Currently on the Team plan with 20 users, of which only 2 need edit permissions.
Only way to have 18 viewers and 2 editors would be to pay 5x more per month (essentially I now have to make an argument why we need to pay considerably more for some users to be able to do less).
Want to add the rest of the company over the next few months, probably another 100 or so people. Still only 2 editors though, no way can I justify the price hike.
A pricing model where it's $50 per editor and $10 per viewer would be great.
+1
We were recently discussing this in our office and we landed on exactly the same numbers as @dcartlidge. We are a smaller organization, we wouldn't ever be adding 100+ users but $50 more a month per user who only can view things is very cost prohibitive for us as a small business.
Hi @dcartlidge and @stevenhdsdoor, thanks for reaching out! I'm Coltyn, and I'm a part of our user onboarding team here at Retool — I'd love to learn more about what you and your teams are building!
I would even be willing to pay more than $50 per month per developer (editor).
Maybe a sliding scale where for $50/developer gets you up to five $20 users, $500/developer gets you up to fifty $20 users and so on.
Let's be real, most, even micro businesses can afford $50 per user per month for important business tools. The problem is you add Retool, plus Quickbooks, plus CMS, plus, plus, plus and pretty soon you are taking a lot of money per employee. The SaaS model is a cruel mistress!
Companies manage this my only having two Quickbooks seats, one person manages mailing lists and so on. This can be done with Retool, but it is such a broad platform that eventually every user will find some use for it, even if it's only 4 times per month. I guess login sharing works there
Some companies (I have one I am working with now) use a lot contractors, all of whom need access to the backend, but only account for some hundreds in revenue each per month. She can't pay $50 per head for them. She can easily pay $50 each for the 8 core employees.
Not a bad idea @bradlymathews except it limits the amount of "viewer" or "end" users in multiples of five. We hire one at a time, when we hit that 6 mark we have to pay for 5 more users rather than one? Seems much easier to just charge a flat fee for editors and a lower fee for end users.
Yeah I agree, bundles are a bad idea. To clarify, what I meant was for a $xxx dev license would get you up to xx view licenses.
So you could buy one or 5 view licenses. If you wanted 6 then you pay the full price for each new view seat until it make sense to spend say $500 for the the dev license in which case you get the new volume discount for seats 6 through 50.
Now the bigger dev license fees may also get you more dev features (access control granularity, more modules, theming, on-prem, advanced IDE, version control and so on to follow the Visual Studio model.)
The alternative is what I have seen other companies do (and I do not like) is to charge $2000 per dev seat or even start at $9500 for 5 dev licenses (even if you have only one dev). Then another $20,000 - $50,000+ for a royalty free distribution license. Those are huge gates to entry and keeps the poor, unwashed riff raff out of the neighborhood.
My method provides a milder slope while still giving Retool a deserved exchange as you use it more.
I am wondering if we should take this to the Discussions section, this is a very worthwhile discussion to have amongst us.
This is a huge reason why we have not moved to Retool for more of our internal apps. I need to secure our applications while still making them publicly accessible. In order to do that, I have to pay for edit licensing for all users. We have 3-4 people that need that editing ability at this time. Outside of that, everyone should be a viewer. Licensing is very pricey for adding 350 end users and the on-prem version has an entry price that is not enticing either.
Hi @jcook and @bradlymathews, I appreciate the thoughts and feedback here! I've gone ahead and flagged this to our pricing team. If it makes sense, I'd love to connect with you all to see if there is a better way we can support your current use cases.
Thank you again to everyone in this thread for taking the time to share your feedback on our pricing model. We’re making some major changes to our pricing today!
First, instead of charging the same price for any user at your company, we will now charge different rates for standard users (people who build apps in Retool) and a significantly lower amount for end users (people who only view or use Retool apps). See the details on our pricing page.
We’re also adding an annual billing option to our Team and Business plans so that you can pay annually and get an additional 20% discount per user.
And, we’re introducing a self-hosted Business plan for teams that prefer to self-host and need more granular permissions, audit logs, and reusable modules.
We are constantly adding to the platform to make it more useful to you. If you have any other feedback about Retool, please comment in this thread or start a new thread anytime! Your feedback is always welcomed and appreciated.
