Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by hanniabu » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 5:34 AM UTC

tsemenov wrote: post #119

hanniabu wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I started a free trial a while back and didn't have the time to dig in, but this post made me go back and check it out. I have a red message bar at top saying "Your trial has ended. You will be unable to create or edit Retool pages."and it seems I can't use the new free plan.

Hi there, so sorry to hear that. I’d try visiting our billing page under settings/billing and see if you can select the free plan from there. If that doesn’t work, send me a note at timofey@retool.com and we’d be happy to fix this

Took a few minutes but I realized that white downgrade was clickable. The color and text difference threw me off.

I do have a question about plans if you happen to know the answer. I see there's an option to share an app publicly (I'm assuming this wouldn't require people to log in to view?), but when I select it I'm shown and error that my current plan doesn't support this. But when I go to view the plans none of them mention a public view feature so I have no idea which one I would actually need for that.

Also do you guys have any programs to sponsor small open source projects with free or discounted higher tier plans? I'd love to migrate my open source project over (a dashboard that tracks various metrics), but I would need the publicly viewable options and I'm not sure I can cover the cost since I'm doing this pro-bono.

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

#122

Post by onphonenow » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 5:40 AM UTC

barking_biscuit wrote: post #102

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…

Wait, how new is the new free plan? A co-worker of mine linked me this recently saying it might be good for some internal tooling (which I totally agree!) and I wanted to hack around with it in anger on my own first before being comfortable making any sort of pitch internally for it but when I checked the free plan (at the time) it put me off. But now it looks like quite a bit more friendly...

I'll check it out again myself if there is a useable free plan! We are paying 20k per year for some apps we got hooked on for free - nothing beats actully trying product and I'm often so busy it takes 45 days to get back to something

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

#123

Post by yangikan » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 5:44 AM UTC

Are there any tools like Retool for developing mobile apps?

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

#124

Post by foxbee » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 5:47 AM UTC

If you're interested in an open source alternative to Retool, checkout Budibase.

On top of a drag and drop visual builder, Budibase comes with an automation platform (like zapier) , internal db, and a lot more flexibility when it comes to design.

We launched our cloud product 7/8 months ago and we just hit the 40,000 companies using Budibase.

Budibase is open source and you can run it on Docker, K8s, Digital Ocean, Raspberry Pi, ARM, and more.

If you are interested, check it out:

https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

https://budibase.com

To David and the team at Retool - congrats! I'm the cofounder of Budibase and it's wonderful to see you push the industry forward. But we're coming to get you :-)

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

#125

Post by password4321 » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 5:49 AM UTC

antonybello wrote: post #108

barking_biscuit wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how new is the new free plan? A co-worker of mine linked me this recently saying it might be good for some internal tooling (which I totally agree!) and I wanted to hack around with it in anger on my own first before being comfortable making any sort of pitch internally for it but when I checked the free plan (at the time) it put me off. But now it looks like quite a bit more friendly...

Hi! It’s hot off the press— we just launched it today!

Maybe support GitHub auth?

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

#126

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 5:51 AM UTC

santa_boy wrote: post #82

arjie wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#127

Post by foxbee » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 5:55 AM UTC

santa_boy wrote: post #82

arjie wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for mentioning Budibase. I'm the cofounder and I'd like to add one or two points.

On top of Retools functionality, Budibase also comes with an automation platform, internal db and a lot more flexibility when it comes to design and deployment.

Here's our GitHub repo for anyone interested: https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

#devtoolsshouldbeopensource

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

#128

Post by ilrwbwrkhv » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 6:14 AM UTC

foxbee wrote: post #124

If you're interested in an open source alternative to Retool, checkout Budibase. On top of a drag and drop visual builder, Budibase comes with an automation platform (like zapier) , internal db, and a lot more flexibility when it comes to design. We launched our cloud product 7/8 months ago and we just hit the 40,000 companies using Budibase. Budibase is open source and you can run it on Docker, K8s, Digital Ocean, R…

So is there anything which Retool provides over Budibase?

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

#129

Post by mullwaden » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 6:21 AM UTC

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…

We are also having the same issue, even in Europe the round trips add up. Our sales team uses retool as their crm system and for them the slowness is quite painful. We will be self hosting soon, but it is some work so this is unfortunate.

Another topic of interest is managing queries. What happens if a database column is renamed for example? Now we manage it though stored queries in our db - this creates some dependencies and there is always a risk that old queries are no longer used or some query has not been updated. A single place to manage and overview all queries would go a long way (maybe this exists, I have only had a small part in the implementation).

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

#130

Post by dvdhsu » Fri, Jul 29, 2022, 6:49 AM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #121

tsemenov wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there, so sorry to hear that. I’d try visiting our billing page under settings/billing and see if you can select the free plan from there. If that doesn’t work, send me a note at timofey@retool.com and we’d be happy to fix this

Took a few minutes but I realized that white downgrade was clickable. The color and text difference threw me off. I do have a question about plans if you happen to know the answer. I see there's an option to share an app publicly (I'm assuming this wouldn't require people to log in to view?), but when I select it I'm shown and error that my current plan doesn't support this. But when I go to view the plans none of th…

I just sent you an email. We love open source, and would love to support you in any way possible!

On public apps: we are in the process of creating a separate pricing package for that based on something other than users (e.g. pageviews). Since you're working on an open source project, we're happy to offer it to you for free; will follow up over email.