I just wanted to express my intense displeasure at suddenly discovering today that Retool has seen fit surprise me by removing a feature from our account to hide it behind enterprise only:
To be specific, removing the ability for us to use BYO AI Model.s We had this connected to our company anthropic account, and all of a sudden people couldn’t work this morning because they’re suddenly forced to use retool AI credits - and there weren’t enough.
At least retool have now added the ability to add AI credits, but it’s in a pretty shitty way. It’s like retool WANTS to drive us away to alternative platforms (which is pretty damn easy these days when a competing AI app builder can easily replicate the work we’ve done; and when we have a solid graphQL api behind which all our data and permissions are handled.)
What I’d like to see:
Don’t change stuff that we rely on to suddenly gate behind an enterprise plan, that you don’t even share pricing information on publicly.
Ensure that your retool AI credits are cost effective/competitive to our token based BYO plans (maybe they are, but I’m not optimistic when you’re forcing me to use your AI providers, rather than letting competitive pricing encourage me to do so)
The credit top off process is clumsy, and wastes my time: I have to manually purchase more credits whenever we run out. Take a leaf out of other systems, and let me set a monthly limit, with auto-top off increments up to that limit - So I don’t need to log in every few days.
Credit expiry is insanely short: One month? I purchase credits, and if I don’t use them, you’ll expire them in just a month? (well, one month, 10 days. The credits I purchased this morning, according to the UI, expire on Nov 12).
I mean, as I said, there is good news in this: Our company has gone all in on allowing staff and operations members to build their own dashboards using retools AI app builder, freeing up our developers to work on APIs and customer facing dashboards. This has been great. But it also means, that unlike the old manually crafted retool dashboards, it’s very easy for us to switch to a competing AI app builder platform, and just rebuild our existing apps without needing to spend our limited dev time.
So I’m pretty irate, but unconcerned.
Make the credits cheap, make it easy for me to auto renew, and we’re happy to stick with retool, despite being pretty pissed about you changing our plan underneath us.
Do more shit like this, and ah well, it’s been a good 6 or 7 years with retool, but it’s just a minor inconvenience for us to close down and switch to someone else.
A long-time cloud user is upset that the ability to bring their own AI model (connected to their own Anthropic account) was suddenly moved behind the Enterprise plan, forcing a switch to Retool AI credits; they also object to manual-only credit top-offs (no auto-renew to a monthly cap) and short (~1 month) credit expiry.
AI Response
This reflects recent changes to how Retool handles AI model usage. Per current documentation, bringing your own key/model for AI resources is now an Enterprise capability, while other plans use Retool-managed AI models billed via monthly AI credits. Those AI credits are organization-level, renew on the first day of the billing cycle, and do not roll over, which explains the short effective lifespan. To avoid running out mid-cycle, admins on Team and Business plans can purchase additional AI credit packs directly from Settings > Plans & Billing under the AI Credits section. The requests for auto-top-off up to a set monthly limit and longer credit expiry are not currently available and would be best logged as feature requests on the Community forum.
Sources
AI credits billing and usage | Retool Docs
Confirms AI credits are organization-level monthly credits that renew on the billing cycle's first day and do not roll over, corroborating the short-expiry behavior. Purchase additional AI credits
Official announcement that Team and Business admins can buy additional AI credit packs from Settings > Plans & Billing, the current way to top off when credits run out.
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I would like to second this complaint. I have been combining Retool AI credits with BYOK credits because the Retool credit flies through its allowance and the fact that overages expire and can be bought in minimums of $100 is not fair to us when we run out of Retool AI credits on the 5-th-to-last-day-of-the-month. I think it’s pretty brutal to not be able to customize the quantity of credits you get, then at the end of the month have to buy minimum $100 more and not even retain them in just a few days. I was using BYOK to cover the gap. I would like to give the Retool team more time to sort out a better system than the above, but if it is not addressed within a few months, I would consider it churnworthy. Which is a bummer because I’ve implemented Retool at 7 companies across the last five years
Echoing these frustrations. I’ve been building in Retool for the last four years and have always loved how flexible the platform is. But pulling the rug out on BYOK while locking us into rigid, $100 minimum overage blocks that expire in a month makes it really punishing when you hit a wall right before a billing cycle resets is a bummer.
Hey all - I run the Community team here at Retool and spend a lot of time collaborating with the Product and Engineering teams on behalf of our self-serve customers.
Many thanks to you all - @Quirkz, @Bill_Boulden, and @Sarah_Skillen - for clearly stating the impact of this change on you and your orgs. I’m sure there are others that feel similarly and it gives us genuinely good feedback.
To be clear: the ability to BYOK has always been considered an Enterprise feature and will be enforced as such going forward.
The bottom line, though - and the learning that I’ll be taking forward - is that we never did a good job of communicating this and certainly didn’t do a good job of preparing you all. We sent out an email last Friday (9/25) to every org using a self-managed key, but I’ll be the first to acknowledge that a week isn’t really adequate. Sudden changes don’t feel great - that’s our mistake and we can do better.
Going forward, we really do want to make the experience of building with Retool-managed keys as seamless as possible. To some of the specific points shared here:
Enabling automatic top-ups is definitively on the roadmap. We’re building a system that lets admins define both a credit floor and ceiling and will give an update here as soon as that ships.
Right now, credit packs expire at the end of the next billing cycle, which effectively means they are valid for 4 to 8 weeks. We’ve heard a fair bit of feedback about this system and are taking a serious look at iterating on it.
We understand how important it is for the work that you do in Retool to be both fast and credit-efficient - our business model would be pretty flawed if it wasn’t! We recently launched two internal models (Retool Mini/Power) in support of this effort that are only available on managed keys. And we’re generally always on the lookout for bugs and opportunities for further optimisation.
In order to somewhat ease the transition, I’ve allocated some additional credits to each of your orgs. Please don’t hesitate to reach out directly if there’s anything else I can do to help. Or even if you just have additional feedback/questions. Thanks!
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