Full disclosure: I'm a Technical PMM at Retool, which makes me a little biased, but I'm also a developer who’s seen these sorts of projects from both sides.
I generally agree with most of the commenters here, that you need a team of just a couple experienced people to start building your in-house platform. But when you're constrained with that small of a team, building something full-code can make it tough to find the momentum you need to get any one solution over the finish line.
If you already have a solid software development process or a team already in place, maybe going with full-code could work. On the other hand, we have a customer that replaced a custom-built React dashboard that was powering their whole business with an app entirely built in Retool, and let them work with the team they already had in place. Empowering the entire team is one the reasons Retool exists. They’ve been prototyping new features incredibly fast, even the non-technical folks on their team can contribute, and they haven’t had to worry about managing freelancers or attracting and hiring a team.
You've got a lot of choices ahead of you and a lot of good advice here in the comments. Feel free to reach out to keanan@retool.com if I can help sort through any of it!
I generally agree with most of the commenters here, that you need a team of just a couple experienced people to start building your in-house platform. But when you're constrained with that small of a team, building something full-code can make it tough to find the momentum you need to get any one solution over the finish line.
If you already have a solid software development process or a team already in place, maybe going with full-code could work. On the other hand, we have a customer that replaced a custom-built React dashboard that was powering their whole business with an app entirely built in Retool, and let them work with the team they already had in place. Empowering the entire team is one the reasons Retool exists. They’ve been prototyping new features incredibly fast, even the non-technical folks on their team can contribute, and they haven’t had to worry about managing freelancers or attracting and hiring a team.
You've got a lot of choices ahead of you and a lot of good advice here in the comments. Feel free to reach out to keanan@retool.com if I can help sort through any of it!