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Form to DB

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Re: Form to DB

#41

Post by electroly »

dvdhsu wrote: post #21
nextworddev wrote: post #14

As a side note I found retool to be the most prohibitively expensive out of 6-7 solutions I was researching for “low code admin app builder” ecosystem.

Hm, sorry you found us to be expensive. Two notes: * Forms (ie the product here) is free. * We’ve always aimed to build a sustainable business where we charge reasonable prices and can guarantee we’ll stay in business ourselves. It’s true there are other products that are cheaper, but every single one of those companies is unprofitable and many will probably be dead in a few years. See, for example, Airplane, Interva…

As a counterpoint--from another potential user who looked at Retool first but landed on a competitor's product because Retool was too expensive--another way for me to avoid that outcome is to choose a tool that's open source and self-hosted. That's precisely what we did. If/when the company goes out of business, we can keep using it; this already happened to us with RethinkDB and we continue to run that in its community-maintained form. I'll likely want to find a new platform for new development but I won't have to rewrite my existing apps by a deadline.

You're right that it's a big concern, but it's a pretty tough sell to solve this problem by just charging so much that it's clear you could not possibly go out of business. I had to go pretty far down the list of your top competitors to find a good one that was open source, but I did find it.

All that said, Retool's pricing at that time was MUCH worse than it is today. This is what Retool was offering us at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20230315060042/https://retool.co... -- no distinction between developers and end users! No access controls until the $50/user/month level! That was totally out of the question. The current pricing looks a bit more reasonable, but it's too late; we already committed to the competitor offering an open source solution.

Re: Form to DB

#42

Post by _Marak_ »

dvdhsu wrote: post #21
nextworddev wrote: post #14

As a side note I found retool to be the most prohibitively expensive out of 6-7 solutions I was researching for “low code admin app builder” ecosystem.

Hm, sorry you found us to be expensive. Two notes: * Forms (ie the product here) is free. * We’ve always aimed to build a sustainable business where we charge reasonable prices and can guarantee we’ll stay in business ourselves. It’s true there are other products that are cheaper, but every single one of those companies is unprofitable and many will probably be dead in a few years. See, for example, Airplane, Interva…

Hey David! I love the sustainable work you are doing for developer tools.

We were emailing back in 2021 about one of the many products you and your team have built for developers. Exciting conversation, for sure!

If anyone is interested in reading about my experience with ReTool's approach to developer tools, I have a link: https://marak.com/blog/2021-04-25-monetizing-open-source-is-...

Re: Form to DB

#43

Post by dvdhsu »

mehal wrote: post #40
dvdhsu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, sorry you found us to be expensive. Two notes: * Forms (ie the product here) is free. * We’ve always aimed to build a sustainable business where we charge reasonable prices and can guarantee we’ll stay in business ourselves. It’s true there are other products that are cheaper, but every single one of those companies is unprofitable and many will probably be dead in a few years. See, for example, Airplane, Interva…

Dynaboard shutting down does not relate to pricing for end-users. From a Low Code product perspective, we were still able to build a beautiful and functional product. Our product unit/engineer ratio is much higher than our competition (see, for example, Retool), which allows us to provide the best value for our users. Regarding the transition, I don't see any indication from the note you posted that users will have t…

Sorry I didn't link to a Dynaboard email. Here's what an (unhappy) customer of theirs sent me: https://imgur.com/a/qTGpgbQ. They were unhappy because they're a) losing all their data, and b) losing all their applications.

Re: Form to DB

#44

Post by dvdhsu »

_Marak_ wrote: post #42
dvdhsu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, sorry you found us to be expensive. Two notes: * Forms (ie the product here) is free. * We’ve always aimed to build a sustainable business where we charge reasonable prices and can guarantee we’ll stay in business ourselves. It’s true there are other products that are cheaper, but every single one of those companies is unprofitable and many will probably be dead in a few years. See, for example, Airplane, Interva…

Hey David! I love the sustainable work you are doing for developer tools. We were emailing back in 2021 about one of the many products you and your team have built for developers. Exciting conversation, for sure! If anyone is interested in reading about my experience with ReTool's approach to developer tools, I have a link: https://marak.com/blog/2021-04-25-monetizing-open-source-is-...

