That is probably a good model. First build (prototype) it in Retool to nail down the database, functionality, workflow and business logic and then pass it off to someone to recreate in Vue for a royalty free, aesthetic, performant and scalable product.
If they can retool can find a way to integrate in 3 or 4 basic patterns and have a pricing model that include clients rather than users they might pull it off. The crux of the seems that they only want to only support one type of authentication which will never been successful.. You may as well write your own if you going to have to jump through retools proposed authentication model.
Update here: we just launched Retool Embed, which lets you securely embed Retool apps into your existing portal or web app. You can use your existing auth to give users access to embedded Retool apps, and Retool provides security and auditing for external users out-of-the-box (docs here).
Because we're talking about external-facing Retool apps embedded into your product, the pricing model needs to make sense upfront and at scale. Because business models vary (or some companies don't monetize users at all), we've worked with our early customers to align on what works.
Would welcome any feedback on the Embed product - please don't hesitate to share it at antony@retool.com!
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Hi all, we just made some significant changes to our pricing! 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.
I'd love to understand if this helps unblock your use cases, or if there's more work to be done. Please shoot me a note at antony@retool.com if so!
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Hello folks!
Major update on our pricing for external use cases 
TlDR: Free plan orgs can now create and share public links. External pricing has been revamped, including 50 free external users for Self-serve Business plan customers. Additionally, Business and Enterprise organizations can more easily onboard to our external apps solution when sharing apps and inviting users via a redesigned share modal.
What changed: We have updated our pricing and packaging ahead of the Assist launch, offering public apps on all cloud plans, and revising our external user pricing to include 50 free seats on business plans, with tiered pricing for additional external users.The share modal has also been redesigned to more easily facilitate sharing apps, both internally and publicly. Our intent here is to more seamlessly expose these additional ways of sharing an app outside of an organization. For organizations that haven’t enabled external pricing when they share an app or invite a user whose email domain is outside their current admin email domains, we’ll prompt them to opt in to external apps and take them through an onboarding flow in the modal.We have also built in the ability to report potentially malicious public apps, aiming to mitigate abuse given their wider availability.
Who it’s for: Everyone! Public links and external users help us bring good software to the entire web.
Availability:
• Revised external user pricing launched on 9/13
• Today (9/18/25), all cloud organizations can create and share public links and more easily onboard to external.
• Public apps and external users are not available for Self-serve self-hosted customers, but the new share modal will be available in the upcoming Q3.5 stable release!
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