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

50 points bootstrpppin | 2 comments | 14 Nov 24 00:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.419s | 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. leoff ◴[19 Nov 24 07:05 UTC] No.42180734[source]▶
From personal experience, I wouldn't try making anything complicated with Retool.

The saying "it makes hard things easy, and easy things impossible" is fitting, once it feels like you're fighting against the platform, it's time to quit and start writing some code.

replies(1): >>42186854 #
2. tdeck ◴[19 Nov 24 18:52 UTC] No.42186854[source]▶
The thing I like about Retool is that it's pretty easy to just drop to code within Retool itself, provided you're willing to write JavaScript. You can write JS "queries" that just run a piece of code, and you can create completely custom React UI components. You can also write JS for things like conditional formatting of table rows, generating and exporting a CSV file the user can download, transforming API responses, and so on. And you can still take advantage of Retool's automatic coaching and reloading to some extent. In my last job I built a number of fairly complex dashboards with Retool alongside my normal work, including one with an interactive network graph.