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Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

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Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#81

Post by doctor_eval »

dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…

Congrats. I think retool could be great, and I really wanted to use it for our internal tooling, but we operated in Australia and the lag was just nuts. Latency was over 1 second for a page view, compared to ~10ms for a locally hosted UI - it was unusable, and there didn’t seem to be any way to get a local server instance.

Hopefully this is something money can fix :)

the problem was the sum of UI latency to US(?) plus latency of serial API calls to get the data. We could probably have lived with a full rendering time of 100ms or so, but responsiveness requirements don’t scale linearly. So with a few round trips, it quickly became insurmountable.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#82

Post by santa_boy »

arjie wrote: post #48
throw12321 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to say that we're actively switching away from retool because you insist on charging £10 a month users who are a simply view form thats already built. I can understand charging for building and launching a form, I can understand charging something for a view only, but the same as builder? na I think not. Good luck with your pricing

A long time ago, I was at their offices and I asked them about this. If this is a limiter for you, I'm sure you could get a customized pricing plan from them if you reach out. I believe AppSmith is a FOSS alternative, otherwise.

Yes Appsmith, Tooljet and Budibase are great FOSS alternatives.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#83

Post by dvdhsu »

doctor_eval wrote: post #81
dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…

Congrats. I think retool could be great, and I really wanted to use it for our internal tooling, but we operated in Australia and the lag was just nuts. Latency was over 1 second for a page view , compared to ~10ms for a locally hosted UI - it was unusable, and there didn’t seem to be any way to get a local server instance. Hopefully this is something money can fix :) the problem was the sum of UI latency to US(?) pl…

Yes, this is something our infra team is working on right now. As of today, somebody in Australia, with a database hosted in Australia, experiences two round-trips in order to get data (client => our backend => database => our backend => client). We are working on deploying our database connector in far more regions so this won't be a problem. I think ETA is ~next two months? Will check in with team now...

An alternative is our self-serve on-premise product: https://retool.com/self-hosted/, which you can host in your own EC2. Given this latency issue is our fault, if you want a discount, just reach out to me; I'm david AT. Happy to provide a discount until we go multi-region with our backend.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#84

Post by alistairw »

doctor_eval wrote: post #81
dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…

Congrats. I think retool could be great, and I really wanted to use it for our internal tooling, but we operated in Australia and the lag was just nuts. Latency was over 1 second for a page view , compared to ~10ms for a locally hosted UI - it was unusable, and there didn’t seem to be any way to get a local server instance. Hopefully this is something money can fix :) the problem was the sum of UI latency to US(?) pl…

In the exact same boat. Love retool and using it a lot for interfaces we want to whip up quickly, but the performance is terrible. We're just copping it at the moment since we don't have the time to invest in any other options!

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#85

Post by krithix »

Mandatum wrote: post #75
dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…

I love the demo. I love the tooling. Demo tips: Name your queries. Following along "query1, query2, query3" is confusing. You should following best practice (where it makes sense) during demos, and you're definitely not doing it. The selling point of this tool shouldn't be for the developer, it should be for the manager. So add some "here are some other examples of tools we've created in a similar amount of time thro…

(I work at Retool.) Appreciate the feedback! We are re-recording this video in the next few months. I'll make sure that we use better query names (and other best practices) in that video.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#86

Post by dvdhsu »

no_wizard wrote: post #22
dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…

I do see you pivoted away from some developer tooling things, like mock APIs generated from your database schema (that was a thing previous, no?). While I see you have the mock api generator service, I seem to recall you guys had a more robust paid offering that would read your database schema and spin up a mock API. Any reason you pivoted away from that product? I quite literally am in search of a company that will…

Ah, we still have a way of generating mock APIs: https://retool.com/api-generator. You can upload a CSV (we'll parse the columns and guess types for each one), and then generate mock data and put it into an AIP for you: https://retool.com/utilities/generate-api-from-csv.

In the future, we'd love to make it more robust; we're currently working on a database-y product (think Airtable, but backed by postgres). It would be really cool to have mock data-generation built in to that product.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#87

Post by eeke »

jarek83 wrote: post #61
dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…

I jumped on to see a demo and got stuck at the start where it wants me to add DB credentials. First thing is that I just wanted to fool around to see what I can do with it - it would be nice to have some playground DB for that instead of having to connect an existing set. Second thing - I'd be kind of hesitant giving access to my production DB to it this way. Do you consider adding some credentials store so I could f…

We have something for exactly this situation shipping very soon! Happy to give you beta access if you'd like to drop me a quick note from the email you signed up with (eeke@retool.com).

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#88

Post by cuffe »

mousetree wrote: post #24

Congrats. We're big fans of Retool! We're a neobank and use Retool for all of our internal customer service, operations and compliance apps. Our subscription is now up for renewal and it looks like we're in for a big price increase as we transition from a handful of shared users to 50+ named users + granular permissions. We're still a very small startup ( Looking forward to continuing to build on Retool!

Hey there, and thanks for using Retool! I’m a PM at Retool working on supporting more external-facing use cases like yours – if you’re open to it, would love to chat about the app you have in mind. Mind shooting me an email at Jamie@retool.com

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#89

Post by dvdhsu »

throw12321 wrote: post #39
dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…

Just to say that we're actively switching away from retool because you insist on charging £10 a month users who are a simply view form thats already built. I can understand charging for building and launching a form, I can understand charging something for a view only, but the same as builder? na I think not. Good luck with your pricing

I'm sorry; we are actively working on our pricing model right now. (We today launched a 5-seats-for-free plan: https://retool.com/blog/new-free-plan-2022/.) I think charging for end-users does make sense, but we need to think about exactly how much (as you note). Thank you for your feedback!

Oh, while we are actively thinking about pricing, if Retool is out of budget for you, please do reach out to david AT. We are always happy to be flexible on price; our goal is to convince more people that Retool is a better way for building CRUD software, not to maximize revenue. We never want pricing to a blocker for anybody. (Reaching out to me is obviously not a long-term solution, but is a good one while we think about what our future pricing plans look like.)

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#90

Post by dvdhsu »

alistairw wrote: post #84
doctor_eval wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats. I think retool could be great, and I really wanted to use it for our internal tooling, but we operated in Australia and the lag was just nuts. Latency was over 1 second for a page view , compared to ~10ms for a locally hosted UI - it was unusable, and there didn’t seem to be any way to get a local server instance. Hopefully this is something money can fix :) the problem was the sum of UI latency to US(?) pl…

In the exact same boat. Love retool and using it a lot for interfaces we want to whip up quickly, but the performance is terrible. We're just copping it at the moment since we don't have the time to invest in any other options!

Performance is our #2 priority for our engineering team this quarter. We have made some notable gains, but there is much more work to do. Thank you for the feedback and for sticking with us; we are hard at work on it, and expect to deliver more performance wins over the next few months. (If there are tips you want on improving app performance, feel free to reach out to me; we are happy to get an engineer from our side to help debug why things are slow.)
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