We’re excited to introduce the second iteration of pricing for Retool, which is cheaper for nearly every customer. Here’s a quick summary of the changes:
- First, instead of charging the same price for any user at your company, we now charge different rates for standard users (people who build apps in Retool) and a different, lower amount for end users (people who exclusively view or use Retool apps). See the details on our pricing page →
- We’re adding an annual billing option to our Team and Business plans so that you can pay annually and immediately get an additional 20% discount per user.
- And, we’re announcing a self-hosted Business plan for teams that prefer to self-host and need more granular permissions, audit logs, reusable modules, and other security features. You don't have to "talk to sales" to access this plan, you can deploy Retool yourself right away.
- Our free plan, which we introduced last year, is still free for up to 5 users. You can always sign up and get started right away, and upgrade whenever you might need the features from our Team or Business plans.
Most SaaS companies these days are raising their prices (when looking at the vendors Retool uses, spend increased with 83% of them compared to last year). So, why are we lowering prices?
Our pricing philosophy has always been to delight developers, deliver exceptional ROI, and monetize in a fair way. We would much rather be underpriced, since that drives high word-of-mouth (our top source of new users today). And we love delivering exceptional value to customers, whether that’s Ramp saving $8M in operating costs across the company with Retool, or Plaid’s support team getting 80% faster with Retool.
The most effective tools are fully customized to your workflows and the unique aspects of your business: take for example, the custom software NBC has developed to manage global demand planning for the Olympics, the suite of apps Snowflake has built to maintain SEC compliance, or the hundreds of apps Brex runs on Retool to do everything from simulate transactions or conduct risk reviews. We’re trying to change the economics of software development so transformative, custom operational software is available in every corner of every company.
When Retool gets activated within a business, we see adoption tick up considerably. Here’s the MAU (monthly active user) growth at a typical Retool customer a few months after they started building in Retool:
However, we got feedback from some customers that price could sometimes be a blocker to scaling adoption. That is counter to our goal of delivering delight to developers and value to businesses. That’s why we’re introducing the concept of standard users and end users to our pricing. Our standard user seats continue to be for the developers and builders within your org who will actively be building and editing Retool apps for your teams. End users—the folks who view dashboards, take actions, submit forms, etc—are now charged significantly less.
Let’s look at how this plays out in practice. Previously, an organization with 45 seats paid $450 monthly on the Team plan or $2,250 on the Business plan. But let’s say only 15 of those seats were actively building apps. With the new pricing, this org will only pay $390/month on Team and $1,515/month on Business. (And, if they opt into the annual plan, that drops an additional 20% to $300 and $1200, respectively.)
These new pricing plans are available starting today. Explore the details on our pricing page and get started. If you’re already a customer, we will grandfather you, and your current plans will still be available until the end of 2024. But we'd encourage you to switch over to the new plans, since they'll likely be quite a bit cheaper.
At Retool, we take a long view: what we really care about is improving how developers build software.
We are flabbergasted at the current “state of the art” of software building: to build a simple CRUD app, you need to wrestle with hundreds of brittle npm package dependencies, learn the nuances of Redux, and debug webpack errors. We think there must be a better way. (If you're interested in this problem space overall, we're hiring!)
The market opportunity here is vast: over 50% of software built today is internal-facing and developers spend >30–40% of their time building internal tools! We need to reach a lot more developers and teams in order to meaningfully change how software is built.
We’re excited to have more developers building in Retool, and even more folks within your orgs becoming more productive with software that’s customized to your unique business. If you have questions or feedback, please let us know—we’d love to hear from you.
