Hi all! David, founder of Retool here. We’ve come a long way since we our very first Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494) and subsequent launch (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966)!

Briefly — Retool is a visual programming language, built specifically for building internal front-ends. The idea is that we can let you use a visual programming interface to get you 70% of the way there very quickly, and then let you customize the rest with code. This lets you build apps much faster, but also retains the customizability and flexibility of code.

We support writing JS anywhere between {{ }} [1], importing custom React components [2] , hosting on-prem [3] (can be setup in 5 minutes: https://docs.retool.com/docs/running-retool-locally), etc. And then once your applications are built in Retool, we manage the authentication (via SSO if you want), authorization (syncing with your groups in Okta via SCIM), and audit logs (can be stored in your own database, so you can build apps on top of it.)

One interesting differentiator is that we don't store any data, and are happy to connect to any back-ends you already use (including both databases and rest / graphql / grpc endpoints).

Here’s a 4 minute demo video: https://d3399nw8s4ngfo.cloudfront.net/videos/intro-to-retool...

HN is what got us this far, so if anybody has any comments / suggestions, please feel free to let me know! We aim to be surprisingly responsive to HN feedback, since we’ve found it highly predictive of what developers in general want. Feel free to email me at david AT retool.com

edit: fixed video. Thanks!

1. https://docs.retool.com/docs/javascript-overview 2. https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components 3. https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions

Hey David, congrats to you. This felt like a winner even two years ago.

The absence of "low-code" (the phrase) throughout the site--except for a couple of blog posts--makes me think it was a conscious decision. Sort of how Slack remarkably avoids the word "chat" anywhere on their site. Is that the case, and why?

> With the customer traction we've seen so far, we're delighted to announce that Retool has raised a $50M Series B, led by Sequoia. Other participants in the round include the founders of Github, Gusto, PagerDuty, Plaid, Segment, Stripe, and Y Combinator.

This is great news. You've really come a long way from a Show HN and now raising a Series B lead by Sequoia Capital. Congratulations to you and Retool. I look forward to see Retool growing with more customers and features in the near future.

Well done!

Would it be fair to say Retool is a spiritual successor to Visual Basic, upon which a whole generation of enterprise apps was built?

I like Retool, but having used both (VB for nearly a decade in the 90s, till .Net came along), and I don't think the comparison is accurate.

Visual Basic represented the high-water mark for developer productivity[1] when it came to small/medium apps. And that's not just Forms apps. You could build a TCP server on it. You could build embeddable COM components, embed a Web Browser, do Distributed Transactions, make a System tray app, connect to any database that you choose, Web Apps, etc. It had a great interop story with COM/C++ code (which allowed you to do embed stuff like, say Telephony, with just a few lines of code).

There's truly a market for a reincarnation of VB. I don't think Retool would be that, because the capabilities will never align. VB is much "lower level" relatively, and that was its strength.

[1]: As long as you stuck to Windows, which was the case in the 90s.

Yes, certainly! "VB in the cloud" is a pretty good description of Retool. (I think we're a quite a bit more developer friendly, but it's certainly 80% correct.)

surprised at the final comment. was VB not developer friendly? this wasnt my perception.

Depends how you define developer.

VB was definitely "business oriented scripter" friendly. When I needed to do something that felt more like programming than scripting it annoyed the hell out of me.

Note: It was still awesome overall, and the time I spent swearing at it for the complex logic parts was more than worth it for the time and pain I saved elsewhere, but I think that's what the retool founder's trying to gesture at.

Retool definitely has similarities to Visual Basic. Actually we are also trying to build a spiritual successor to Visual Basic at Appshare.co, but we still have a long way to go. I think that Retool is far more like a polished RAD tool right now than Appshare as a SQL Builder tool however, so really happy to see this investment and wish them best of luck!

congrats David! just a broad question as a React/frontend dev looking for devtools/startup ideas - how do you feel about your bet on React now? any pain points, wishlists? Would love to hear about any non obvious things in doing visual builder interfaces in React. I found the relayout algorithm (the brief pause when i hover one element over another) interesting, have you ever written that one up?

