Turn Off Edit App Feature

App Building
14

Hello,

I, along with many others, find the current billing plans of Retool quite challenging. Many of us use Retool to develop platforms intended for paying users. The existing pricing structure makes it tough to build a startup based on Retool’s products, despite startups being a key audience (as highlighted on Retool's startup page).

I'd be interested to hear the perspectives of other power users on this issue. @PatrickMast, @ScottR, @AnsonHwang, @bradlymathews, what are your thoughts?

Moreover, the billing page and schema have significantly evolved over the last year, leading to a discrepancy between the set of features we start with and what we end up with upon completion of a product.

@mdsmith1, your perspective echoes the thoughts of many in the community.

@Tess, this is a critical issue raised by the community and warrants attention from Retool's executives for the platform's future growth.

Regards,

15

Hello @MicExpert,

I completely share your concerns about Retool's pricing plans. As a fellow Retool enthusiast, I'm disappointed to see the platform shifting away from its focus on supporting startups and individual developers. The current pricing structure makes it challenging for new businesses to build and scale their products on Retool, and the recent changes to the billing page and schema further complicate matters.

The decision to discontinue support for password-protected public apps is particularly concerning, as it limits the ability of startups to offer their products to a wider audience. This move aligns with the perception that Retool is increasingly catering to enterprise customers, who are willing to pay higher prices for more features.

While Retool is undoubtedly a powerful tool, its pricing structure makes it difficult for startups and small businesses to justify its cost. If we as a startup are charging our customers $15/month for our SaaS product, we can't afford to send 99% of that revenue to Retool in fees. This is a significant barrier for startups trying to build sustainable businesses.

I'm hopeful that Retool will reconsider its pricing strategy and find a way to make its platform more accessible to startups and individual developers. The platform has so much potential to empower innovation, but its current pricing structure is hindering its ability to reach its full potential.

I encourage Retool to take feedback from the community seriously and actively engage with users to address their concerns. If Retool wants to maintain its position as a leading no-code platform, it needs to provide pricing options that are more in line with the needs of startups and individual developers.

:grinning:

Patrick

2 Likes
16

One thing that would help me is the transfer of my App to my own Web Server.

If I am understanding the Team pricing properly, I can have 5 users hosted by Retool and 25 users hosted on my own server.

How do I move my App to my own Web Server?

I also agree with @MicExpert and @PatrickMast that we need a pricing plan to allow us to have much more than 25 users for SaaS products. About the most I can charge is $30 per month to my customers. Its going to cost me about $2 per month per user for login and validation service. It does not leave much margin for the developer.

Mike

1 Like
17

As I see it, retool is still a platform for internal tools. They seem to have changed their marketing around this, but have not adjusted their features or pricing to make building a saas app in retool reasonable. Not that I blame them. The ambiguity around whose customers are who's. And many other challenges are not easy hurdles. Say you build a saas product on retool... you get 100 clients. Then you flake out... Retool has your customers data. What is real liable for if something like this happens. It's not so simple when things start to go wrong.

I use retool for internal tools and I think it is good value. I can get the features and tools I need without hitting a developer or having to build it myself. I think the value is there when building internal tools. For the public app use case being expected in this thread, I cannot see the value working out for retool or their clients trying to build these kind of apps.

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What tools are available that are priced for Saas developers selling at $30 per month?

Mike

19

Here's a company UIBakery that allows unlimited users at $5 per month.

Mike

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20

Unlimited if you self host correct but you wont have roles management releases etc

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Anyway, how do I transfer my Retool code to my own web host?

I would like to take on at least 25 users even if they have the capacity to Edit App.

Mike

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Hi @mdsmith1 . I think your are looking for this page: Self-hosted Retool

23

Hi everyone,

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback on this topic! :disappointed: 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 :pray:

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 :crossed_fingers:.

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 :blush:

2 Likes
24

Tess:

Thank you for your very thoughtful reply.

I will get started on this.

I don't think I will be very long building up to 25 users. If I understand your pricing correctly, I will have to charge $15 per month per user instead of $5 per month per user once I get over 25 users. I am in a very competitive market where my competitors are charging $30 per month. The increase to $15 per month will be very difficult for me.

So I would recommend that you focus on increasing the maximum users on the Team Plan from 25 to 100 users. It would be nice if you could give user permissions but I think that part is not so critical because my prospective users will not understand the language anyway.

Tess, anything you can do to help us would be very much appreciated.

Thank you.

Mike

1 Like
25

Tess:
I have started to go through the steps of migration to self hosting and the first screen looks like below.
I am with GoDaddy. Do I need to check with them as to which software services they have?
Mike

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Hi @mdsmith1

It seems like the Cloud plan might be better for your use case. On the Cloud Team & Business plans, there is no user limit. If you need to invite more than 25 users and don't have specific requirements to self host, you may want to stick with Cloud.

If you choose to self host, then you have the 25 users limit (including editors). The cost per user does not change based on how many people are in your organization. In other words, no, we will not automatically start charging you $15 per month per user instead of $5 per month per user once you get over 25 users. Instead, if you are self hosting, and find you need to add more than 25 users on the Team or Business plans, we'll loop you in with our sales team to discuss a solution.

For both cloud and self hosting, if you are on the Team plan and paying annually, then end users will cost $5. If you're on the Business plan and paying annually, the end users will cost $15. Please note that these prices go up to $7 and $18 respectively if you opt to pay us monthly.

If you still choose to self host, despite the 25 user limit, you'll need to choose an external service to use for self hosting your instance in addition to getting your domain from GoDaddy. You should be able to use any of the services with your GoDaddy domain, but each service may have their own cost and/or technical requirements

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Tess:

You have a reference to " * Spin up a self-hosted instance with the license key provided when you sign up on my.retool.com"

I am being routed to documents that could take me days to plow through. Your reference to "spin up" seems to suggest a simpler process.

If this is a process that will take hours of reading for a first time user, I would be willing to pay an expert in your department to help me with this if the price is reasonable.

Mike

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@mdsmith1 We can help in Self Hosted Retool - Retool Forum as questions come up, but the instance would need to be managed on your side. Self hosting generally adds complexity & can have it's own learning curve if it's not something your team is familiar with. Is there a reason that you're leaning towards self-hosted? It seems like Cloud may end up being a better fit pricing/feature-wise :crossed_fingers:

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Tess:
There is no mention of "Cloud" on you web site.
Could you explain to me how that works.
Thanks.
Mike

30

Hi @mdsmith1

Are you referring to the pricing page?

The pricing page shows Cloud (where we host) by default, but you can toggle to see the self-hosted pricing.

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Mike,
Do not forget that there are little permissions to speak of on the team plan! Neither is there version control. Your users would be able to break your app for themselves, you, and other users and there would be no easy way for you to fix this! As I see it, the team plan is not a fit for you. At the current pricing and feature profile of retool, I can only recommend that you look for another solution.

1 Like
32

Either that or maybe Retool could include the Permissions Feature with the Team Plan.

It makes no sense to charge an annual fee for developing something that we cannot sell.

I think Retool needs to seriously look at making the Team Plan practical for Saas packages.

Mike

1 Like