11–20 of 28 posts
I was really confused until I scrolled through your landing page and I learned from examples.
One piece of feedback/missing feature was the ability to see a version history. Ideally I'd like to be able to back up my entire set up to github so that we could rollback changes easily.
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…
Got your email, and replied. I'd be glad to help. Also, although I have ended up building our back office in React, I'd be glad to ditch it, have one less thing to maintain, and let my "internal customers" build their own tools.
Have a great week-end!
I used retool at work for a while. We had some specific peculiarities with our stack that added a little too much friction for us, but overall it's a super impressive product with a lot of potential. I hope you guys continue growing so that it's around for a long time to come. One piece of feedback/missing feature was the ability to see a version history. Ideally I'd like to be able to back up my entire set up to git…
Ah, good feature request! We recently launched a beta version history + git syncing to on-prem customers. Every Retool app is a JSON blob, and we serialize it to human-readable YAML, so you can do nice diffs + PRs. If you're interested in trying it out... let me know? Thanks! https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/git-syncing
Here's what an example Retool app in YAML looks like, btw:
version: 2.8.1
components:
- id: table1
position:
top: 1
right: 1
width: 8
height: 5
template:
data: "{{ query1.data }}"
selectedIndex: ''
columns:
- id
- name
- salary
columnWidths:
- 10
- 100
- 50
columnColors:
- white
- white
- "{{ self > 60 : 'green' : 'red' }}"
pageSize: 10
alwaysShowPaginator: true
onRowSelect: ''
serverPaginated: false
totalRowCount: ''
paginationOffset: 0
sort: null
sortedColumn: ''
sortedDesc: false
allowMultiRowSelect: false
queries:
- id: query1
template:
query: "select * from users"
runWhenPageLoads: false
runWhenModelUpdates: true
requireConfirmation: false
confirmationMessage: ""
queryDisabled: "",
triggersOnSuccess: []
triggersOnFailure: []
privateParams: []
queryRefreshTime: ''
queryThrottleTime: '750'
queryTimeout: '10000'
showSuccessToaster: true,
successMessage: ''Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please clarify the definition of 'user' for billing purposes. Specifically, do end-users (with no edit permissions) count?
Hi, yes, they count for billing purposes. We bill per end-user of the tool. But... if you have a good use case and can't make the pricing work, please let me know. I'm david@retool.com, and I'd be happy to give HN readers a significant discount or even free Retool for a bit. Your guys' feedback has gotten us to where we are today. Thanks!
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?
Hi, I’m Yogi, the engineer who worked on templates. Retool ( https://retool.com ) itself is a fast way of building custom internal tools (think Visual Basic, but in the cloud). One thing that’s been challenging for us: because Retool is such a horizontal product, it was always hard for us to explain a) what exactly Retool is, and b) what people use it for. That’s why I decided to work on templates. A template is a pr…
or more simply - can you connect a single "tool" to multiple databases?
Hi, I’m Yogi, the engineer who worked on templates. Retool ( https://retool.com ) itself is a fast way of building custom internal tools (think Visual Basic, but in the cloud). One thing that’s been challenging for us: because Retool is such a horizontal product, it was always hard for us to explain a) what exactly Retool is, and b) what people use it for. That’s why I decided to work on templates. A template is a pr…
@yogi - will retool work for non-multi-tenant environments to aggregrate & create tools for the same data from XXX+ databases? or more simply - can you connect a single "tool" to multiple databases?
Also — probably our coolest feature (IMO): you can query anything via SQL, including APIs. So you could query Stripe, Salesforce, etc. via SQL, since all data in Retool is in JSON. AND you can actually join across them too. Imagine joining a Google Sheet with Stripe data with data from your database. It's great fun! https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/querying-via-sql
For example, here's how you query a JSON blob via SQL:
select
*
from
{{ [{ id: 1, apples: 3 }, { id: 3, apples: 20 }] }}
where
apples > 5
select
users.*, payments.*
from
{{ usersApi.data }} as users,
{{ paymentsApi.data }} as payments
where
users.id = payments.user_idEarlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, yes, they count for billing purposes. We bill per end-user of the tool. But... if you have a good use case and can't make the pricing work, please let me know. I'm david@retool.com, and I'd be happy to give HN readers a significant discount or even free Retool for a bit. Your guys' feedback has gotten us to where we are today. Thanks!
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?
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!
Hi, I’m Yogi, the engineer who worked on templates. Retool ( https://retool.com ) itself is a fast way of building custom internal tools (think Visual Basic, but in the cloud). One thing that’s been challenging for us: because Retool is such a horizontal product, it was always hard for us to explain a) what exactly Retool is, and b) what people use it for. That’s why I decided to work on templates. A template is a pr…
Now that you've shipped, come back and hang out at the house soon!