Interested in using Retool for your business software? Use the calculator below to estimate your monthly & annual costs.
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Retool helps developers build powerful business software, fast. Using drag-and-drop components you can quickly create bespoke internal applications like admin dashboards, database GUIs, and more, and then customize them to your company’s needs using code.
When deciding whether or not to use Retool for building your internal tools, pricing is surely a factor. Retool offers four tiers of pricing, free (a limited offering), Teams, Business, and Enterprise. Within each tier, there are two types of pricing for two types of users: the first being those that can access the development environment (i.e. developers), and then the second type is end-users, who only use the final product.
Depending on the features you need, the number of developers and end-users, and whether you pay annually or monthly, the pricing of using Retool can vary quite a bit.
With this pricing calculator (that we made in Retool), you can quickly adjust your desired features, payment schedule, and user numbers to get an idea of your deployment’s monthly and annual costs on Retool.
Why use Retool?
Internal tools are all too often seen as the ugly backend of operations and are therefore neglected by product teams and engineers. Nevertheless, good internal business software can have the power to supercharge employee processes, saving you time and money.
Retool is designed for engineers to take some of the hard work out of building these internal tools, simplifying repetitive elements like forms and tables, whilst still allowing extensive customizability with code. By building on a developer tool like Retool, companies can build out highly scalable custom tools for internal teams much faster than with traditional code, without the restrictions of low-code platforms.
The price of Retool should be considered against the potential ROI of optimized processes, where employees can work much faster, avoiding time-wasting tasks that can easily be automated and leaving them to concentrate on what they do best.
Joey Karczewski
Which tier is right for you?
Retool pricing may seem complicated when first vetting the product. To understand which pricing tier your company will likely land in, it's best to understand what kinds of companies or use cases might fall into each category.
Free - for developers & early exploration of the Retool platform
The free Retool tier enables users who are curious about the platform to explore the environment and start building out basic internal applications. Users have a developer-only version of Retool (i.e. no end-users) where they can create unlimited applications, integrate with any resource & learn about the Retool platform itself, without needing to make any financial decisions around initial pricing. This allows developers to estimate the potential ROI of the platform at zero cost or approval from others in the company and can be used for basic app functionality.
The Retool free tier is limited to only 5 users. This is the perfect playground for a small team or team segment to explore the Retool platform, and see what they can get from it, before jumping onto paid tiers once they are content with the product fit. Once you need more users, you will need to move to the Team tier.
Team - for scrappy startups looking to build fast & cheap, and small teams with equal permissions
The Team tier focuses on smaller teams that have outgrown the first 5 users, and are ultimately more concerned with functionality and speed of building than security. Once your team grows beyond the initial five users of the free tier, it’s essential to build more closely in line with traditional development practices and integrate version control elements into your deployment process. That’s why the key features released in this tier are application release versioning, staging, and production databases, as well as the ability to have unlimited users.
Nevertheless, once a company starts creating business-critical applications & connecting those all-important read/write permissions to key production resources, having the granular permission control and audit logs of the Business tier becomes extremely important.
As an example, in the Team plan, it’s not possible to have Write permissions to a key database for some users and not for all. Since everyone has access to all applications and can perform all functionality, the Team plan is only suitable for teams where all users can have the same access and abilities across apps and resources. When Retool is no longer a tool used by a single team, but instead critical to the entire business, granular permissioning is needed and it’s time to scale up the business tier.
Business - for larger teams or businesses using Retool for mission-critical applications
The Business tier targets customers that require higher-level security and permissioning, with different types of users and likely many different apps within their Retool environment.
With multiple use cases and feature sets, comes the need for more compliance features that are essential to mission-critical applications, such as permissioning and audit logs. The business tier also unlocks the ability to create portals and embedded applications that are designed for an external user base. Alongside these key compliance features, the Business tier also unlocks some more minor features, such as branding and custom logos.
Key features of the business plan summarized:
- Permissioning is a key feature needed for most larger companies with security and compliance protocols.
- Audit logs are another key compliance feature for monitoring usage.
- Portals & Embeds allow users to build external-facing applications. Note: currently, each user is charged at normal end-user pricing, but you can contact Retool for custom pricing if using the portal option for a large user base.
For companies looking to truly adopt Retool at scale, there are a couple of essential key features: these include enterprise-level source control, SAML & dedicated support, and are only available on custom Enterprise pricing.
Enterprise - for large companies that enable many teams with Retool applications
The Enterprise Retool environment usually denotes a paradigm shift in a company’s view of Retool. Beyond using Retool for a small selection of applications, Retool is now the go-to place for all expedited internal application development. With broader acceptance of the platform and user personas in the application, come enterprise-grade security standards such as source control through a traditional SCIM provider, SAML & a support channel.
Important note for On-Premise deployments: having over 25 users pushes you into Enterprise, where there is a higher base cost, as well as a higher ‘per-user’ cost. If your company needs to be deployed on-prem and will likely go over that amount, it’s worth first reaching out to Retool for an Enterprise quote before building out on the platform.