Hi Marak! Let me know if you think this response is fair: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27252331. I'd summarize it as "we used a MIT library to generate some data, and unbeknownst to us, this MIT library linked to proprietary data. We then immediately removed such data once we found out."

If you don't think that's a fair reaction, would love to hear your perspective and buy you a coffee next time I'm in NYC. I'll send you an email now. :)

Re: Form to DB

#45

Post by zokier »

Borealid wrote: post #18

I remember Microsoft InfoPath, for which this appears to be a competitor. I never really understood why InfoPath didn't catch on better.

Did InfoPath have any other workflow/automation/integration things available besides BizTalk (which is the one thing I saw InfoPath with)? Because if not, then it's no surprise that it didn't catch on.

Re: Form to DB

#46

Post by revskill »

cuffe wrote: post #30
revskill wrote: post #29

Form to db is simple task, the hard part is the table.

Agree, the table is the component we’ve spent the most time building: https://retool.com/components/table-new

I'm curious what's the generated sql for the table with grouped rows ?

Re: Form to DB

#47

Post by _Marak_ »

dvdhsu wrote: post #44
_Marak_ wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey David! I love the sustainable work you are doing for developer tools. We were emailing back in 2021 about one of the many products you and your team have built for developers. Exciting conversation, for sure! If anyone is interested in reading about my experience with ReTool's approach to developer tools, I have a link: https://marak.com/blog/2021-04-25-monetizing-open-source-is-...

Hi Marak! Let me know if you think this response is fair: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27252331 . I'd summarize it as "we used a MIT library to generate some data, and unbeknownst to us, this MIT library linked to proprietary data. We then immediately removed such data once we found out." If you don't think that's a fair reaction, would love to hear your perspective and buy you a coffee next time I'm in NYC.…

It's a fair reaction, and I appreciate your offer of coffee.

Keep up the excellent work, creating value with your ReTool company. I am confident you will find continued success with your sustainable approach.

Re: Form to DB

#48

Post by dvdhsu »

electroly wrote: post #41
dvdhsu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, sorry you found us to be expensive. Two notes: * Forms (ie the product here) is free. * We’ve always aimed to build a sustainable business where we charge reasonable prices and can guarantee we’ll stay in business ourselves. It’s true there are other products that are cheaper, but every single one of those companies is unprofitable and many will probably be dead in a few years. See, for example, Airplane, Interva…

As a counterpoint--from another potential user who looked at Retool first but landed on a competitor's product because Retool was too expensive--another way for me to avoid that outcome is to choose a tool that's open source and self-hosted. That's precisely what we did. If/when the company goes out of business, we can keep using it; this already happened to us with RethinkDB and we continue to run that in its commun…

Thank you for your feedback (seriously!). I myself talked a few users that shared your point of view last year and that's why we ended up changing our pricing.

I do think there is more work for us to do — I do think especially as we get more enterprise customers (currently 4 of the Fortune 10 are customers; we're aiming to get to all 10 soon!), we'll be able to make it cheaper and cheaper for indie developers (maybe one day even totally free for up to, say, 100 users, or perhaps to introduce a plan that you can build public apps with unlimited users for free).

We have considered open-coring Retool. I think there are many pros to that (as you note). But my main fear is that it would be difficult to build a business around it, since we'd be stuck selling either hosting or support (neither of which is particularly high margin; cf. Elastic). Or we'd be forced to limit the open-source version to not have important features (e.g. SSO)... and it feels like we wouldn't be true to the open-source philosophy if so.

Thank you for considering Retool!

Re: Form to DB

#50

Post by Borealid »

zokier wrote: post #45
Borealid wrote: post #18

I remember Microsoft InfoPath, for which this appears to be a competitor. I never really understood why InfoPath didn't catch on better.

Did InfoPath have any other workflow/automation/integration things available besides BizTalk (which is the one thing I saw InfoPath with)? Because if not, then it's no surprise that it didn't catch on.

I remember it inserting rows straight into an Access or arbitrary-SQL database, and the integrations running from there. It was a data collection tool.
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