We really like your product! It's made it super easy to create internal dashboards and admins actions that we can safely trust nonengineers to use without making an entire website for them.

Got a question for the best way to (ab?)use the fact that retool already talks to the db. Say I've got a database that's off in some cloud and i've hooked it up to retool.

What's the best way to use retool as a psql connection, because i'm too lazy to configure and setup and start psql to do that (say, because I'd have to start up a google cloud sql proxy and make sure that's pointing at the right db, and make sure to use a nonstandard port if i've got a dev container up at the time and and and and...)?

Right now I've just got a personal dash that i edit that has an empty table and a query that i can preview, but i feel like there's gotta be a better way that doesn't involve biting the bullet and spending the time to make the bash commands for psql (or pgadmin) just work.

Hi there! Thanks for the comments, and thank you for using Retool!

We have a product in beta that (I think) does what you're looking for: the Query Library (https://docs.retool.com/docs/query-library). This lets you run queries, save them, and share them across your company. LMK if that's what you're looking for?

(In the future, we will be adding more permissions, etc. to it. We are actively developing this right now and would love to get some feedback from you on it if you'd be open to it? I will have our engineer email you!)

That's pretty close, and would definitely be super useful to us beyond just my personal use case. Saving would be absolutely awesome because right now I "save" queries by doing this [1] in the query editor and saving a giant comment block. Then when i want to run something i edit and uncomment the single query i need.

I just tried playing around with it, and it looks awesome, but I can't fully commit to it yet, because it doesn't have a way to select staging vs prod like my dash does.

I'd be happy to give feedback! My personal email is in my hn profile, but if you'd prefer i can email you from my work account.

[1]:

  -- select 
  -- select
  -- select
  -- update

David, I wish you would build some tools to help us build custom document management functions.

One of the challenges of highly regulated verticals is that we have to produce a lot of paperwork for regulators. This paperwork is documents in a particular format (from templates we create) but is populated by data from various databases (and other sources like JIRA, google docs, etc.).

If we could program custom logic that pulls data from our various sources to create an exportable document (PDF) based on the data all over our organization, we could replace two dozen document management people with one script ... and have it be more accurate to boot.

Hi, thank you for the message! That is a very interesting use case. Do you mind emailing me at david AT retool? We've previously built something like this, but for Excel (you upload an Excel template, and we pull in data from various APIs [e.g. SFDC, JIRA, etc.] and fill it into the xlsx file). If you're interested in using Retool for it, I'd love to chat and learn more about the use case. (I bet there are many others who have a similar use case, hah.)

Hi,

I’m interested in understanding what it is you need exactly.

I’m working on something that may have overlap.

let me know how I can get in touch!

Off-topic but when reading some of the early HN discussions about Retool, I noticed that the old https://retool.in/ links don't redirect to retool.com. The retool.in HTTPS certificate expired last year. :)

Fixed. Thank you!

Just wondering what is the most interesting use case(s) you have seen for retool.

We were actually looking for a similar tool, considered some famous SaaS and decided we should go for our in-house backoffice because of niche requirements.

I am really interested in understanding the full potential for future projects. :)

Hey David, I've been thinking about using Retool within a data warehouse context, as I see you created a Snowflake connector. I feel like direct CRUD access on data in the data-warehouse that exists elsewhere by business users might be an antipattern, but I also can see many scenarios where this might be useful. Do you have any users/use-cases/demos where this has been used successfully?

Thanks!

How do you compare to https://internal.io?

Full disclosure: I’m co-founder and CEO of Internal. The biggest difference between Internal and Retool is that Internal is designed for everyone (engineers and non-engineers) whereas Retool is designed for engineers. Both are legitimate approaches - just depends on what you’re looking for.

