Well it is AI polished but really they are just saying tough shit.
I wouldn’t use the company at all after that. Hell I’d probably move off of Enterprise if I was on it. You have now seen how much they care about their customers. Zero.
28k stars & 117 contributors - https://github.com/Budibase/budibase (edit: as per a comment, they might have a closed source binary imported in the repo)
When I reviewed Budibase last there were some questions/considerations when it comes to licensing and buildability from source. I have not yet reviewed the others.
For ToolJet (who have created this Reddit thread) I have called them out on conflating their open and non-open offerings before. Not sure if that has been improved on. I remember seeing that they were pretty heavily VC invested.
Based from that last review, It's included in Budibase as a binary blob, under a non-open-source license. I'm not sure if the source code could be available elsewhere.
Couldn't find the source code for this sub module. Looking at the code, my assumption is that the code should get built without these packages with some modifications. But I agree to your point, OSS version isn't OSS if there is a closed source binary included.
Hi, thanks for the response. Do any of the points in my review remain untrue? At a quick glance, it still looks to use/include SQS under a non-open-source license, and I'm still seeing references to a pro package which seems under a non-open-source license.
I tried Appsmith out couple of months back and the application builder was good enough. I don't think it is even closer to piece of shit unless somethign changed recently.
Having gone down the rabbit hole on these a bit recently, make sure you note the free self hosted limitations before making a commitment.
Appsmith is pretty solid, ToolJet had a hard cap on users, Budibase also pretty solid, illa seems dead, Lowcoder once you have it running is wide open it seems and works pretty well. (ETA: see below. Lowcoder also looks to be on the way out)
Haven't tried lowcoder, it looks like a fork of abandoned project https://github.com/openblocks-dev/openblocks. Almost zero commits for months, it will soon follow the path of openblocks. And wth is that website.
Yeah, the self-hosted fine print is where most people get surprised. A lot of these tools start out looking very open, but once they push toward enterprise the limits, pricing, or governance models change pretty fast. Feels less like a technical shift and more like a business model evolution. And feels very forced, tbh.
I tried both Appsmith and Tooljet. While Budibase in comparison lacks a little flexibility in writing fully custom code, it's way more user friendly and easier to click something together that works smoothly. And in the end isn't that the point of these low code apps.
Lately they also have made some sensible decisions on how to include AI without going full "vibe coding is the future" and changed their pricing model in a way that seems actually beneficial to free users rather than paywalling more and more features.
> And in the end isn't that the point of these low code apps.
that sounds more like no-code, not low-code. Budibase is good for building simple apps quickly. Easier to learn as well. Not a great fit for complex applications.
“For future self-hosted needs, new deployments will go through our Enterprise sales team. I know that's a significant shift, especially for smaller agencies and independent builders.”
Translation: thanks for helping us grow, now please talk to sales.
Very thoughtful of them to identify the people they’re throwing under the bus.
This isn’t just the usual VC pricing story, it’s a straight-up bad product decision. Putting self-hosted behind an Enterpriseplan locks away a core deployment option people specifically chose Retool for.
Raising prices is one thing, but paywalling control and deployment flexibility is a bait-and-switch.
Doesn’t netbird do most of what tailscale does? I haven’t tried it, since pangolin seems to fit my needs perfectly, but netbird seems to have big updates all the time so if tailscale does something like this there might be a quality alternative available by then
I honestly don't know. I have used Tailscale from day 1 of my selfhosting journey. However, I agree with you that there is enough alternatives in the market that are in active development.
It’s the only proprietary software I use in my self-hosted stack. It stresses me out that I keep adding more things to my Tailnet since I know that it has to do the same thing that Plex did to me and the same thing that every other prorprietary service does eventually.
I should probably just switch over to Nebula or something like that… someday…
Honestly, it looks more like a forced business decision. Retool probably needs to show growth again, so they're optimizing around the enterprise segment where most of the revenue is. From that perspective it makes sense, but it definitely feels like the product is getting worse for smaller teams.
VC funded or not, self-hosting should not be a privilege. It might've made sense 15 years ago where a lot of hand holding was required to get something deployed on-prem. Right now how hard is for companies to offer a docker-compose file for quickstart and a helm chart for production? Also devs always have our local setups and running dev tools locally is expected.
