Show HN: Retool Portals and Retool Embed | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Retool Portals and Retool Embed

retool.com

30 pointsantonybello14 comments

Antony here, PM at Retool. We’re really excited to share how you can quickly build portals and business software for your customers, partners, and vendors.

We started Retool to help developers build internal tools faster—and along the way noticed that a lot of the same frustrations with complexity, costs, and data risks applied to building software for external users too. Developers are often forced to build from the ground up: setting up a database from scratch, integrating multiple APIs, configuring the latest Webpack release and making it work in CI, fiddling with CSS to get components to fit company branding, and then managing auth, SSO, permissions, scaling, performance—the list goes on.

So, we’re introducing two new products. Retool Portals is great if you want whitelabel Retool and have it manage login, signup, and user management; Retool Embed makes sense if you want to augment an existing portal with the functionality you build in Retool.

I’d love your feedback on how to make these even better. Also happy to answer any questions.

I can't seem to find pricing information related to these 2 products

Is it $15 a month per external user? Wow. Who can even afford this? Clearly only B2B and very profitable contracts.

I was very interested in the embed functionality but yeah I can't pay that much per user

We actively work with folks on custom pricing that aligns with their needs, so would love to understand what model makes sense for you! If pricing is the blocker, you can email me at antony[at]retool[dot]com. Would love to help.

Unless companies have too much money to waste, it is hard for me to understand this per user pricing. You have to do the work the create the app, your data gets locked and you have got to pay per user as you scale. Are companies just have too much money or too inefficient?

Yes! I've been waiting for this for years! -- or rather, my customers have. Super stoked for Portals, and to see Retool move outside of the internal tooling niche. Looking perfect for small, customer-facing licensing portals.

How good is scalabiliy? If I build a tool that processes 10 million orders a day, will it scale?

PM at Retool here. Generally speaking, as scalable as any other piece of software. Specifically:

- Retool is datastore/backend-agnostic, so from a backend/data perspective it will be as scalable as whatever backend you’re using to process/store those orders. You can connect Retool to make requests to your own API, to directly query a database, etc.

- From a frontend perspective, you can choose to deploy Retool using Retool’s Cloud, or self-host Retool on your own private cloud. The former is quite scalable, but if you wanted full control over scalability you’d likely opt to self-host. If you’re self-hosting you have all of the “typical” scaling techniques available to you: you can e.g. run Retool on Kubernetes, and vertically or horizontally scale however you need.

For more on scaling self-hosted deployments, see: https://docs.retool.com/docs/horizontally-scaling-retool

Is the pricing model per user for self-hosted or fixed fee?

Really cool!

Retool embed reminds me a bit of Matterway in spirit. But also a bit like Pixiebrix.

This seems like a big deal?

Depends?

HUGE! Have a project right now that this will really impact.

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