My co-founder and I have led several product and engineering teams at tech companies - and have experienced first hand the struggles of building and maintaining internal tools. We believe that empowering product teams, operations teams, IT teams, etc. to build and update some of their own tools would speed the business up, and free engineers to focus on bigger things.

Set up is lighting fast and you can customize and update your tools whenever you want.

We also provide developer tools as well. You can read/write via API, manipulate data with javascript, and more. We’re making some big investments in this area.

internal.io is pretty similar to https://www.forestadmin.com/, or even djangoadmin. If you're looking for a quick, non-customizable CRUD interface on top of your database, both of them are pretty good solutions.

Retool is really aimed at engineers who are building custom internal applications. For example, if you're Coinbase and looking to build a complex approval workflow for withdrawals above $100MM (with a custom UI depending on which Okta groups you're in, with custom approvals required depending on the KYC status of the customer, etc.), it's very very hard to do with either internal or forest (since the customizability and flexibility are much lower with both of them).

So: forest and internal are good if you want something quickly but have no intention of customizing it later. Retool takes longer to get started, but allows you to customize substantially more.

In the mid-term (i.e. 1 - 6 months' time) we want to make starting in Retool much easier. We will probably allow users to quickly generate admin panels (similar to internal or forest) with a few clicks on top of common datasources.

Hey David, I'm the founder and CEO of Forest Admin (https://www.forestadmin.com). Thanks for mentioning us! First of all, I wanted to congratulate you for this fund raising. I'm a big fan of what you're building. For Retool, Internal, Forest Admin or any others... I think it's great to create this new SaaS product category and to design this new market all together! That's exciting!

From my point of view, Retool helps you build any internal tools using a frontend builder where you can build your UI from scratch or from templates after connecting any type of data sources.

With Forest Admin, we decided to focus on the administration panel of any webapps. From the ground up, we've designed our solution accordingly by providing a fullstack framework using an on-premise backend/API (open-source) connected to the application's database(s) and an off-the-self SaaS frontend (learn more about architecture here: https://medium.com/forest-admin/a-deep-dive-into-forest-admi...).

The reason behind having such an architecture is to let our users to keep full control of their data and to be able to access the code locally to extend the API without any restriction. That's why I don't agree when you say "Forest Admin is good if you want something quickly but have no intention of customizing it later". Our mission is to do the exact the opposite.

To be fully convinced, I think examples are always better than words. We spent time with some of our customers to demonstrate how Forest Admin can be adapted to handle complex workflows: https://www.forestadmin.com/customers. To react on your example about the KYC stuff, approval workflows, etc. This is something that some of our Fintech/Banking system customers are doing with Forest Admin.

Hi David,

Congrats on the funding!

I am wondering whether retool can fit this use case? I have some bunch of data which I would like to sell, and would like to give a dataviz tool to a 3rd party customer to play with my data.

Are you aware of any customer of you with such an use case?

Yes, that should work well with Retool. You just need to build the app in Retool, and then enable "public applications", which'll let you expose the app publicly. We don't bill for public users.

(Theoretically, the end users could get all the data by inspecting the network requests. But there's really no way around that given that you're exposing the app and its data publicly. I suppose you could get around it by adding a password to the public app. LMK if you need help with that!)

Congratulations David, this made me have a nice feeling yesterday since I am building in the same space. Thanks for taking the efforts to shape a great product.

Congrats David, we're a big fan (and users) of Retool.

Thank you for using Retool! If you ever have any feedback, feel free to email me directly. :)

Your link to the 4-minute demo videos issues an “access denied” error.

Fixed. Thank you!

Demo video link is not accessible

Fixed. Thank you!

Congrats to Retool!

I worked with Retool when they were in the YC W17 batch. They were previously working on a p2p finance app for the UK, and I remember sitting in the conference room when they told me they were pivoting to Retool.

