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As a side note I found retool to be the most prohibitively expensive out of 6-7 solutions I was researching for “low code admin app builder” ecosystem.

kinj28 3y ago
Curious - what was your use case for low code tool? Just build a single admin tool for a few users or something more elaborate. FWIW I run growth for a low code platform company and we are one of the retool alternatives. One of the things I am trying to get right is getting the value proposition right for different scenarios like say building a customer portal (unlimited external users) to admin tools (few internal users). So far we have been able to do good on this front by helping customers with usage based pricing or even developer based pricing. But yet curious to hear your use case and see if there is something I am missing.
- nextworddev 3y ago
  It’s a progression. It starts out as an admin dashboard for a team of 5, then it grows to an internal platform for 15 devs plus “ops” people etc. Thus there’s micro segments inside this market based on stage
  - kinj28 3y ago
    Interesting. Would love to chat if you got 15 and see if app based pricing works better or pure usage. Email is in profile.
dvdhsu 3y ago
Hm, sorry you found us to be expensive. Two notes: * Forms (ie the product here) is free. * We’ve always aimed to build a sustainable business where we charge reasonable prices and can guarantee we’ll stay in business ourselves. It’s true there are other products that are cheaper, but every single one of those companies is unprofitable and many will probably be dead in a few years. See, for example, Airplane, Interval, or Dynaboard. Dynaboard just got acquired today (their founder is apparently “thrilled” about it: https://dynaboard.com/blog/figma-acquires-dynaboard https://dynaboard.com/blog/figma-acquires-dynaboard) and they’re shutting down on April 30th. If you’re a paying customer you’ll need to rebuild all your apps by then. Ouch! (I’d rather pay more and not have worry about core pieces of my business getting shut down with three months’ notice.)
- hipadev23 3y ago
  Just wanted to echo I love your product but the pricing is too prohibitive. My use-case is wanting to offer a dashboard to my own clients. But the business pricing was $50/mo per user and also gave each user editor privileges. I want to create customer accounts, apply settings (e.g. I delimit the data their account can access, basically adding WHERE clauses on a per-account basis), and they can access white-label read-only dashboards with their own user/pass. Retool seemed 100% insistent on being an internal-only tool with a high cost per user.
  - jinen83 3y ago
    Pricing is always tricky. One pricing never fits all use case. So we have worked hard to offer pricing options like usage based pricing/ dev based pricing in addition to user based pricing. Was curious to apply your use case and see if our pricing model maximises ROI. Disclaimer: I am co-founder at a retool alternative platform for building internal tools and enterprise apps.
  - antonybello 3y ago
    Hi! Last year, Retool introduced differentiated pricing for end users (viewers) and standard users (editors) to make these kinds of use cases much more palatable[0]. We also rolled out support for building customer-facing apps through letting you whitelabel and ship apps to people outside your organization [1]. Would be more than happy to talk through your use case; feel free to reach out at antony[at]retool[dot]com. [0] https://retool.com/pricing https://retool.com/pricing [1] https://retool.com/products/portals https://retool.com/products/portals
- matt3D 3y ago
  As someone who also tried and really liked Retool but also found it too expensive I can add my reasoning. I help companies with digital transformation, what it usually entails is deploying solutions to small teams and then growing them as we get buy in from the business. The initial users are high frequency users of the tools, and later users might be infrequent users. The problem I found with Retool was that as I scaled to the infrequent users the cost per user remained static, so I would be punished for my tool becoming more popular.
yatish27 3y ago
https://www.tooljet.com/ https://www.tooljet.com/

kinj28 3y ago

Curious - what was your use case for low code tool? Just build a single admin tool for a few users or something more elaborate. FWIW I run growth for a low code platform company and we are one of the retool alternatives. One of the things I am trying to get right is getting the value proposition right for different scenarios like say building a customer portal (unlimited external users) to admin tools (few internal users). So far we have been able to do good on this front by helping customers with usage based pricing or even developer based pricing. But yet curious to hear your use case and see if there is something I am missing.

nextworddev 3y ago
It’s a progression. It starts out as an admin dashboard for a team of 5, then it grows to an internal platform for 15 devs plus “ops” people etc. Thus there’s micro segments inside this market based on stage
- kinj28 3y ago
  Interesting. Would love to chat if you got 15 and see if app based pricing works better or pure usage. Email is in profile.

dvdhsu 3y ago

Hm, sorry you found us to be expensive. Two notes: * Forms (ie the product here) is free. * We’ve always aimed to build a sustainable business where we charge reasonable prices and can guarantee we’ll stay in business ourselves. It’s true there are other products that are cheaper, but every single one of those companies is unprofitable and many will probably be dead in a few years. See, for example, Airplane, Interval, or Dynaboard. Dynaboard just got acquired today (their founder is apparently “thrilled” about it: https://dynaboard.com/blog/figma-acquires-dynaboard https://dynaboard.com/blog/figma-acquires-dynaboard) and they’re shutting down on April 30th. If you’re a paying customer you’ll need to rebuild all your apps by then. Ouch! (I’d rather pay more and not have worry about core pieces of my business getting shut down with three months’ notice.)

hipadev23 3y ago
Just wanted to echo I love your product but the pricing is too prohibitive. My use-case is wanting to offer a dashboard to my own clients. But the business pricing was $50/mo per user and also gave each user editor privileges. I want to create customer accounts, apply settings (e.g. I delimit the data their account can access, basically adding WHERE clauses on a per-account basis), and they can access white-label read-only dashboards with their own user/pass. Retool seemed 100% insistent on being an internal-only tool with a high cost per user.
- jinen83 3y ago
  Pricing is always tricky. One pricing never fits all use case. So we have worked hard to offer pricing options like usage based pricing/ dev based pricing in addition to user based pricing. Was curious to apply your use case and see if our pricing model maximises ROI. Disclaimer: I am co-founder at a retool alternative platform for building internal tools and enterprise apps.
- antonybello 3y ago
  Hi! Last year, Retool introduced differentiated pricing for end users (viewers) and standard users (editors) to make these kinds of use cases much more palatable[0]. We also rolled out support for building customer-facing apps through letting you whitelabel and ship apps to people outside your organization [1]. Would be more than happy to talk through your use case; feel free to reach out at antony[at]retool[dot]com. [0] https://retool.com/pricing https://retool.com/pricing [1] https://retool.com/products/portals https://retool.com/products/portals
matt3D 3y ago
As someone who also tried and really liked Retool but also found it too expensive I can add my reasoning. I help companies with digital transformation, what it usually entails is deploying solutions to small teams and then growing them as we get buy in from the business. The initial users are high frequency users of the tools, and later users might be infrequent users. The problem I found with Retool was that as I scaled to the infrequent users the cost per user remained static, so I would be punished for my tool becoming more popular.

yatish27 3y ago

https://www.tooljet.com/ https://www.tooljet.com/