←back to thread

50 points bootstrpppin | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | 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. steve_adams_86 ◴[] No.42180543[source]
I used retool briefly and ended up choosing windmill instead. I self host it and find it incredibly useful for prototyping. It’s very robust and the end product actually works quite well.

I wouldn’t ship an actual product with heaps of users from windmill but it’s perfectly capable of proving concepts, and the workflows are excellent.

I do have one product I built entirely in windmill but you’d never be able to tell. It isn’t online right now. It was essentially a scheduled script for fetching smoke forecast data from government websites, a react front end, and a tile server which sent map tiles to the client containing the smoke forecast data. The performance was totally fine and the UI was nice, but I built that part mostly by hand rather than exclusively with their WYSIWYG editor.