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

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 pre-made app that you can plug your datasource (Stripe, Postgres, Github, etc.) into. Think old-school MS Word templates but for apps instead. You can plug in your credentials to get an extensible UI for your data. These templates aren’t meant to be 100% usable out of the box, but really to give you an idea of what you can do with Retool, quickly. (For example, here’s a video of us building the Github PR dashboard, which I mention below, in 15 minutes: https://cdn.tryretool.com/github_dashboard.mp4)

All of these templates are built from real-world use-cases that other companies are using Retool for. For example, we have customers using something very similar to our “Stripe refund tool” template. It pulls in data from Stripe, joins it to purchases in our database, and lets you refund an order in one click. (It updates the database, POSTs back to Stripe, and sends an email to the customer.)

My favorite is probably the Github PR dashboard. As an engineer myself, I want to start work everyday knowing who I’m blocking (i.e. I need to review their PR), and who I’m blocked on (i.e. I need to remind them to review my PR). I’d also like a quick summary of what a PR is. So I built this dashboard that loads all this information with the Github API at once, so I can just browse through them without waiting for each page to load. (Apparently this is an actual internal tool at Stripe that engineers check every day.)

Please let us know what you think! You can use any template to create your own app by clicking on “Use Template”.

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 developing the back office's front in React.

Although, in hindsight, maybe I was "holding it wrong". Unless my situation wasn't appropriate for the tool. Or maybe my way of using Firestore collections is just plain wrong. Who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Been watching Retool for a while and it's a fantastic looking product and concept. I think almost every company ends up spending a relatively significant chunk of time building up internal tooling like this.

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!

Wow, this looks amazing. I might give it a go and see if I can replace my own internal crappy admin panel with this. Kudos for supporting GraphQL!