8 ms·

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 y

by dvdhsu 4y ago

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 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 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/ 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-unicorn-funding-round-follows-risky-employee-first-approach/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2021/12/22/retool-un...

drunkpotato 4y ago
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!
alexk307 4y ago
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?
- dvdhsu 4y ago
  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.
  - tofuahdude 4y ago
    > if you have (say) 1M orders a day, you aren't able to put that data in Salesforce anymore Could you clarify in what way you can't put 1M orders a day into Salesforce?
    - te_chris 4y ago
      Because you measure your fees in yachts at that point.
    - njudah 4y ago
      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.
    - Mandatum 4y ago
      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.
jinen83 4y ago
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.
jollybean 4y ago
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.
no_wizard 4y ago
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.
- tomhallett 4y ago
  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?
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    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.
    - Hansenq 4y ago
      Interesting...would it be accurate to say that the issue you're facing is being able to generate and access mock data for testing purposes? I'm working on building something in this space. Would love to chat with you about your use case; mind emailing me at hq@ withcodex.com? Thanks!
throw12321 4y ago
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
- arjie 4y ago
  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.
  - santa_boy 4y ago
    Yes Appsmith, Tooljet and Budibase are great FOSS alternatives.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - foxbee 4y ago
      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. Here's our GitHub repo for anyone interested: https://github.com/Budibase/budibase https://github.com/Budibase/budibase #devtoolsshouldbeopensource
- Mandatum 4y ago
  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!
- 4y ago
snarkypixel 4y ago
Product looks really cool, well done
jarek83 4y ago
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)?
- eeke 4y ago
  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).
  - jarek83 4y ago
    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
- eeke 4y ago
  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/ 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!)
dgudkov 4y ago
Quite rapid growth! I'm curious, what in your marketing strategy worked best?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
joshu 4y ago
It's amazing how far you've come since Demo Day! I regret not making time for you then!
Dyac 4y ago
Hi, congrats on the funding! 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?
- jkradddic 4y ago
  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.
Mandatum 4y ago
I love the demo. I love the tooling. 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!
- krithix 4y ago
  (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.
doctor_eval 4y ago
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.
- dvdhsu 4y ago
  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/ 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.
  - snir 4y ago
    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.
    - doctor_eval 4y ago
      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 :)
barking_biscuit 4y ago
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...
- aliasxneo 4y ago
  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.
- antonybello 4y ago
  Hi! It’s hot off the press— we just launched it today!
  - hanniabu 4y ago
    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.
    - tsemenov 4y ago
      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
      - hanniabu 4y ago
        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.
pxue 4y ago
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.
- alextapper 4y ago
  Alex here from the Retool team. We recently added a feature to write tests in your Retool apps: https://docs.retool.com/docs/testing https://docs.retool.com/docs/testing Coming to CI soon as well: https://docs.retool.com/docs/testing-in-ci https://docs.retool.com/docs/testing-in-ci Thanks for being a customer! Glad that it worked out for you and your team :)
madrox 4y ago
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.

by dvdhsu 4y ago

drunkpotato 4y ago

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!

alexk307 4y ago

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?

dvdhsu 4y ago
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.
- tofuahdude 4y ago
  > if you have (say) 1M orders a day, you aren't able to put that data in Salesforce anymore Could you clarify in what way you can't put 1M orders a day into Salesforce?
  - te_chris 4y ago
    Because you measure your fees in yachts at that point.
  - njudah 4y ago
    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.
  - Mandatum 4y ago
    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.

jinen83 4y ago

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.

jollybean 4y ago

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.

no_wizard 4y ago

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.

tomhallett 4y ago
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?
- no_wizard 4y ago
  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.
  - Hansenq 4y ago
    Interesting...would it be accurate to say that the issue you're facing is being able to generate and access mock data for testing purposes? I'm working on building something in this space. Would love to chat with you about your use case; mind emailing me at hq@ withcodex.com? Thanks!

throw12321 4y ago

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

arjie 4y ago
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.
- santa_boy 4y ago
  Yes Appsmith, Tooljet and Budibase are great FOSS alternatives.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - foxbee 4y ago
    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. Here's our GitHub repo for anyone interested: https://github.com/Budibase/budibase https://github.com/Budibase/budibase #devtoolsshouldbeopensource
Mandatum 4y ago
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!
4y ago

snarkypixel 4y ago

Product looks really cool, well done

jarek83 4y ago

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)?

eeke 4y ago
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).
- jarek83 4y ago
  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
eeke 4y ago
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/ 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!)

dgudkov 4y ago

Quite rapid growth! I'm curious, what in your marketing strategy worked best?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

joshu 4y ago

It's amazing how far you've come since Demo Day! I regret not making time for you then!

Dyac 4y ago

Hi, congrats on the funding! 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?

jkradddic 4y ago
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.

Mandatum 4y ago

I love the demo. I love the tooling. 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!

krithix 4y ago
(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.

doctor_eval 4y ago

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.

dvdhsu 4y ago
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/ 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.
- snir 4y ago
  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.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    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 :)

barking_biscuit 4y ago

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...

aliasxneo 4y ago
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.
antonybello 4y ago
Hi! It’s hot off the press— we just launched it today!
- hanniabu 4y ago
  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.
  - tsemenov 4y ago
    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
    - hanniabu 4y ago
      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.

pxue 4y ago

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.

alextapper 4y ago
Alex here from the Retool team. We recently added a feature to write tests in your Retool apps: https://docs.retool.com/docs/testing https://docs.retool.com/docs/testing Coming to CI soon as well: https://docs.retool.com/docs/testing-in-ci https://docs.retool.com/docs/testing-in-ci Thanks for being a customer! Glad that it worked out for you and your team :)

madrox 4y ago

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.