The Retool idea made immediate sense to me because at my prior startup we used django-admin to crank out internal pages and it was amazing. So it seemed clear to me that having something along those lines that was available in every programming environment would be useful, but it was harder for me to wrap my head around competing with free. This sort of reminds me of Algolia competing with Apache Solr - as it turns out can be a great business if you build a great product and really understand your customers. Also I did not appreciate the power of having a drag-and-drop interface, all of the integrations etc.

David and the whole Retool team have done a truly brilliant job executing since then, excellent work.

Thanks. (if I may) Since you emphasize that Retool built a 10x product and really understood their customers, what are some ways they did both of those? Did they hire the right product / UX people early-on? Had initimate understanding of the problem at-hand? Knew which features to leave out and which ones to build in face a barrage of feature requests? Kept in constant touch with their early adopters? Ran really good user interviews? Or...

I realize that this is likely to be less illuminating than you would hope, but the Retool founders were relentlessly focused on getting their first users, building quickly, and getting to profitability as if their lives depended on it. Witnessing them go from 0-10K MRR was to witness someone walking through walls.

To give a perspective on how much of an outlier this team is, my recollection is they got to ~1M ARR very quickly and with just the 2 cofounders and one employee. That is rare.

Can you give any examples of those 'walking through walls' moments?

What are your thoughts/reactions after a pitch with an novel idea+execution+traction but no obvious moat?

I've been using Retool very seriously over the past few months. It's definitely helpful to iterate on some UI ideas and prototype. Once you want to do anything complicated that involves any sort of logic, it becomes very clunky since you're trying to write JS in a tiny web-based code editor box. Refractors (e.g. changing a variable name or deleting a query) is kind of a nightmare since I can't just search for it's usage. I also wish it had support for a lightweight DB out of box instead of requiring one to always be present. Finally, it seems components have kind of inconsistent capabilities, like being able to trigger a query on certain events that you would expect, which limits their usefulness.

Overall I'd say it's helpful but has a ways to go before being a useful replacement for most internal app use cases. It's certainly promising though and hopefully this round of investment helps round off some of these rough spots in the product.

Thank you for trying Retool! I agree that we have a lot of room to improve on the writing of more complicated JS, as well as large-scale refactors. We are working on bringing git syncing to the cloud (currently it's only available on-prem), which'll let you edit Retool apps as code. I think that should help a good amount.

Anyhow — thank you for the feedback! I will send you an email in a few hours too. If you'd be willing to hop on the phone to dive into some of this in more detail, it'd be really appreciated. (I'll probably run a few potential solutions by you and see which ones you like.)

Hey there, sure! Feel free to reach out. I think you guys are on to something great. Hope I can help

I totally agree with the request for a lightweight DB out of box..

There is https://easydb.io which is nice and works OK with Retool but is NoSQL.. an equivalent for a relational DB would be great.

Supabase[1] provides full Postgres databases which take ~2 mins to spin up. You can connect Retool with the DB connection details in the settings

[1] https://supabase.io

Disclaimer: I work at Supabase

s/disclaimer/disclosure

Congrats! Quick endorsement (no connection to company):

I discovered Retool fairly recently during a bout of frustration-with-our-designers-and-engineers-spending-too-much-time-on-internal tools.

We were fighting very very elementary bugs mostly because the people implementing our internal tools were just not thrilled about that work (vs. the customer-facing stuff) and there's just a natural progression of common bugs when you're building things from the ground up.

We are just about to launch our first full conversion from an internal tool to a Retool-powered one, and I'm super excited. We were able to get the project to 0 backend engineers, 1 frontend engineer (who gets some help w/ SQL queries), and 1 designer who works directly in Retool (which, to be fair, isn't as powerful as Figma, but that's actually a good thing!).

And for the product guy (me), I can go in and tweak things without filing a ticket and waiting for a test-review-deploy cycle. So the whole thing is just quicker and better for this use case. Now our team can focus 100% effort (or, at least 99%) on the customer-facing stuff, which is where we're adding the most value anyway.

