Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps

Changed again by founders' request. Hopefully still clearer than the original!

Edit: never mind, people are still complaining so I backtracked.

the ease looks like a hack, since it's documented it's not a "hack as in workaround". in my vocabulary "hack" is a compliment, not a derogative. i grew up on jargon file.

I've used Retool and absolutely love it. It's a godsend for folks like me who want to create quick internal tools without delving into frontend frameworks and code. It's very drag-and-drop, intuitive, and easy to use. I describe it as MS Access on steroids.

This thing looks nothing like Retool. As other people have mentioned here, Refine "just scaffolds your codebase, gives you a good start, and has some cool hooks". So the whole "Open-Source Retool Alternative" angle seems very confusing and off-base to me. They look like very different tools built for very different audiences, imho.

Seems like you're trying to piggyback on the Retool wave. Why not just be honest (and a bit creative, perhaps) with your marketing? My $0.02

Here are some questions, suggestions, and thoughts roughly categorized as I went through and understood a bit more about refine (the open source) and what I can glean from enterprise.

Landing Page / Initial impressions

* You mention "enterprise" a lot on the landing page, along with being open-source, but then you also call your commercial version "enterprise". It is a tad confusing delineating what is what. Having built and sold developer facing tools, *I* have enough context to understand that you mean is "this isn't a toy, you can actually use it in for-real production apps with for-real big company requirements even in open source", but I don't think you are doing yourself favors by calling your commercial tier enterprise, as it really confuses the message.

* The above is made a bit worse by the fact that you don't have any mention of a commercial product on your landing page, so when I got to pricing (usually my second page) and see enterprise, now I am not sure if the landing page is just for commercial project and open-source is just a toy.

* As far as I can tell, you don't have any marketing pages for the enterprise offering beyond the pricing page? I want to know how it differs. I want to click on the list of additional integrations. I want some docs. Anything you can give me besides contacting sales is going to help. I am not saying it is a paper launch / painted door, but it seems like one, and a thin one at that. You may have a really great product, but your GTM seems like it is lacking, and GTM for products built on open-source is super important, but generally underdeveloped by dev led teams.

* Your landing page doesn't really tell me who the target audience is, unless I have context of another product. I totally get a play that uses the momentum of another company, but I do think you lean on it a bit too hard here. I need a tagline like "Refine is an opinionated project builder for React developers designed to 10x your ability to stop fighting frameworks and start getting work done" or something to tell me who this is for without relying entirely on knowing retool. Similar, the enterprise product has really compelling features, but without more context on pricing, use-cases, etc, I don't know if it is for me.

* Your CTA and getting started is reasonable, but, as others mention here, it is giving the user a ton of choices that they may not have a clear idea of pros and cons. I suggest changing from a horizontal card arrangement to a vertical card where you have more space to provide some guidance.

* Animations and graphics for marketing pages is very subjective, but imo, the animation of the different domains of front-end apps (backend, react, auth, etc) along with the rotating list of "enterprise-ready" features is really busy and don't tell me much. I kept thinking that the firing concern would link with the enterprise ready feature, but it seems they were unrelated which just made it noisy.

Architecture / deployment model / commercial differentiation

* Are you doing the hosting directly for enterprise version and including the direct database access? If that is hosted in your cloud... that seems really tricky security wise. If you are hosting in the customer account that seems really tricky in terms of a wide range of clouds etc. I would be curious to know how this has gone so far.

* With enterprise and the direct database offerings, it seems like you have two choices of generating APIs that connect to DBs or are doing a more "direct" API that can execute SQL. Both have challenges. is there anything unique there on offer?

* The differentiation of features between open source and commercial seems reasonable... but I am concerned that because you don't have *any* ability to use any server side integration, it becomes such a different beast that you don't have an opportunity to get people to learn it. I would think that moving a "taste" of the server-side capabilities into open-source might be really helpful

Small Nits / Fixes

* The generated project has a lot of places with hardcoded configuration that I know I would need to change for my app... but no docs/comments/hints to tell me to do that? For example, using Auth0, I have a hardcoded (real) auth0 key and secret. I found it by chance. I personally wouldn't do that in a production app, as I want to centralize all config in one place. That seems like something I wouldn't be happy with

* Your docs are expansive... but could use some refinement. They are hard to navigate, especially the tutorial section, which doesn't appear to have any representation in the left nav? They also aren't navigable they way I expect docs to be (for example, https://refine.dev/docs/tutorial/getting-started/chakra-ui is not a page). I also was able to break the back button in the tutorial section.

Hopefully this is helpful, that was a lot of negative stuff, but I do want to close with overall feedback that this is a *really* hard problem and it is clear that there is a lot of potential value here.

If you want to get deeper into any of these questions, the email is in my profile, always happy to chat with companies building cool things :)

I've always been confused (and rather peeved) at people who refer to Retool as a low-code / no-code tool. The vast majority of our users are software engineers, and that has always been our focus. In fact, we purposely try and filter out non-engineers from signing up. They have lower conversion rates, require more support (they oftentimes ask us to teach them how to write JS), and have lower NPS.

Our target audience is the developer who doesn't believe that building a simple form (that submits a POST request) should involve: 1) installing 30 dependencies, 2) learning a new framework, 3) spending hours researching the best table library, and 4) mucking around with redux trying to figure out how to get a spinny indicator on a button.

The state of web development today is _insane_, and we want developers focusing on being productive, instead of everything listed above. (Fortunately for us, most developers agree and think that web development has gotten too complicated, especially for simple internal forms.) Developers who want to ship is our market, not "non-developers" who don't know how to code.

Perhaps we should write a blog post about this one day, hmm...

(David, founder @ Retool here.)