Comment by dvdhsu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvdhsu | Hacker News Reader

Hi HN! I'm one of the creators of Retool, and we're excited (and very nervous again) to be posting this on HN. We first showed Retool to HN around a year ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494).

When we posted Retool last time, we thought it was a cool idea (visual programming + functional reactive programming). But we didn't really know whether it was useful, and whether people would pay for it.

Since last year, we've been hard at work talking to customers and writing code. We discovered that internal tools (eg. to manage deliveries) is a good use case for a visual programming language like Retool.

Basically, Retool gives you components (textinputs, dropdowns, tables, etc.), and queries (connect easily to APIs, SQL databases, etc.). In a FRP way, they can interact with each other. So your tables can pull in data from queries, and buttons can pull in data from a table's selected row.

When we show Retool to people, they often think "oh! it's visual basic for the web!". And in many ways - it is! Maybe that's something you think is great - maybe not. In any case, I'd love to hear HN's thoughts. :)

Here's a 3 minute video demo I just made this morning: https://cdn.tryretool.com/approval_video.mp4 of me making an approval workflow in 3 minutes

If you're curious how it works - here are the docs: http://docs.tryretool.com/.

Thanks!

Cool idea! We built a lot of internal tools at my last startup (bloc.io) because it was an operationally intensive business. I would have definitely tried this out.

Your premise that most internal tools use the same building blocks seems accurate based on my experience, a lot of it is collecting and analyzing data.

I'd also add that the most underrated cost is maintaining a tool, developers are usually excited to build something new and when they're working in a fresh codebase they can build and iterate quickly. The real pain is when no one has used a tool in a couple months but needs it now, and the original dev has moved on to some other project so there's no one available to update or fix it. That's one of the biggest reasons we started using more third-party SaaS options instead of building our own, even if they were expensive and only an approximation of what we actually wanted.

This is definitely true and one of our insights as well. All you need to use retool is basic working knowledge of sql and javascript, so there's no dependence on the original author.

Thank you!

> I'd also add that the most underrated cost is maintaining a tool, developers are usually excited to build something new and when they're working in a fresh codebase they can build and iterate quickly. The real pain is when no one has used a tool in a couple months but needs it now, and the original dev has moved on to some other project so there's no one available to update or fix it. That's one of the biggest reasons we started using more third-party SaaS options instead of building our own, even if they were expensive and only an approximation of what we actually wanted.

That is a good point - and we've used that a few times in sales pitches. The benefit of Retool is that it's pretty clear what's going on (oh, new column added to table, so let's add it to our KeyValueMap too). And so keeping things up to date requires a lot less context.

Thanks for the thought - we will bring this up more in our sales calls :)

Hi dvdhsu, this looks great. At Thread we build lots of internal tools, but would like to be able to build more. We currently use ChartIO to build dashboards, but some of these have become almost like mini read-only apps that teams use, it would be great to make some of these into something a bit more useful and Retool sounds like it has the potential to be a good fit.

Some questions I would have as an engineer...

1. Where's the documentation - it's not linked to on the site.

2. What's your GDPR policy, we have customer data in our database.

3. Can this do Slack bots? We use them quite a bit for reporting, would be handy!

4. What sort of auth schemes do you offer? We provide limited access to some of our tools to third parties who aren't on our Google Apps domain.

5. What sort of APIs do you support. We have some basic JSON+HTTP things that require a session cookie to use because they are only used in web pages we run, and we have an authenticated GraphQL API. Would these work? How do you handle authentication on APIs?

1. docs.tryretool.com - we just added it - thanks!

2. You can install Retool in your EC2 instance, and block all inbound / outbound network traffic. I'll send you an email about it!

3. Yes - we can! Curious to hear about your use case though - is it for BI?

4. We integrate with Google, Okta or any SAML 2.0 provider. Would that work for you guys?

5. Any! Yep - we handle authentication in the API query itself, or you can create an API with authentication stored server-side. Here are docs on generic APIs: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/apis, and here are docs on GraphQL: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/graphql

WRT cookies specifically - even though requests from the browser get proxied through our backend we support forwarding authentication cookies to the browser that is tied to the user's specific session in Retool. (I thought we had written docs for this but can't find them now. Ping me @ david@tryretool.com and I can tell you how we do it!)