Suffice to say I'm very pleased so far.

Heard about this countless times. I’ve felt that pain before, but in a regulated environment where retool wasn’t an option at the time.

Internal tools at many orgs languish as not being sexy - I’ve always found them cool and an opportunity for building some good operation secret sauce.

Honestly I have seen Retool being used, and see developers love it. But the one thing I hate about Retool is that anything that a developer does on Retool is tech debt.

You want to do a quick form to manage an app ? Let's build it on Retool, you will lose control of everything, you can't improve the form, you don't run the form, you can't apply the usual code review, ...

Visual coding is great for people who don't know how to code, but for developer that should be the thing to avoid at all cost. I have seen a company that instead of improving their coding environment they started progressively doing everything on Retool, what is going to happen the day Retool is down ? or increase their price ? or they bring a breaking change ? or ?

Don't get me wrong, I think the product is amazing, but it requires huge discipline, and this is never a good idea to depend on the discipline of people

Hi! Thanks for the comment. I'm an engineer as well, so the concerns you raise are things I've thought a lot about. I think Retool does a few things differently, which help:

1. On We allow you to sync all your applications to Git. All Retool apps just JSON, and we serialize that to YAML (that has pretty diffs). So when you make changes to your application, those changes can be synced directly to your Git repository, and you can use code reviews, PRs, etc. in order to manage everything. This means we also support code transforms (if you want to bulk-change Retool applications), support staging and dev environments, and more. https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing

2. On the flexibility side — you can import your own React components. This lets you use the data-handling layers of Retool, but still customize the front-end as much as you want: https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components.

3. Most serious Retool users host Retool on-prem: https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions. By hosting Retool on-prem, you can be responsible for Retool's up-time. And because all updates are shipped via Docker, you can always downgrade / refuse to upgrade.

The git thing is only for on-prem.

Currently. Elsewhere in this thread the founder said they're aiming to make it available in the cloud as well.

I'd be a lot more comfortable playing with retool once that happens myself, might, by "only ... so far" appears to be the situaiton.

They still can put git or something basic diffing logic in their SaaS backend and surface some simple GUI, I have done this before just by selecting the last entry, diffing it, and inserting a newer entry that subsumed the old database entry

Hi! I'm an engineer here at Retool. I actually did build just this (a basic diffing logic tool) not long ago. It's currently behind a beta flag, but I opened a PR up this morning to get this to ship to production.

If you're a Retool user you can find it under the Beta section in your org settings. And yes, this is available on our cloud offering

Nice. Yeah you guys have tried to recruit me more than once or twice ;) one thing I would strongly suggest as you roll it out is setting a retention policy and throttling/squashing diffs as you can have users that make lots of edits and it can take up a lot of data and become hard to follow the logs for the end users! Great work coming up with this pragmatic solution, best of luck with the rollout, and congrats to the team!

I disagree, you can definitely improve the stuff you built in retool. As a dev it's saved me a lot of time from having to build non user-facing dashboards, etc that would otherwise take up a lot of time. Instead I was able to spend that time on the core features.

It becomes technical debt if you are focusing on the app, but if you are focusing on the data Retool has very little impact on your debt. You should still be processing and managing data with sql or python version controlled on git. What Retool does is commoditizing front end for building internal enterprise tools and letting you spend the resources and time on the data. The real value add of internal tools is data, UIs can change but the data doesn't. Unfortunately many digital IT projects put high focus on the frontend and they go badly because too little effort is put on the data, I think Retool solves that giving a standard cheap way of building decent looking frontends.

I’ve found the same in our use of it. It’s really hard to audit the code to understand what’s going on and I find myself clicking around trying to get some sense of how things fit together. The interface itself is pretty slow, which I find frustrating.

We’ve also had it explode on us a couple of times in production (on prem) and even reprovisioning it from scratch was a real struggle.

