Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you!<p>For example, here's when we launched: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494</a>. Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!)<p>After that, we spent around a year polishing the product and getting customers, and we launched officially on HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966</a>.<p>Today, we have tens of thousands of paying customers, are ~cashflow-positive, and have substantial revenue. But we are yet still so far from changing how internal software is built. Our thesis is that a Visual Basic-like application builder is a better way of building a certain segment of software (namely, internal CRUD apps). If you have any feedback or ideas on how we can improve the product, please do let me know (in comments or via email).<p>Oh, here's our blog post too: <a href="https://retool.com/blog/series-c2/" rel="nofollow">https://retool.com/blog/series-c2/</a>. It has some details about our weird fundraising strategy (smaller rounds, lower valuation), which we think is more employee-friendly (lower dilution, more upside for employees). Happy to talk through that as well; here's another article about it: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2021/12/22/retool-unicorn-funding-round-follows-risky-employee-first-approach/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2021/12/22/retool-un...</a>
If you're interested in an open source alternative to Retool, checkout Budibase.<p>On top of a drag and drop visual builder, Budibase comes with an automation platform (like zapier) , internal db, and a lot more flexibility when it comes to design.<p>We launched our cloud product 7/8 months ago and we just hit the 40,000 companies using Budibase.<p>Budibase is open source and you can run it on Docker, K8s, Digital Ocean, Raspberry Pi, ARM, and more.<p>If you are interested, check it out:<p><a href="https://github.com/Budibase/budibase" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Budibase/budibase</a><p><a href="https://budibase.com" rel="nofollow">https://budibase.com</a><p>To David and the team at Retool - congrats! I'm the cofounder of Budibase and it's wonderful to see you push the industry forward. But we're coming to get you :-)
Will you be increasing your OSS financial support? Retool uses many Open Source libraries, and given your financial position, it seems incommensurate with the total support to date of $50,250. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://opencollective.com/retool" rel="nofollow">https://opencollective.com/retool</a>
As someone on the product side I am getting more bullish each day on low-code tooling as it gets increasingly hard to source and retain engineering talent.<p>Whist it might comes with downsides and limitations I think the positives in terms of time-to-market and cost outweigh these on balance for many types of needs (not all for sure).<p>Congrats.
45M at 3.2B valuation? Who's drinking that koolaid?<p>EDIT FTFA
>>>The funding, which Retool has described to me as a Series C2, is coming from Sequoia Capital, Stripe co-founders John and Patrick Collison, GitHub’s former CEO Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, Daniel Gross and Caryn Marooney, the former VP of Comms at Facebook who is now a partner at Coatue. All are previous investors in the company. The round comes on the heels of the company raising a more modest $20 million Series C in December 2021 (which valued it at $1.85 billion).
Congrats. We're big fans of Retool! We're a neobank and use Retool for all of our internal customer service, operations and compliance apps.<p>Our subscription is now up for renewal and it looks like we're in for a big price increase as we transition from a handful of shared users to 50+ named users + granular permissions. We're still a very small startup (<5 developers but lots of external customer service people using Retool) so hopefully we can find a way to take the company size (and not just the number of seats) into account.<p>Looking forward to continuing to build on Retool!
Congrats to the team! Retool is a fantastic product. I commend the vision of the founding team to keep the focus on internal tooling and "devs" as the core of its market. I wish more people realized that "no-code" is a delusion. You need someone to create the logic, and wire things together. The right approach is the re-tool approach. Give devs the ability to create powerful tools by helping them focus on what's important.
I have ported a backoffice app from Phoenix LiveView to a Retool(Frontend) + Vercel(Api) + Supabase(database) collection and it's holding out really great. The primitives of Retool (autoupdating queries, transformers, direct integration to the database, staging and production environments) makes feature development super fast. You guys are on to something great, keep going strong.
Congratulations on the funding! I built multiple unusual internal apps for our product last year. Retool is now in my list of "must have" for any thing I build.<p>The build process took a bit of time and I had to hire an expert on Upwork. Not everyone might persevere. A gallery with examples of varying complexity would make the sell easier.
Congrats on the round!<p>I've always been interested in Retool, but have a baseline requirement of any tool syncing back to Git. Is there a reason you don't allow that in the SaaS version?
Retool is awesome tool, because of the introduction of some workflow in retool my team as able of 200% more perfomance in 3 months, i managed the team and shifted the tools in last months so quickly an re adapted, is fucking insane the amount of possibilites
Congrats on the round! Love the product.<p>I think retool is a great framework to build internal apps. Customers always wonder of what they can build with a framework. I wonder what were strategies that you used to solve this problem.
100k/y minimum for getting more than 5 users a d single sign on is ridicoulous. I would really like to use retool and grow with it but thats just insane for a startup.
Does this remind anyone else of FileMaker Pro? I remember I used FileMaker in my teen years (mid 90s) to build an application to help my parents manage my condo building expenses. Very simiilar concept but of course the world has changed since then, so today you'd need what retool offers (connectivity to cloud databases, building web app vs macos apps, etc). But it's funny how after 20 years old ideas become new again.
Question. I looked at the demos and the documentation. It seems like Retool can do low volume ETL. In my case, I want to pull Smartsheets data into Tableau which is our reporting tool. Is this an appropriate use case for Retool? Specifically, I want to use the Retool online version.
I really want a single retool docker image that I can just run locally to test it out. I think the last time I tried finding that it didn’t exist, and I didn’t really feel like setting up a whole docker compose stack just to see if it worked.
So a company that produces something which “RAD” tools have tried to do since approx 1990 is valued at how much again? Read a product description from a RAD environment such as Delphi or VBA or a 4GL like Rational and you will find almost the same language.
I would not touch this with a ten foot pole; it’s a massive lock in / walled garden.