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Show HN: Retool Templates – Custom internal tools with drag-and-drop components

retool.com

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21–28 of 28 posts

Re: Show HN: Retool Templates – Custom internal tools with drag-and-drop components

#21

Post by vijucat »

How is extensibility handled (on the UI side, on the back-end)? Are internals transparent or is it meant to be a black box? Just wondering what happens if one hits the boundaries of what the tool can do and wants to extend or integrate...

The last time I evaluated RAD (Rapid Application Development, for all you cool folks who refuse to know anything that wasn't invented after JavaScript) tool-builders, I really liked https://www.awareim.com/. They're not that famous, but I appreciated the extensibility.

Re: Show HN: Retool Templates – Custom internal tools with drag-and-drop components

#22

Post by dvdhsu »

vijucat wrote: post #21

How is extensibility handled (on the UI side, on the back-end)? Are internals transparent or is it meant to be a black box? Just wondering what happens if one hits the boundaries of what the tool can do and wants to extend or integrate... The last time I evaluated RAD (Rapid Application Development, for all you cool folks who refuse to know anything that wasn't invented after JavaScript) tool-builders, I really liked…

We're engineers, and Retool is built for engineers. So it's pretty flexible: the internals are all available for you to see and modify (every Retool app is serialized to a YAML blob, and can be synced bi-directionally to Git), you can write JS in most places, as well as import npm packages (everything inside {{ }} is sandboxed JS), the front-end components are extensible (you can import your own React, Vue, etc. components), and the back-end we're completely agnostic towards (we connect to any REST / GraphQL API, as well as most databases).

Here's more info on:

* git syncing: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/git-syncing

* hosting on-prem: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/setup-instructions

* custom components: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/custom-react-components

* using JS between {{}}: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/javascript-overview

* writing custom JS: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/custom-js-code

Let me know if there's anything else I can help with? Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Retool Templates – Custom internal tools with drag-and-drop components

#23

Post by infinite8s »

dvdhsu wrote: post #19
vish4 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 3 cases: 1) a dashboard for an internal system which will be used by a team of 10 only. Will it cost me $100/month? 2) A dashboard used by 10 people in my team, but could be view by the rest of the company (say 100) people occasionally. will it cost me $1100/month? 3) Lastly, say I develop 10 different internal tools for my team of 10 people. Will I have to pay $100/month for each app?

1 - Yes, $100 / month. 2 - We bill per monthly active user, so if they're active that month, we'll bill for them. If that's too much for you, please reach out to david@retool.com and I'll try to find some pricing plan that works for you. 3 - No, you can build as many apps as you want. Thanks for the questions!

One model you could explore would be similar to Tableau's creator vs user/viewer license, which has a 10:1 price difference.

Re: Show HN: Retool Templates – Custom internal tools with drag-and-drop components

#24

Post by syogi »

alexgodin wrote: post #9

Mostly lurker coming here to say that Retool is the #1 SaaS app we use to run our startup. I rarely evangelize things, but Retool is so amazing that I feel the need to yell from the rooftops. Everyone on our team is now able to build complex tools and dashboards without dev resources!

Thanks for your support Alex!

Re: Show HN: Retool Templates – Custom internal tools with drag-and-drop components

#26

Post by Dansvidania »

dvdhsu wrote: post #7
ElFitz wrote: post #4

The last time I used Retool, I ended up wanting to kill myself. But that's mostly because we rely on Firebase and have many collections, with documents referencing other documents,... So loading times ended up taking for ever, and it seemed like the simplest thing to do was to query everything and handle the references 'locally', leading to astronomical RAM usage :/ After a week a scrapped it all and went back to dev…

Hi, I'm David, and I work @ Retool. I'm really sorry that our Firebase support is bad — we built it specifically for one customer and haven't iterated on it since. You're right that Retool doesn't handle deeply nested JSON well. (We designed Retool mostly for databases, so it handles tabular data pretty well.) This is something we will be working on next sprint! Do you mind if I reach out to you? (Edit: found your em…

Hey David, love to see you guys on hacker news! Come visit us in Czech Republic again soon :D

Re: Show HN: Retool Templates – Custom internal tools with drag-and-drop components

#27

Post by ethiclub »

Retool and the Retool team are absolutely superb.

In our experience, it's the current winner amongst the flourishing low code/db app/spreadsheet app space. It is one of few that to me, proves that this space should (and will) eat market share from excel/gsheets on one end, and expensive bespoke tools on the other. Also eager to see these offering more competition against small ERPs, CRMs and the like - Perhaps this will eventually even give behemoths such as ConnectWise, Salesforce et al a run for their money. Those companies need some competition on both innovation and price. For now though obviously, this is best used for business automation, small tools, and stitching data/processes together.

Not affiliated, just a very happy customer. Customer support is above and beyond. Trialed internally to great success, thus preparing to consider in client solutions.

Re: Show HN: Retool Templates – Custom internal tools with drag-and-drop components

#28

Post by thedangler »

Product looks amazing and I'm thinking about using it on a personal level. But my overall sentiment is the same, per user billing is getting out of hand. It makes sense for application where you expect 1 - 20 users max but for places like us we wont use anything that has per user billing. Our end users are in the 1000's

Love your work though!

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