Retool has a high ceiling for what you can build with it. Generally speaking, most of our external use cases are B2B use cases that focus on productivity and data, not things that require highly differentiated visuals and animations. We call this "Operations software".
To name a few examples:
- Greenly is a B2B climate tech company who built a large portion of its product using Retool. You can see their case study here: https://retool.com/customers/greenly - Ylopo is a real estate tech company that built Retool apps to drive upsell opportunities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj0_XuRh3G8 - Retool runs its Partner Portal through external-facing Retool apps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu7FlG7SsU0
We had to make a lot of platform improvements in Retool's performance and design capabilities to claim that we have first-class support for customer-facing use (it's not as easy as it should be if you're new to Retool, but we're working on it). The bar is simply higher. Pricing and packaging needed to be there as well: we launched external user pricing that gives you a predictable rate at scale, and if you're bootstrapping, you can get up to $60k in credits through our Startup Program, which would cover your Retool bill entirely.
Happy to chat more if you're overwhelmed by all the links - you can email me at antony[at]retool[dot]com.
(Quick plug - we're actually running a webinar on how to build external-facing applications tomorrow! You can sign up on https://events.retool.com/build-external-apps.)