Nice!

For the Slack bots, a fairly common thing we want to do is regular business updates from either Google spreadsheets (that are very dynamic/scripted) or from ChartIO. Some basic interactivity with those bots would be handy.

Interesting! Retool might be a good fit then - I'll reach out over email. Thanks!

Please add me to the list of people to talk about the install on EC2 Instance options, docker would be preferable though.

David this looks fantastic. I can’t wait to play with it.

Just on the GDPR front, our DB also has customer data. We currently host on heroku. Does the data we pull in / process using retool go anywhere else except for where we point it?

No, your data never goes anywhere. You can deploy Retool and airgap it to prevent all inbound / outbound network connections. Then you can connect to it via a VPN.

I will reach out over email - thanks for the question!

Ha! I see in your video demo that someone is being naughty:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ymacuu8eo3m5267/Screenshot%202018-...

That’s me - in fact! We thought it’d be a funny joke HN would appreciate :)

Bobby Tables strikes again!

I love the Eva-Luator user as well :)

And I hope you've learned to sanitize your database inputs.

Awesome idea. As somebody who wrote many internal tools for a small startup many moons ago (customer manager, shipping manager, inventory manager) Retool solves that pain.

A few questions.

1.) How does authentication to retool apps work? Can I use 3rd party such as Google or GitHub? Is enforced 2fa supported?

2.) Do you support visualizations from data such as graphs and charts?

3.) You mention to allow access to my database we just whitelist the Retool IP. Are there a group of IP's to whitelist? If somebody compromised your service, then they have access to my database. A bit scary.

1. Yes! We support google and standard SSO solutions (Okta, etc.)

2. We do! Check out the charts components under "display".

3. We take security very seriously. If you want to keep security 100% in your infra, we support on-prem deployments.

> 1.) How does authentication to retool apps work? Can I use 3rd party such as Google or GitHub? Is enforced 2fa supported?

Yep - we integrate with Google, Okta, as well as any other SAML 2.0 provider (e.g. ADFS).

> 2.) Do you support visualizations from data such as graphs and charts?

We have a few charts, but that's not our focus. If you're looking to graph a lot of things, you're probably looking for a BI tool like Looker.

> 3.) You mention to allow access to my database we just whitelist the Retool IP. Are there a group of IP's to whitelist? If somebody compromised your service, then they have access to my database. A bit scary.

Yep - there is a group of IPs for you to whitelist. But yes - if you care about security, you should probably be using the on-premise version of Retool. That's hosted by you, and you can control all inbound + outbound traffic. (70% of our customers are on on-premise.)

Thanks for the questions!

You must have an MIT engineer on staff judging from the user names in the video :-) Great demo. I'd use this personally to do things like ML labeling for personal projects.

That's perfect! There's already a labelling component built-in!

Haha - thanks! We have a few SICP lovers :P

What's your twitter username. I want to add you as a maker to the producthunt project :)

Not sure if you're going to see this but I'll give it a shot: is the per-user pricing per-end user using the tools or per-developer writing/modifying the tools?

We use you @ Rappi <3 Retool

Thank you! You guys were one of our first customers! :)

Interesting. Looks really cool! Would you mind sharing a little about the front end stack you’ve used to make it? I’m assuming React?

That's right: react + a ton of customization

People often think it’s Visual Basic for the web, or MS Access or FileMaker for the web?

Slick, and great landing page, I’d like to try it.

Thank you! We definitely do hear that from hardcore VB users back in the day.

Looks really great. Will try it out as soon as I have a use case in mind :)

A small note: shared that in our internal slack and it just displays as a "preview" the domain, title and meta description of your page. I think Slack uses the `og` meta tags too, so adding a more elaborate description and an image would help :)

This is super cool. Retool has come a long way in the short span of time. I would love to connect it with my db and build more integrations/alerts/notifications on top of it.

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