So we decided to build a form builder. It allows you to:
1. Send data directly to your database (Postgres in our case), your data warehouse, or wherever else you want it
2. Write JS almost anywhere on the front-end, including libraries like moment and lodash, for custom validations, conditional logic, and data parsing
3. Run any arbitrary code in form submission (or validation), via our Workflows product
4. Store it in our database (where we give you a connection string), or your own database
5. Self-host it in your own VPC
And it’s free with no arbitrary limits on the number of users, forms or submissions.
I’m hoping to ship a bunch more features like integration to any REST API, more styling options, etc. If you have any feedback please let me know!
> and b) building my own frontend (probably via React, and then maybe via formik)
There's also a new technology called HTML. It comes with a <form> tag, <input> field tags, and even a <button> to submit!
Although new, they managed to get all browsers on board to support it.
You will not need to import 150kb of JavaScript, though, which is sad. And it's not shiny to speak about in the interview for your next job.
I guess the pros dont overweight these cons... Yes, "probably via React" is the way!
It has an "action" attribute that points to a server you need to own and run a code you need to code in order to validate the input and store it in the database. If you are comfortable doing this, which no doubt you are, then you are not the target audience of this tool.
I’m curious how to interpret the “trusted by” statement here
Does this count: https://airforms.com/
When did you start building it? Budibase does exactly this since 2020.
https://docs.retool.com/education/labs/self-hosted
Edit: the right page seems to be https://docs.retool.com/self-hosted but it’s about Retool in general; I doubt you need 8 vCPUs and 16GB of RAM to host forms [1].
[1]: https://docs.retool.com/self-hosted/quickstarts/docker#vm-co...
Grist is open source, Python scriptable and each project is stored in a SQLite database.
Thus I came to the conclusion that any Access database is probably better off being a spreadsheet, even with all the chaos that not having forms as a front end and not having relational structure entails. At least people can understand other peoples spreadsheets (up to a point)
Recently I discovered https://directus.io/ which comes pretty close and it's open source.
* Forms (ie the product here) is free.
* We’ve always aimed to build a sustainable business where we charge reasonable prices and can guarantee we’ll stay in business ourselves. It’s true there are other products that are cheaper, but every single one of those companies is unprofitable and many will probably be dead in a few years. See, for example, Airplane, Interval, or Dynaboard. Dynaboard just got acquired today (their founder is apparently “thrilled” about it: https://dynaboard.com/blog/figma-acquires-dynaboard) and they’re shutting down on April 30th. If you’re a paying customer you’ll need to rebuild all your apps by then. Ouch! (I’d rather pay more and not have worry about core pieces of my business getting shut down with three months’ notice.)
You're right that it's a big concern, but it's a pretty tough sell to solve this problem by just charging so much that it's clear you could not possibly go out of business. I had to go pretty far down the list of your top competitors to find a good one that was open source, but I did find it.
All that said, Retool's pricing at that time was MUCH worse than it is today. This is what Retool was offering us at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20230315060042/https://retool.co... -- no distinction between developers and end users! No access controls until the $50/user/month level! That was totally out of the question. The current pricing looks a bit more reasonable, but it's too late; we already committed to the competitor offering an open source solution.
I help companies with digital transformation, what it usually entails is deploying solutions to small teams and then growing them as we get buy in from the business. The initial users are high frequency users of the tools, and later users might be infrequent users.
The problem I found with Retool was that as I scaled to the infrequent users the cost per user remained static, so I would be punished for my tool becoming more popular.
From a Low Code product perspective, we were still able to build a beautiful and functional product. Our product unit/engineer ratio is much higher than our competition (see, for example, Retool), which allows us to provide the best value for our users. Regarding the transition, I don't see any indication from the note you posted that users will have to rebuild all their apps. Rather, the founder is saying he will provide more information and possible steps. Who knows – maybe it would be integrated into Figma? And Figma would gain great runtime and IDE capacities?
I want to create customer accounts, apply settings (e.g. I delimit the data their account can access, basically adding WHERE clauses on a per-account basis), and they can access white-label read-only dashboards with their own user/pass.
Retool seemed 100% insistent on being an internal-only tool with a high cost per user.
We were emailing back in 2021 about one of the many products you and your team have built for developers. Exciting conversation, for sure!
If anyone is interested in reading about my experience with ReTool's approach to developer tools, I have a link: https://marak.com/blog/2021-04-25-monetizing-open-source-is-...
FWIW I run growth for a low code platform company and we are one of the retool alternatives. One of the things I am trying to get right is getting the value proposition right for different scenarios like say building a customer portal (unlimited external users) to admin tools (few internal users). So far we have been able to do good on this front by helping customers with usage based pricing or even developer based pricing. But yet curious to hear your use case and see if there is something I am missing.
I enjoy the technical side, but I'm struggling to commercialise it so don't hesitate to give me your feedback here or on https://www.myowndb.com/contact.html which is of course powered by a myowndb public form :-)
Where were all these alternatives when I was looking for a WYSIWYG form builder?
Retool is very widely adopted by major companies.
I may very well be nitpicking unfairly here, those marketing "trusted by" blocks on brand new products just always rub me the wrong way.
I said this in a sibling comment too, I may just be unfairly nitpicking here but these "trusted by" marketing blocks just rub me the wrong way when the product is brand new.
For building Retool Apps/Workflows, our pricing is here: https://retool.com/pricing
I never really understood why InfoPath didn't catch on better.
- We still had to have paper forms for legally required forms in case someone didn’t have a computer, etc. so then we needed a regular printable PDF. InfoPath native forms had issues with printing.
- The InfoPath-PDF integration was not very good and not usable for my production.
- The data on the other end went into bizarre formats and thus needed a job to convert it to the format we needed (and take action).
In the end this solution was deployed, and shockingly is still online and in production in 15 years later:
- A graphic designer (often an intern) took the original paper forms or fillable PDFs and made basic HTML forms with them.
- jQuery used for user friendly form validation.
- These forms were integrated with an SSO to allow e-signing.
- “Print” and “Submit” buttons on the form invoked a Perl script which (1) transformed the HTML form to having the content filled in, (2) ran headless Firefox and print-to-PDF to archive the form for legal purposes, (3) stored the form values in the native database, and (4) fired off a stored procedure based on the form name.
In effect, the same things InfoPath was supposed to do, but it didn’t need a dedicated administrator or complex integrations.
Don't get me wrong, it was an amazing tool for its day, but had some steep and proprietary onramps that limited adoption. I'm personally not at all surprised that it faded from general consciousness.
It was surprisingly good at letting non-computer-people build data gathering applications though.
Plenty “SSR” (the only place to render, so it wasn’t called that) tempting engines of the day, if you had an ODBC connection, you could generate form handlers with “one click”.
Of course, this was also before OWASP (started circa 2001)...
Which should I use for new projects? I assume the new one?
i assume for amazon, mercedes, etc. it's talking about retool? or are there some employees using formtodb?
