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Ask HN: Anybody used Retool for production, user-facing app?

50 points bootstrpppin | 3 comments | 14 Nov 24 00:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.685s | source

Bootstrapped founder here.

I'm planning to build a SaaS product loosely in the B2B logistics space - it needs to be relatively low cost to build/maintain, look slick and be extensible.

It would be customer facing, meaning each customer would need a login/account (or perhaps many, if a whole team is using our product).

I've looked at Retool and it looks quite epic but it looks like it's designed primarily for internal apps.

Has anybody used, or attempted to use Retool for a production, user-facing app?

Would really appreciate advice, war stories or recommendations.

1. puppycodes ◴[19 Nov 24 05:33 UTC] No.42180338[source]▶
At some point you realize the whole thing could have existed as a node or flask app after locking yourself into limitations that simply don't need to exist. Prototyping is great with tools like this but if its not fully open source, not exportable to code, thus dependent on someone elses successful seed round... avoid it.
replies(1): >>42183000 #
2. xtracto ◴[19 Nov 24 13:08 UTC] No.42183000[source]▶
That's why we went with tooljet at my startup.

Open source and "exportable" dashboards, allows us to setup a dev-stage-prod release cycle for our internal tools as well.

It's been pretty good so far.

replies(1): >>42183094 #
3. foxbee ◴[19 Nov 24 13:19 UTC] No.42183094[source]▶
Exportable?