I'm hearing mixed things from the Retool team. Am I to understand that there is no more live chat or email support for business plan and that's only available on enterprise? Did I miss that announcement or am I misunderstanding?
Thank you for asking @jmr1234 - we have recently made an update to our Support contact channels. We do have a wider announcement planned for next week. Appreciate you asking here where others can also learn the latest!
You’re right that as of this week, 1:1 developer support over email and Slack will now be limited to the Enterprise plan. Customers on any plan can still email us directly about account or billing related questions, and we aim to reply within 1 business day. If you’re experiencing a critical outage that should be added to our status page, you should still email us to let us know and we will escalate these reports promptly.
As Retool’s user base continues to expand, we are making a conscious investment to provide technical answers and advice where they have the greatest impact for all current and future users. We're investing in the forums as a scalable channel for all customers to learn from discussions and verified answers, and a space for Retool (including product managers and engineers) to engage with and learn from customer feedback and feature requests.
Every answer here is reviewed and confirmed by a Community Support Engineer on our team, and will be discoverable by others looking to get help with similar issues. We are focusing our efforts on making the forums as useful, active, and accessible as possible.
You may have already noticed an increase in Retool engineers and product managers directly engaging here in the forums! You can also expect to see more exciting updates and programs like gamification and celebration for contributors, investment in systems infrastructure, and smoother moderation at scale.
I also want to highlight that although our Developer Community Forums (here!) are the best place to ask questions, share solutions, discuss new updates, and leave feedback, we also run live video office hours several times per week. If you’re interested in learning more about Retool generally, join us to discuss use cases in a group. You can also network with fellow Retool developers in our Discord server.
If you’re looking for hands-on dedicated technical help on a specific timeline, options include our developer network, or booking a demo with our team to explore our Enterprise plan.
Hope this context on our goals and investment helps understand the change!
Great Job
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Two items for consideration:
Make a section or tag all "verified answers" as such and upgrade search to be more accurate in this forum.
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I think the big problem here is that I've run into many problems over the last year that only a Retool engineer with access to my account could accurately investigate and analyze. In a few of these cases, there was an issue on Retool's end that needed to be escalated. These types of thing just can't be fixed by posting in a community like this.
I'm a big fan of Retool and have a business that revolves around it, but I'm pretty disappointed with this change. I understand having to move some service to different tiers, but forcing full enterprise to get 1:1 support is unreasonable based on the pricing I've gotten for enterprise. For me as a single developer using the platform, I'd need to pay around 25x what I'm paying annually now to get support. That seems pretty harsh.
@jmr1234 I hear you, this is definitely a change. I hope it helps to know that we’re investing heavily to continue to scale up the forum’s usefulness, activity and reach. Some specific context + initiatives below!
Our Community Support Engineers monitor all incoming community threads, and especially focus on chiming in on topics that seem to be about something that only a Retool engineer could confirm or fix. We’re also aiming to increase our ability to troubleshoot without directly accessing customers’ accounts. For example, we’re working on adding better ways for community forum members to provide context and troubleshooting details on forum topics upfront so that community contributors and Retool staff alike can more quickly understand the issue and work toward resolution together.
This might look like brief prompts in a template you’d see when creating a forum post, encouraging folks to share specific kinds of details depending on the Category (like a sample json app export with sanitized data to reproduce an app building question). More to come on ways to make working to resolution in the forum more streamlined. For things that require screensharing in a smaller group, Discord office hours 3x per week can be a good option.
In terms of things that can only be fixed by Retool, posting on the forums allows direct eyes from not only Community Support Engineers, but also Retool Engineering and Product team members. We pipe all new forum posts into our company Slack instance, so that Product Managers and engineers working on specific areas of the product see the feedback on the features they work on. My team escalates all bug reports and feature requests to Eng and Product by pairing the public forum post to an internal tracking ticket. In parallel EMs, PMs and engineers also actively watch and often directly engage with customers in the forum - sometimes fixing bugs in the following week’s release.
I’m also working with our Docs team to make this feedback loop more visible in the Changelog. Many of those bullet points are fixes to existing features, reported to Retool here in the forums. We aggregate linked reports internally and share customer quotes from the forums, so engineers can see the scope of impact, and we circle back when things are fixed.
Completely understand that the Enterprise plan isn’t the right plan, or feasible, for many customers and businesses running on Retool. That’s part of why we’re dedicating so much effort and a full time 5-person Retool team (plus many others chiming in here and there) to making this forum as useful a resource as possible, accessible to any Retool customer.
@AnsonHwang thanks, glad you’ve seen the uptick in activity in the forum from people across many different roles at Retool 
@ScottR thank you for these suggestions! Great idea to have a filterable tag for verified solutions. We’re currently looking into how best to implement that, and will let you know once it’s moving toward reality! Also agree the search could be much better, we’re also looking into a few possible improvements there. 