Hi everyone,
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback on this topic! 
I hear you on the pricing issues & I've shared this feedback with folks internally as well. I've also reported the feedback in this thread on an internal ticket where we're tracking feedback and ideas regarding the current pricing plan. We truly do value hearing feedback from our community, so we appreciate you kicking off this discussion 
We've thought a lot about pricing over the past year, and while there are still use cases where our current pricing model isn't a perfect solution, hopefully we're taking steps in the right direction 
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Since we’re committed to supporting developers across a wide range of use cases (both internal & external) and industries, defining a one-size-fits-all pricing model for self-service customers is challenging. To share some context on how folks have thought about this internally, Retool introduced a new differentiated pricing structure this year, explicitly designed to provide greater flexibility and affordability for startups. Rather than charging a flat fee for any user, we now offer discounted pricing for end users & for teams paying annually. We offer the start up program mentioned in this thread as a great way to start growing your business in the first year of using Retool. Additionally, we have separate discounts for students, educators, and nonprofits.
Usage often varies in external use cases, and so does value, so we recognize that, for external use cases with lots of end users, it can still be difficult to justify the price point of $18/user/month. To help solve for this, we've collaborated on custom pricing for external use cases with many early stage companies, including some deploying to 1,000s of external users. To give an idea of what this might look like, companies typically get started building customer-facing apps on our Business plan, which gives them access to the granular access controls and permissions needed to manage initial external users. As these teams scale and want to roll Retool out to a broader audience, things like full whitelabelling (i.e., removing the Retool logo from your apps) and custom pricing start to make sense. If anyone thinks their team is already at this stage, the best next step is to book a demo. From there, our engineers help you scope and build out a proof of concept that’ll get you more comfortable with a broader rollout.
To clarify the current pricing, the Team plan does not have any permissions settings - all users have the ability to edit apps & resources. The Cloud Team plan enables to you to have more than 5 users (a step up from the 5 user limit on Cloud Free). The self-hosted Team & Business plans allow you to invite up to 25 users.
Separate from pricing, there are some comments about self hosting, if you believe you'll stay within 25 users and you want to manage your own self-hosted Retool instance, there are some manual steps to take to migrate from Cloud to Self-hosted. First, you will need to set up a new account for that self-hosted instance through this portal here. This will be a whole new account you have to pay for in addition to your cloud account (until to you archive your cloud account). From a high level, the process of migrating from a cloud-hosted account to a self-hosted account looks like this:
- Sign up for a self-hosted account on my.retool.com (the portal mentioned earlier)
- Spin up a self-hosted instance with the license key provided when you sign up on my.retool.com
- Configure your self-hosted instance as needed
- Manually migrate your resources from your cloud account to your self-hosted account. You'll need to re-make your resources with the exact same names in your self-hosted instance as in your cloud account for the queries in your migrated apps to work correctly.
- Export and import your apps from your cloud account to your self-hosted account. You can export your apps by clicking the 3 dots in the top right corner of the app > Export to JSON. Then, you can import this JSON file by clicking Create new (home page) > From JSON
- Invite users to your self-hosted instance
- When you're ready, archive your cloud organization
Something to note is that our self-hosted versions trail our cloud versions by 2-4 weeks, so you may lose some new functionality when migrating your apps from the cloud to an on-premise instance.
Thank you all again for sharing your thoughts & feedback! Hopefully it'll help other community members as they onboard to Retool, and internally, we're constantly iterating on how we can make Retool even better for our customers 