[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!