Things may have improved now (I try not to touch it these days) and I wish the team all the best with it. No doubt there are people out there for whom it will work well. But for me personally, I’ll be moving the things we’ve built using it into something else when time permits.

Sorry about these frustrations! Sending you an email to see how we can help :)

100% Agree about any non trivial retool immediately becoming a mountain of tech debt. We use retool extensively and have put a lot of effort into making a workflow that is vaguely manageable, but it's still pretty bad. And once you start using custom components it's even worse. It's also an incredible resource hog.

Still, it lets you churn out working UIs and mini apps really fast so it's very hard to stop using it once you've started!

That's exactly why we built appsmith. A company's core tech stack should be built on open source technology so you're never held hostage by proprietary software. https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith

Uh man let the guys at Retool relish their moment of glory for a second.

Ahhh so that's what Retool is. Your page does a much better job of explaining what these things are. And it looks like an interesting project - good luck!

Interesting project.

1. How soon will you announce pricing?

2. In terms of feature parity, how close are you to matching Retool?

thanks! 1. We'll announce pricing in 6-9 months, our project opened for beta 2 months ago 2. We are about 6 months away from feature parity, maybe even quicker if we can attract more contributors :)

I took a look as a potential contributor and noticed from spot checking it seems like bug fixes are getting merged without tests, which deters me from contributing to a project personally. Looks really cool, though!

Josh, thats a fair point. We merged a few fixes recently to quickly get rid of some bugs. We need to get stricter with our automated testing processes.

I think Retool continues in the trend of startups creating a formidable SaaS from something that is "obviously useful" to developers working with open source, and has become a "tool of the trade" for those developers, which reveals a wider market outside of that language/platform-specific open source niche. Examples here are:

- Real-Time Sys/App Dashboards (e.g. Graphite) => Datadog

- Collaborative Source Control (e.g. trac, hgweb) => GitHub

- Team Chat & Bots (e.g. IRC, ZNC, Hubot) => Slack

- App Error Tracking (e.g. Raven/Sentry project) => Sentry

In this case, the category is:

- Internal Admin Interface (e.g. Django Admin) => Retool

Like all of the above categories, this category is obvious in retrospect.

Every SaaS product/company I have ever worked on or advised has leveraged a Django admin interface. Or, the team wished it had one once they went into production with real users, if the technology choice _wasn't_ Python/Django.

If you have never personally experienced a the Django admin interface, you can read about it and see screenshots in this tutorial: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Server-side/D...

Essentially, it gives you a web-based interface, hooking into your existing user/group authentication model, for inspecting (and even altering!) live production data by introspecting your "Django Models". That is, your Python classes which represent your production SQL tables lead to (controlled!) admin interfaces that can edit those tables.

You can extend that admin interface using simple declarative configuration, such that you can build functional, SQL-aware tables and forms without writing a lick of UI code.

Based on the demo video, Retool is even more featureful than the Django Admin (although perhaps a little less extensible, since it isn't based on an open source framework). But, for anyone thinking to themselves, "Why didn't I think of this?" -- perhaps give some thought to the root problems beneath some of the open source tools you're using today, that could perhaps be turned into a widely-applicable SaaS tomorrow.

I am trying to build a simple user registration/sign in and view your contents website and yes it takes hours or days to do in React/Vue/Angluar + Backend. So by process of elimination:

I tried replacing the backend with just Google Firestore. Surprisingly to do this on react, it's a hell lot of code. I don't mind writing the code but it's just ridiculously complicated and hard to reason the complexity.

I thought of just bootstrap with jQuery with Firestore but then you have to do all the session management which will again devolve into a shit ton of code.

Finally decided to ditch all this and just go with Wix. Wix has definitely come a long way in terms of building websites. I can build a user registration form in minutes and have the whole site up in like less than 2 hours.

Retool offers much much more than Wix so I see a bright future. One of the shortcomings of Wix is lack of component embedding. Essentially you are limited to passing control between pages. If Retool offers component embedding, that's a huge win IMO.

