Hi,
Though retool's main purpose is building internal tooling I am curious if we can eventually make a public facing saas product with signup and sign in functionality ?
Suggest me some good workaround on this
Thanks.
1 Like
Hi @mpmohi! We currently don't have a workaround for this since on public links, we actually collect no user info, which means any kind of authentication would be challenging. All authentication is associated with specific Retool user accounts, and since public app users are fully anonymous there is no user to work with that system. Public apps allow for unauthenticated, open access to the embedded app. If you need to give users access to confidential information or dangerous functionality, they would have to login with a Retool account.
With that said, we're thinking about how to make this possible going forward! Would you be able to share any more about your use case here? 
I'd love to share it with the eng teams working on this part of our future roadmap.
1 Like
Hey thanks for replying.
One simple use case might be showing user a set of data based on their subscription.
Of course! Thank you for sharing that. We’re currently building a product that helps users extend Retool to their users. If you're interested in learning more or seeing if we'll be implementing any specific features you're interested in, feel free to reach out to antony@retool.com, the fearless leader/product manager for this new product.
1 Like
Chipping in here with my use case.
I'm building an administrative case management app. Basically students applying for funds for their activities.
The process would be managed end-to-end (application -> transfer of funds -> final reporting) in Retool.
It would be useful to be able to expose some information about the case status to the students, so that at any time, they could look up which place in the pipeline their application is in.
Thank you for sharing that! Helpful to have your feedback here and your name in this thread so we can reach out with updates
I have a suggestion for how to this with Retool's current methods, one which I am currently using with some success so far.
- Make your student focused app Public.
- Assign each student a Public Key in your database that is a UUID or other long unguessable string.
- Give each student a unique URL which will show them their data and only there data. Like this:
https://myapp.retool.com/embedded/public/12ace24b-6654-4e55-b3e6-1b3e123cadac?publickey=4C2D20DA-2E01-46F5-BC3D-AD38FA1BDD5E - You have a query in your app that runs against that publickey value:
select * from students
where publickey={{ urlparams.publickey}}
- If the public key is missing or wrong I hide the container that holds the entire app and the page header lets the viewer know they are not authorized
The main Pro is also its main Con. There is no log in needed by the user: it is security by obfuscation.
3 Likes
We also need this ability. The enterprise tier pricing required for B2C and SSO is grossly overpriced.
Our app is for revenue cycle management backed by CosmosDB and azure functions. We must have identity to do this and the current retool licensing prevents this - and there is TREMENDOUS potential here! There needs to be a pricing tier that includes B2C without architecture support.
1 Like
Shared with the relevant internal teams, thank you for taking the time to write this up!
1 Like
i have a similar topic, i wanted to create a small app for a NGO club, to manage it's users, events,..
- but for the current pricing structure this is not possible - a user brings less then 50 € total revenue to the club per year .. with about 100 members - having a tool like retools would be a good a idea because it helps to save time ( but since all are working for free time != money)
Added to our internal ticked tracking this type of pricing feedback - thank you for your feedback here!
Same need here!
I'm thinking of building Retool SaaS for my clients and I need this feature to do so (and a new pricing model for it to make sense).
I see a huge potential for this feature, moving from internal tools only to external as well 
I'm writing a report for a client appraising some of the main low code platforms and this is a key use case for many of them so I've been scoring specifically on this aspect. I think many clients want a combination of public (unauthenticated) and private (authenticated) content and it would be helpful to build all of this in one place. I note Microsoft have a separate pricing structure for Power Pages which is a much low fee per user so they are addressing this use case.
A use case that I'm currently delivering is helping a research organisation visualise the data generated by their models and they want to share some of these visualisations publicly, but be able to provide enhanced content privately to authenticated clients. At the moment I'm using Tableau which has both options but we still need to embed the charts in a website.
1 Like
I'm preparing to launch a worker-owned business that serves small nonprofits (annual budget <$500k). We build toolkits for things like financial management, hr, strategic planning, governance, quality improvement, how to organize a variety of fundraising events, etc. The idea is to provide the kind of value that could only be gotten if the customer had an unlimited budget for consultants.
We're a subscription based business (at a price that is affordable for small nonprofits) and I would LOVE to build web apps into our toolkits to make nonprofits' jobs that much easier. It seems that the low-code / no-code movement is really close to a place where we could put some serious power into the hands of the people who are changing and improving our world. But for small nonprofits it is too much to ask that they learn the skills and invest the time to build apps for themselves. They also can't afford to hire people to build custom solutions. Is Retool planning anything that could allow developers to build SaaS apps? Something that we could build and deploy to thousands of customers?
Welcome to the forum @Phil_Owen ,
I have been noodling on this myself. Retool's retooling (pun intended) of their pricing structure along with their Embedded feature (Retool Embed overview) opens up a new SaaS option.
I haven't tried this myself so is there is probably nuance I am missing, but this seems like it would work.
If you embed your app into your own site, you do not need to contend with Retool's authentication system, you use your own. Retool will automatically add users which will be charged $18/month. Hopefully that price works for your model. I do not know the newest pricing data for enterprise, so it may be less (or more) than $18.
And you would need the enterprise plan and be self-hosted so you can fully manage all of your users more effectively with a Retool you would build for the purpose. Once Retool deploys a user API you could do this with just the Business plan.
I am curious what the retool folks think of this idea.
1 Like