Retool

Retool's pricing can make it difficult for a typical SaaS company with a free tier to maintain margins.

Affects: SaaS companies with free tiers

Support is described as slow and unfamiliar with Retool's products and pricing, leading to repeated explanations over multiple emails. The experience was frustrating enough to prompt thoughts of abandoning Retool.

A former Retool power user finds chart creation cumbersome compared with describing the desired chart to an AI assistant. They say the editor requires dragging components and entering JavaScript snippets chart by chart.

Affects: Retool power users building charts

The app's overhead can make it a poor fit for users who want to open a dashboard briefly to check stats and close it.

Affects: End users

The commenter says Retool is expensive and locks users into its ecosystem, making it a costly and restrictive option for small businesses building simple apps.

Affects: Small businesses

The user wants a visual app builder that can be hosted independently and is open source, avoiding Retool's ecosystem lock-in.

Affects: Small businesses

The user wants team-plan users to be able to share specific apps with selected users; they say this level of permission control is currently limited to Enterprise.

Affects: Teams on the Team plan

The author wants a simpler way for less technical employees to build basic CRUD apps, with Google Sheets as the backend and SSO support for company access.

Affects: Less technical employees

The author wants to bring Python or R into Retool’s data flow to calculate statistical measures such as confidence bounds for experiment performance.

Affects: Experimentation program operators

After building an internal admin app, the user asks for an easier way to consume a custom API in Retool.

To avoid new Google logins being added to the company account, the team tells users to use personal email. Users who need company-account features must ask one of a small number of account members to add their app.

Affects: Teams using a company Retool account

The user is in the process of switching their company's Retool use to an AI-generated back office, citing usability, development velocity, and security, as well as cost savings.

Affects: Company

The developer says they were assigned no-code dashboards for the sales team despite having said they did not want that work. They left for another job, describing Retool as a framework with no future.

Affects: Software developer

The user is switching away because Retool charges £10 per month for users who only view an already-built form. They consider the view-only price too high compared with the builder price.

The company moved its internal apps to Superblocks to combine several tools and build faster. It also wanted Python and JavaScript engineers to collaborate without relying on APIs between their work.

Affects: Engineering team

As part of reducing subscription costs, the user transitioned from Retool through Appsmith and ultimately replaced it with a custom Flask app, local Postgres, and the Xero API.