Good luck folks and congratulations on the fund raise.

I've been using retool for a year, and very heavily for some large internal tools for the last month. I find some of its design rather inspired. Its been massively helpful and surprisingly easy to use. Even for some relatively complicated tasks.

We are hitting the limits of its capability. Which is when applications get complicated or end up with lots of code. The javascript you write in your tool is running inside many layers of retool javascription and encapsulation.

But at this point if we decide to move such an app out of Retool, then the business logic is already written.

I tried this product thinking it would be super useful... not the case. Ended up spending a few days total rolling our own internal tools and way happier we did. I love leveraging saas products but this one just fell flat for me. It felt too constraining.

Curious to hear from a real customer of theirs how they are using this service?

Thank you for the comment! Do you mind sharing what exactly you were trying to build and how Retool was too constraining? We'd love to learn which use cases we could be doing better in, so we can improve (even if we're able to convince you to try it again!). Thanks!

Congrats to the Retool team! I got a chance to meet David and Anthony when they were working out of their apartment and I was incredibly impressed with how fast they were able to innovate/build. Kevin White from Segment who was an amazing head of growth marketing joined their team as well, so I'm confident it's only a matter of time until we see them become the next big thing!

Wow - really cool & congrats...

Sort of reminds me of a handful of RegBI tools - like Periscope Data. But the marketing/positioning is "this is for internal teams". I suppose another important difference here is that you can write to the database from the interface. The API out-of-the-box is pretty neat too.

I gave it a quick spin after watching the demo. Large tables take a while to refresh. I dont know if thats just extra load on the servers after the announcement. I would imagine getting latency down, especially for queries with many columns or rows, would be important to UX.

Thank you — seriously — for trying Retool! You're correct on the difference — Retool supports writing back to databases and APIs, which is fairly different from most BI tools.

On the latency part — yes! We are currently working on scaling our systems and latency is a bit higher than usual right now. If this is something anybody is interested in working on, please ping me! :)

We’ve been using Retool for the past few months and I just want to say thanks. It’s saved us a slew of time and y’all are always responsive to any issues I’ve run into.

Thank you for using Retool! I'm really glad that we've delivered value to you all. Please let me know if there's anything we can ever help with!

I remember someone suggesting that when you write a web app you should prototype the design with the client until they like it and then build the backend. Could something like this let you create a front end responsive design but leave the logic to the backend where you can then make whatever design decisions you want to?

Edit: Also, a huge congratulations!

Congrats! Well deserved - Retool is an excellent product in my opinion. So much CRUD code saved.

Congrats! We built our admin tools in Retool. I was surprised with how simple it was to get started and launch our tools in a few hours. Great docs as well. 2 years later our tools continue to work perfectly without changes. Cheers to the future :)

I'd be curious to know what the investors see as a path to success here.

This tool strikes me as confusing for non-programmers and too limited for programmers.

What is this meant to compete with, what's the use case?

Building internal tools - I've built enough internal tools in just a few years at Amazon. Those are never high enough in terms of priorities but improve productivity of the non-tech people. You don't need a heavy dev team to build internal tools - and devs can focus on delivering the business values instead.

Of course if you're a dev that loves building tools, this might not be good news for you if your company decides to adopt it.

Are there any open source alternatives to retool? We’re uncomfortable using a third party tool for our internal operational workflows without more visibility into the source

Hi! We've considered making Retool open-source (and we may yet). Is there any particular reason you'd want access to the source code? For example, you can host Retool on-prem (https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/setup-instructions), extend it with custom components (https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components), and bring in data from anywhere (https://docs.retool.com/docs/queries). And if you were concerned about bugs, we're comfortable providing very tight SLAs, along with 24/7 support if need be.

We felt the same way about Retool and that's why we built Appsmith. https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith

Our project has similar goals like Retool, Powerapps or other low code builders for internal tools, but we are building an open ecosystem instead of a closed one.

