New: Retool for External Apps

[KeananKoppenhaver]

Hi all!

Today, we’re excited to launch Retool for External Apps—our solution for building and managing apps for users outside your organization—into general availability. Now it’s easier than ever to bring the internal tools you love to your customers, vendors, and partners.

Build secure, full-stack, white-labeled portals
With this launch, you now have even more customization and branding options in your external-facing apps. If you’re building a portal for external users and don’t need to customize your onboarding flow, you can whitelabel Retool and get on your way. Or take advantage of custom user pages, which allow you to create apps to completely customize your sign-in, sign-up, forgot password, and user invite experiences.

Embed your apps anywhere
Whether your Retool applications are for your internal teams or external for your customers, you can embed them inside of an existing dashboard, third-party SaaS tool, or web app. The brand-new, easy-to-use Javascript SDK and React library make interacting with your parent application seamless.

Ready to get started?
Retool for External Apps is available today for Cloud customers on the Business or Enterprise plans and for our self-hosted Enterprise customers.

When you’re ready for more information on the how and why, as well as all the details you need to get started, we’ve got you covered.

If you want to see all this new functionality in action, take a look at how our new Partner Portal came together, built entirely in Retool!

Or if you’re ready to get started today, head over to our External Apps page to learn more or dive into the documentation.

Happy to answer any questions here!

[JoeyKarczewski]

This is HUGE! Thanks a bunch Retool!

[MiguelOrtiz]

This news made my day!

[MicExpert]

Hi,

It's a nice and important addition. The pricing for external users has been adjusted to be more coherent. Thank you for that.

The next logical step would be to have a feature set to manage billing for our external users.

Regards,

[Lorenzo_Buonanno]

Thank you for this!

Just to clarify, does "Up to 250 external users: $8/user" mean $8/user/month? (E.g. for 50 users $4,800/year)

[KeananKoppenhaver]

Good question. You can see the monthly vs annual breakdowns on our pricing page. We have toggles there that should hopefully make this more clear

[Vinyasa_Health]

Do we have any detailed videos for creating external apps? I have done the branding customisation but am unsure of how to publish the app and set up authentication. It is confusing to understand how to set-up and test authentication once the google sso is enabled. How do I do password generation for first time user who is an external user.

[bobthebear]

i think all you have left to do is click share in the top right corner when ypur editing the app you want to make external, then at the top of the new window click Piblic then enable the public link? you migh tnmeed to fill out the bottom half of the External Apps settings page (just under the Branding one, youll see Theme then External Apps), cant remember if its required tho.

[Vinyasa_Health]

How do I let the users set-up their password for the first time and how does the email and password combination login work for external users?

I'm using User Login Resource. However, I haven't created it on my end. So, how do I migrate my old customers so they don't have to create another account. Or do they go through sign-up process?

Also, when I click sign in with google, the redirected page is branded as Retool, not vinyasa. How do I fix it? I have already added the client id and secret along with branding.

[Paulo]

Hi @Vinyasa_Health,

For users to set up their password for the first time, if we would like to have a custom sign up page instead of the Retool managed one, go to Branding settings and change the 'Claim invitation' page to one you create.

We'll need a Resource query to 'Claim invitation':

For the input fields, follow the steps below (they are for login but it works the same way).

For signing in with credentials, we are just missing the values for 'Email' and 'Password' on the Resource settings. They should be references to the values of the Input components.

For Signing in with Google, we don't need to set up Custom Auth. There is a built-in Resource for External Apps called 'User Action.' Select Account for the type, 'Log in' for the action, and 'Google SSO' for the method:

Then, add an event handler to the button to run that query:

[bobthebear]

can I request this post be added to the User Guide doc page? or a link to here or something? I don't think there's anything for User Actions resource type either so you could reuse it there also (or under Branding or SSO/Google SSO)

[Paulo]

Here is a walkthrough on how to enable External apps, create a custom login, and a set landing page for external users:

How to create a custom login page for External Apps

Hello everyone! Here is a step by step guide on how to create External Apps with a custom login page. External apps are available on the Business plan or above. If you'd like to explore whether this plan meets your organization's needs, feel free to book a demo here. Setup The first step is to enable external apps. We can do this by going to Settings -> External Apps -> Enable external apps. [Screenshot 2024-10-04 at 11.37.50 AM] Then, specify the domains we'll use for internal users…

[chrisfedrizzi.com]

I still don't understand this! I pay $8 dollars and have the ability to get 250 users to use the public app or I pay 8 dollars per user? This would change completely my business model and maybe make my SaaS unviable.

[MiguelOrtiz]

Hey @chrisfedrizzi.com,

Sorry to be bad news bearer, but it is $8 dollars x user.

[chrisfedrizzi.com]

Wow. That is hard, I don't know what to do...