Comment by syogi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by syogi | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I’m Yogi, the engineer who worked on templates. Retool (https://retool.com) itself is a fast way of building custom internal tools (think Visual Basic, but in the cloud).

One thing that’s been challenging for us: because Retool is such a horizontal product, it was always hard for us to explain a) what exactly Retool is, and b) what people use it for. That’s why I decided to work on templates. A template is a pre-made app that you can plug your datasource (Stripe, Postgres, Github, etc.) into. Think old-school MS Word templates but for apps instead. You can plug in your credentials to get an extensible UI for your data. These templates aren’t meant to be 100% usable out of the box, but really to give you an idea of what you can do with Retool, quickly. (For example, here’s a video of us building the Github PR dashboard, which I mention below, in 15 minutes: https://cdn.tryretool.com/github_dashboard.mp4)

All of these templates are built from real-world use-cases that other companies are using Retool for. For example, we have customers using something very similar to our “Stripe refund tool” template. It pulls in data from Stripe, joins it to purchases in our database, and lets you refund an order in one click. (It updates the database, POSTs back to Stripe, and sends an email to the customer.)

My favorite is probably the Github PR dashboard. As an engineer myself, I want to start work everyday knowing who I’m blocking (i.e. I need to review their PR), and who I’m blocked on (i.e. I need to remind them to review my PR). I’d also like a quick summary of what a PR is. So I built this dashboard that loads all this information with the Github API at once, so I can just browse through them without waiting for each page to load. (Apparently this is an actual internal tool at Stripe that engineers check every day.)

Please let us know what you think! You can use any template to create your own app by clicking on “Use Template”.

Please clarify the definition of 'user' for billing purposes. Specifically, do end-users (with no edit permissions) count?

Hi, yes, they count for billing purposes. We bill per end-user of the tool.

But... if you have a good use case and can't make the pricing work, please let me know. I'm david@retool.com, and I'd be happy to give HN readers a significant discount or even free Retool for a bit. Your guys' feedback has gotten us to where we are today. Thanks!

I have 3 cases:

1) a dashboard for an internal system which will be used by a team of 10 only. Will it cost me $100/month?

2) A dashboard used by 10 people in my team, but could be view by the rest of the company (say 100) people occasionally. will it cost me $1100/month?

3) Lastly, say I develop 10 different internal tools for my team of 10 people. Will I have to pay $100/month for each app?

1 - Yes, $100 / month.

2 - We bill per monthly active user, so if they're active that month, we'll bill for them. If that's too much for you, please reach out to david@retool.com and I'll try to find some pricing plan that works for you.

3 - No, you can build as many apps as you want.

Thanks for the questions!

One model you could explore would be similar to Tableau's creator vs user/viewer license, which has a 10:1 price difference.

@yogi - will retool work for non-multi-tenant environments to aggregrate & create tools for the same data from XXX+ databases?

or more simply - can you connect a single "tool" to multiple databases?

You can! If you watch the demo video (https://cdn.tryretool.com/videos/4_minute_demo_4827ae.mp4), you'll see that every query could potentially come from a different datasource. So for example in our GDPR data export tool, we pull in data from Stripe, Salesforce, and a postgres database: https://retool.com/templates/gdpr-data-export/

Also — probably our coolest feature (IMO): you can query anything via SQL, including APIs. So you could query Stripe, Salesforce, etc. via SQL, since all data in Retool is in JSON. AND you can actually join across them too. Imagine joining a Google Sheet with Stripe data with data from your database. It's great fun! https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/querying-via-sql

For example, here's how you query a JSON blob via SQL:

  select
    *
  from
    {{ [{ id: 1, apples: 3 }, { id: 3, apples: 20 }] }}
  where
    apples > 5

And here's how you join data from two separate APIs (that return JSON):

  select
    users.*, payments.*
  from
    {{ usersApi.data }} as users,
    {{ paymentsApi.data }} as payments
  where
    users.id = payments.user_id

We miss you Yogi!

Now that you've shipped, come back and hang out at the house soon!

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