What was the "minor change" to pricing, was it announced anywhere? I must have missed it.
I've been using Retool for about 4 years and I don't recall Teams ever having granular permissions. Everyone could always edit. I used to have to jump through hoops to hide the menus in CSS when I deployed an app to prevent (or at least dissuade) people from getting to the edit screen. I finally grew my use case to the point I could justify moving to Business Plan (the new pricing about a year ago with cheaper seats per user really helped me here!) and the granular permissions with user groups are much better I agree. But I can't relate to what you're saying changed recently - maybe I'm just out of the loop?
Teams never had granular permissions, they didn't even exist. But at least there was a differentiation between (kind of) admin group- and (kind of) users groups. So "admins" could edit, "users" not. At least they were not "motivated" on every page to "Edit App".
Getting this predefined group/role differentiation back would make all problems disappear immediately.
However, I am afraid, this was not a "bug", it was intention, disguised as "cool new feature" (which it absolutely is btw.).
But its not worth it, since it is effectively tripling the cost per user!
For our company, we upgraded to team subscription because we thought we would have an admin and end users. End users shouldnât be able to edit the app. They should just be able to use it.
We wanted to create a Public facing app. For customer support or returning orders. But halted it because we donât understand the pricing and it can change in future. Making it a huge risk.
To clarify, this was not the case; every user had "Editor" permissions on the Team plan in the past. The "Admin" group had some additional permissions around managing their Retool organization, but every user on the Team plan was always an "Editor".
Last year, we modified the Team plan to charge a lower price for users who don't edit apps. Note that billing and permissions are decoupled in our model: while every Team plan user will have "Editor" permissions, we only charge the higher price point for the ones that actually make edits to apps in a given month. There are some examples for how this works in our docs, but the overall outcome is that customers pay less for users who aren't actively editing apps.
First one: true,
Second: I wrote âkind ofâ
Third: At least thatâs what I remember and we never had issues with unauthorized edits.
Last one: true.
Still: Who needs a team plan, if anyone can do everything? I know very few organizations where all users know all databases, query them via SQL and are even allowed to drop entire tables, happily presented in the query window! In production environments! Or execute all kind of REST requests, run crazy workflows like every second etc.
Also: I never understood why - even with the business plan - users are âupgradedâ to editorsâ (kind of, I still donât understand this) if they accidentally edit something, just because I might missed to restrict one of the apps. I simply donât get it. Whatâs the reason for this? If I wanted someone to do more I could simply add him to editors.
And as you said: Itâs per billing period. So itâs an obviously financial, not a technical thing.
So you want Business plan features at Team plan pricing? Sure, why not, I do too. But then again, I also want Retool to be and remain a successful company so I can utilize their product years into the future.
The part I'm confused about is you act like something changed with the Teams plan which is now leaving you in a lurch with your customers, but I still don't follow what happened. Teams has also been that all users are editors. Perhaps your customers' use case is just not the best fit for Retool, particularly if they're cross-shopping Notion.
For my business its a great fit. 45 employees, only 10 need Retool apps at all and only 1 (me) builds/edits. I pay $50 (me) plus $15x9 per month but with the complexity of some of the apps I've built, and the value we get out of it, its incredible, I consider this money very well spent! If all I needed was a single admin panel then yes, I agree, I might find Business plan too expensive, and then might find Teams plan too restrictive. Perhaps if you could up-sell more complex use cases with Retool it would justify the cost for them...it did for me.