You can self-host here: https://retool.com/self-hosted. Most people deploy it as a docker container on an EC2 instance but there’s various options
66 karma · joined April 5, 2020
For building Retool Apps/Workflows, our pricing is here: https://retool.com/pricing
So we decided to build a form builder. It allows you to:
1. Send data directly to your database (Postgres in our case), your data warehouse, or wherever else you want it
2. Write JS almost anywhere on the front-end, including libraries like moment and lodash, for custom validations, conditional logic, and data parsing
3. Run any arbitrary code in form submission (or validation), via our Workflows product
4. Store it in our database (where we give you a connection string), or your own database
5. Self-host it in your own VPC
And it’s free with no arbitrary limits on the number of users, forms or submissions.
I’m hoping to ship a bunch more features like integration to any REST API, more styling options, etc. If you have any feedback please let me know!
We’re working on getting this down significantly but, that being said, the login page isn’t our highest priority. It’s the first thing customers see, but >99% of the time, they’ll already be logged in and navigate straight to the apps page, or a specific Retool app. For these pages, we’ve:
1. re-written our core runtime to avoid excessive message passing with iframes (up to 75% faster page load for slowest apps)
2. parallelized resource fetching with JS execution
3. cached app graph information in IndexedDB
4. tweaked webpack chunking strategy to avoid very small JS/CSS chunks
5. optimized resource fetching to avoid over fetching
Hope that’s helpful context. Definitely let me know if you have thoughts/other ideas
Who knows longer-term I'd love to help users fine-tune their own models on llama2/gpt-3.5!
Just to be clear Retool Vectors is completely free (we're even taking on the LLM costs). We put the embeddings in a free postgres DB (and soon other open source vector DB providers) and give you the connection string so you can take it anywhere
If you’re looking for external apps, check out portals (https://retool.com/products/portals) that has custom volume discounts for many, many users
For context, these resources are cached on your machine. So you should find that the actual data transferred significantly decreases after the first visit.
1. A lot of the useful data for answering questions is in our public docs and community forum answers, which Intercom doesn’t have access to. (And we wouldn’t feel comfortable giving them access to our internal Slack anyhow.) For example, we’ve debugged complicated OAuth issues in Slack, and there is a lot of “context” there that is helpful for answering future OAuth questions (but isn’t available to Intercom).
2. Intercom doesn’t allow you to customize prompts or customize context easily. In our case, for a highly technical product, “prompt engineering” allowed us to radically improve answer quality. We could also use chain-of-thought prompting, which Intercom didn’t support. Together these two improvements probably doubled the answer success rate.
3. We needed to integrate with our data warehouse for in-product context. For example, if a customer has an error with a particular product/feature, knowing what plan they’re on, which features they’re using, which feature flags are enabled, etc. is quite helpful.
And no, this is definitely not making money. (It’s free after all, so I guess we’re probably losing money on this.) To be honest, as an engineer @ Retool, I work on things because I think they’re cool and could be useful to our customers… not because it has to make my company money.
I then tried building a custom AI chatbot for our support team, powered by a vector database (with previous answers, our docs, and community forum data). In my prototypes, the successful response rate was much higher (around 5 - 7x higher, ~30%). But it was surprisingly hard to build this bot: I needed to stitch together vector databases, custom integrations with Intercom, cronjobs to sync data, etc.
That’s why we built Retool Vectors. The idea is that we want to build a vector database that has full ETL from whatever inputs you have (e.g. Intercom, a postgres database, Salesforce, a community forum, a website, etc.). It’s always kept up to date. (We’re still working on some of these features, but I decided to try and launch this week because I just wanted to get feedback from HN, haha.) I think the industry has now settled on vector databases as the best way to provide context to LLMs. I hope that Retool Vectors can be a much easier way of getting data into it.
If you have any feedback please let me know!
By focusing on developers we were able to lean into supporting existing development workflows: versioning with Git, testing with staging environments, debugging with dev tools, monitoring with Datadog, etc.
Our goal is to remove all the boilerplate (spinning up a new box, managing access permissions, setting up staging data and environments, etc) that it takes to just get to writing the business logic unique to you. In my experience this causes as much debt as the logic itself!
I hope you can kick the tires on the new product — would love any feedback on how this could be even better for devs
We're also working on NPM module support (so you can pull in any SDK) right now.