love to show you what we’ve built. Mind shooting me an email at jamie@retool.com and we’ll get you up and running with the beta.
For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494. Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!)
After that, we spent around a year polishing the product and getting customers, and we launched officially on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966.
Today, we have tens of thousands of paying customers, are ~cashflow-positive, and have substantial revenue. But we are yet still so far from changing how internal software is built. Our thesis is that a Visual Basic-like application builder is a better way of building a certain segment of software (namely, internal CRUD apps). If you have any feedback or ideas on how we can improve the product, please do let me know (in comments or via email).
Oh, here's our blog post too: https://retool.com/blog/series-c2/. It has some details about our weird fundraising strategy (smaller rounds, lower valuation), which we think is more employee-friendly (lower dilution, more upside for employees). Happy to talk through that as well; here's another article about it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2021/12/22/retool-un...