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Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

retool.com

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Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#31

Post by dragonfax »

dvdhsu wrote: post #17
polote wrote: post #11

Honestly I have seen Retool being used, and see developers love it. But the one thing I hate about Retool is that anything that a developer does on Retool is tech debt. You want to do a quick form to manage an app ? Let's build it on Retool, you will lose control of everything, you can't improve the form, you don't run the form, you can't apply the usual code review, ... Visual coding is great for people who don't kn…

Hi! Thanks for the comment. I'm an engineer as well, so the concerns you raise are things I've thought a lot about. I think Retool does a few things differently, which help: 1. On We allow you to sync all your applications to Git. All Retool apps just JSON, and we serialize that to YAML (that has pretty diffs). So when you make changes to your application, those changes can be synced directly to your Git repository,…

The git thing is only for on-prem.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#32

Post by dragonfax »

I've been using retool for a year, and very heavily for some large internal tools for the last month. I find some of its design rather inspired. Its been massively helpful and surprisingly easy to use. Even for some relatively complicated tasks.

We are hitting the limits of its capability. Which is when applications get complicated or end up with lots of code. The javascript you write in your tool is running inside many layers of retool javascription and encapsulation.

But at this point if we decide to move such an app out of Retool, then the business logic is already written.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#33

Post by arey_abhishek »

ayewo wrote: post #29
drako999 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why we built appsmith. A company's core tech stack should be built on open source technology so you're never held hostage by proprietary software. https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith

Interesting project. 1. How soon will you announce pricing? 2. In terms of feature parity, how close are you to matching Retool?

thanks! 1. We'll announce pricing in 6-9 months, our project opened for beta 2 months ago 2. We are about 6 months away from feature parity, maybe even quicker if we can attract more contributors :)

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#34

Post by joshribakoff »

dragonfax wrote: post #31
dvdhsu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Thanks for the comment. I'm an engineer as well, so the concerns you raise are things I've thought a lot about. I think Retool does a few things differently, which help: 1. On We allow you to sync all your applications to Git. All Retool apps just JSON, and we serialize that to YAML (that has pretty diffs). So when you make changes to your application, those changes can be synced directly to your Git repository,…

The git thing is only for on-prem.

They still can put git or something basic diffing logic in their SaaS backend and surface some simple GUI, I have done this before just by selecting the last entry, diffing it, and inserting a newer entry that subsumed the old database entry

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#36

Post by exdsq »

I remember someone suggesting that when you write a web app you should prototype the design with the client until they like it and then build the backend. Could something like this let you create a front end responsive design but leave the logic to the backend where you can then make whatever design decisions you want to?

Edit: Also, a huge congratulations!

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#37

Post by joshribakoff »

arey_abhishek wrote: post #33
ayewo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting project. 1. How soon will you announce pricing? 2. In terms of feature parity, how close are you to matching Retool?

thanks! 1. We'll announce pricing in 6-9 months, our project opened for beta 2 months ago 2. We are about 6 months away from feature parity, maybe even quicker if we can attract more contributors :)

I took a look as a potential contributor and noticed from spot checking it seems like bug fixes are getting merged without tests, which deters me from contributing to a project personally. Looks really cool, though!

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#38

Post by [deleted] »

denster wrote: post #27

I think this is a fantastic way to describe it! I spent 5 years in the 90s creating a WYSIWYG tool with Visual Basic 6 , and VB6 was a life saver. I think retool is a fantastic, modern-day re-incarnation of that. However, I think when the UX is important -- that is, a rich, pixel-perfect design combined with robust facilities to define custom app logic, a principles-first approach has to be taken. We've taken one sta…

[deleted]

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#39

Post by haxton »

joshribakoff wrote: post #34
dragonfax wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The git thing is only for on-prem.

They still can put git or something basic diffing logic in their SaaS backend and surface some simple GUI, I have done this before just by selecting the last entry, diffing it, and inserting a newer entry that subsumed the old database entry

Hi! I'm an engineer here at Retool. I actually did build just this (a basic diffing logic tool) not long ago. It's currently behind a beta flag, but I opened a PR up this morning to get this to ship to production.

If you're a Retool user you can find it under the Beta section in your org settings. And yes, this is available on our cloud offering

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#40

Post by dang »

denster wrote: post #26

100% Agreed! Defining logic in JS is quite clunky for these sorts of tools. I'm biased[1], but for this reason we took the approach of creating a spreadsheet from scratch for the sole purpose of creating logic for apps (both internal tools & customer facing UX). Would be curious to get the everyone's input on our spreadsheet-driven approach -- thoughts? [1] I'm biased, because I'm the founder of: https://mintdata.com…

You've been excessively promoting this on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=denster). Most HN readers consider that spamming. Note the site guideline: Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's also in somewhat bad taste to appear to be making a positive contribution to the discussion of someone else's work while actually promoting your own, and you've done that twice in this thread.

(I hesitated to say something about this because Retool is a YC co and we moderate less in such cases (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) but this principle is the same everywhere and I've made similar comments in many non-YC-related threads.)

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