[dvdhsu]

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) 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.)

[electroly]

As a counterpoint--from another potential user who looked at Retool first but landed on a competitor's product because Retool was too expensive--another way for me to avoid that outcome is to choose a tool that's open source and self-hosted. That's precisely what we did. If/when the company goes out of business, we can keep using it; this already happened to us with RethinkDB and we continue to run that in its community-maintained form. I'll likely want to find a new platform for new development but I won't have to rewrite my existing apps by a deadline.

You're right that it's a big concern, but it's a pretty tough sell to solve this problem by just charging so much that it's clear you could not possibly go out of business. I had to go pretty far down the list of your top competitors to find a good one that was open source, but I did find it.

All that said, Retool's pricing at that time was MUCH worse than it is today. This is what Retool was offering us at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20230315060042/https://retool.co... -- no distinction between developers and end users! No access controls until the $50/user/month level! That was totally out of the question. The current pricing looks a bit more reasonable, but it's too late; we already committed to the competitor offering an open source solution.

[dvdhsu]

Thank you for your feedback (seriously!). I myself talked a few users that shared your point of view last year and that's why we ended up changing our pricing.

I do think there is more work for us to do — I do think especially as we get more enterprise customers (currently 4 of the Fortune 10 are customers; we're aiming to get to all 10 soon!), we'll be able to make it cheaper and cheaper for indie developers (maybe one day even totally free for up to, say, 100 users, or perhaps to introduce a plan that you can build public apps with unlimited users for free).

We have considered open-coring Retool. I think there are many pros to that (as you note). But my main fear is that it would be difficult to build a business around it, since we'd be stuck selling either hosting or support (neither of which is particularly high margin; cf. Elastic). Or we'd be forced to limit the open-source version to not have important features (e.g. SSO)... and it feels like we wouldn't be true to the open-source philosophy if so.

Thank you for considering Retool!

[matt3D]

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.

[mehal]

Dynaboard shutting down does not relate to pricing for end-users.

From a Low Code product perspective, we were still able to build a beautiful and functional product. Our product unit/engineer ratio is much higher than our competition (see, for example, Retool), which allows us to provide the best value for our users. Regarding the transition, I don't see any indication from the note you posted that users will have to rebuild all their apps. Rather, the founder is saying he will provide more information and possible steps. Who knows – maybe it would be integrated into Figma? And Figma would gain great runtime and IDE capacities?

[dvdhsu]

Sorry I didn't link to a Dynaboard email. Here's what an (unhappy) customer of theirs sent me: https://imgur.com/a/qTGpgbQ. They were unhappy because they're a) losing all their data, and b) losing all their applications.

[swimmadude66]

mehal and I are former Dynaboard engineers, so we are well aware of the situation. No one is more upset about the removal of Dynaboard than the team, but it doesn't justify poor pricing practices from competitors

[hipadev23]

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.

[antonybello]

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 [1] https://retool.com/products/portals

[jinen83]

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.

[_Marak_]

Hey David! I love the sustainable work you are doing for developer tools.

We were emailing back in 2021 about one of the many products you and your team have built for developers. Exciting conversation, for sure!

If anyone is interested in reading about my experience with ReTool's approach to developer tools, I have a link: https://marak.com/blog/2021-04-25-monetizing-open-source-is-...

[dvdhsu]

Hi Marak! Let me know if you think this response is fair: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27252331. I'd summarize it as "we used a MIT library to generate some data, and unbeknownst to us, this MIT library linked to proprietary data. We then immediately removed such data once we found out."

If you don't think that's a fair reaction, would love to hear your perspective and buy you a coffee next time I'm in NYC. I'll send you an email now. :)

[_Marak_]

It's a fair reaction, and I appreciate your offer of coffee.

Keep up the excellent work, creating value with your ReTool company. I am confident you will find continued success with your sustainable approach.