How close is this project to Retool? We have all the major features already so you won't miss much but we don't have all the UI widgets and native integrations yet. We'll probably reach feature parity in ~6 months.

I would be happy to talk if I can help. I am building https://github.com/brainless/dwata but from a different angle. It is not a builder as such and has no SQL in the interface at all.

It is where non-technical folks can do everything - dig into data, merge data from CSV even, create reports. SQL is generated automatically from schema reflection. There is no engineering help needed, at least at this stage and it does multi-table JOINs by itself already.

Wow - congrats. I love the tool. Active user through a year.

Retool seems pretty awesome so far! I got an immediately useful admin panel working in about 20 minutes today.

Congrats! How does it compare against AirTable and Metabase?

Great question! Against Airtable, primarily in two ways:

1. We are _not_ a system of record, and do not store any data. We'll connect to your data, no matter where it is (e.g. postgres, your own API, Stripe, etc.)

2. We are primarily for building complex UIs, not for simple spreadsheets. If you're looking for a spreadsheet for your database, there are lots of other options (e.g. postico). But if you're looking to build a UI (perhaps you only want some columns to be editable, or don't want to expose the whole database as a spreadsheet), you should use Retool.

To give a concrete example of a good Airtable use case: let's say you join a new company and have a list of friends that you admire and want to try and recruit. You'd probably use an Airtable for that. Retool is probably overkill here because you'd have to setup a database to store your friends, which probably doesn't make sense.

To give a concrete example of a Retool use case: let's say you're Doordash, and you want to manage all the orders in your database (e.g. you want cancel an order because the restaurant is closed). The only safe way for your support team to do that is you build an internal front-end for it. To do that, you're either writing React (or Angular, or Vue), or using Retool. Airtable probably wouldn't work here because Doordash is not storing their orders in an Airtable.

Against Metabase: we're primarily used for applications that both read and write data. If you're looking for some charts or tables that only read, I'd recommend Metabase (or Chartio, Looker, Redash, etc.). But if you want to write data back via Metabase (i.e. the CUD in CRUD), it's impossible without building a custom React app.

You mention support for complex UIs, but Retool only ships with a basic table, and no built-in support for Data Grids. Something to consider when it comes to building richer page experiences. I would presume you intend to add more standard components as Retool continues to mature.

Current Retool customer here. We had this concern as well and we're supporting it with a custom component. Retool has been immensely helpful in planning, developing and supporting us in the engagement.

Due to Retool, we've essentially overhauled 60+ 10MB Excel sheets that we had to generate,distribute consolidate for a business planning function into a single app that supports by-user profile settings with 2 guys that are decent Excel/SQL guys but by no means devs.

Strong data grid, and Retool will start eating into "Excel as a front-end" market.

Just curious, are you using Excel as the 'end-back' with Retool being the front-end UI?

Thanks. Since it doesnt store data, which is excellent, does it still cache them for performance? If it does, would that still fall under the radar of GDPR?

100% Agreed! Defining logic in JS is quite clunky for these sorts of tools.

I'm biased[1], but for this reason we took the approach of creating a spreadsheet from scratch for the sole purpose of creating logic for apps (both internal tools & customer facing UX).

Would be curious to get the everyone's input on our spreadsheet-driven approach -- thoughts?

[1] I'm biased, because I'm the founder of: https://mintdata.com

[2] But this example shows what I mean by the "a spreadsheet is better to define logic than JS" approach:

https://mintdata.com/showcase/photo-finder/

You've been excessively promoting this on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=denster). Most HN readers consider that spamming. Note the site guideline: Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's also in somewhat bad taste to appear to be making a positive contribution to the discussion of someone else's work while actually promoting your own, and you've done that twice in this thread.

(I hesitated to say something about this because Retool is a YC co and we moderate less in such cases (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) but this principle is the same everywhere and I've made similar comments in many non-YC-related threads.)