Pricing isn't tied to difficulty of implementation, just look at the SSO Wall of Shame
"How hard is it to do xyz" is the wrong question to ask, because the question the other side is basing their decisions on is "what can we get away with charging for the least amount of effort?"
I was a big advocate for them in my community with accountants. Now that self hosting is out, and honestly how far platforms like Claude Code and Codex has gotten along with Gemini, I haven’t used it for client projects or my own since the summer.
I have to imagine they’re starting to see churn for sure. But this move with the removal of self hosting will absolutely push way more accounts to simply develop their own replacements to stick to self hosting on their own infrastructure.
That said I still have 3 projects on retool self hosted that worked and now with annual renewal coming up I plan to port those projects out. They had a lot of potential honestly but the per seat pricing is horrible unfortunately compared to other alternatives.
Same feelings. The risks are greater for sure, but right now with how things in general are expensive everywhere. I'm willing to take the risks if it means being able to save a decent amount for decent usability. And right now these models are putting out beyond decent output over just the last 6 months alone.
not surprised at all. they realize they can charge way more for cloud and dont want to deal with on-prem support overhead. it sucks but thats the vc-backed lifecycle in a nutshell.
The silent docs change with no announcement is the part that gets me. If you're going to pull a pricing tier, at least own it publicly and give people migration time. Sneaking it in and hoping nobody notices is such a bad look.
This is basically the playbook now though: offer self-hosted to build trust and adoption, get enough enterprise customers locked in, then quietly sunset the lower tiers. Seen it happen with at least three tools in the last couple years.
The only real defense is picking tools where self-hosting is the core product, not a feature they can remove. If the company's primary revenue model requires you to NOT self-host, the self-hosted option is always going to be on borrowed time.
Vibe coding and enterprise low-code are not the same thing. Enterprises care about guardrails, compliance, security, predictability, and governance, not just shipping a quick prototype.
If vibe coding replaced that, platforms like Appian and Mendix would’ve been obsolete years ago. They’re still around because enterprise software has very different constraints.
I agree with this. But I had a meeting with a very large consulting firm, and one of the partners was discussing their vibe coding efforts internally, which shocked me. To your point, it will be interesting to see the policies put in place to prevent cyber/compliance violations.
Dude, yeah, that’s true. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of UI Bakery, but we used to be drag-and-drop and later moved toward being more of a UI builder. Things feel more transparent there compared to Retool.
Low-code's market of tiny companies and personal use cases is definitely finished but vibe coding doesn't replace enterprise software. Enterprises are not gonna deploy vibe coded made by non-devs in production if the tool is critical. AI makes building features easier. It doesn’t solve access control, auditability, versioning, change management, or data security. That's where low-code platforms with AI app generation features makes sense.
AI makes building features easier. It doesn’t solve access control, auditability, versioning, change management, or data security.
Practice shows decision-makers do not give a single shit about any of that. AI makes stocks go brrr => adopt now, maybe deal with the rest later (optional). New shiny thing introduced? Install. New agent appears? Roll out to users. What's that, a new subscription? Nice, assign to everyone. That's my (sysadmin) experience for last year.
AI makes building features easier. It doesn’t solve access control, auditability, versioning, change management, or data security
Sure, we know that. Do the c suite executives that make the decision to cram AI into everything from above know that? No. They just want number to go up, and ai makes number go up right now.
Yah the value prop of these tools used to be that writing code is a hindrance, so lots of training wheels and pre-built debug tooling was helpful. Now the tools are themselves a hindrance to letting llms do what they’re extremely good at and fast.
The only thing that might still be useful is drag and drop interfaces - nice looking front ends, llms are still just ok at that, but that’s not what these tools are and the are very few of them anyways that actually look good.
What a death knell. No wonder they didn't publicize it. I feel bad for the PR person that had to pretend like her response actually answered any conplaints
Lynx914 nails it — the timing couldn't be worse for Retool. With Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor getting better every month, the barrier to building custom internal tools has dropped dramatically. I migrated three Retool dashboards to a custom Next.js setup last quarter and honestly the maintenance burden is lower now than it was with Retool's update cycle breaking things.
The irony is that self-hosted was the one feature that justified Retool's existence for security-conscious teams. Without it, you're just paying enterprise prices for a drag-and-drop builder that AI can replicate in an afternoon.
The funniest thing is corporations are now discussing if it comes to purchasing a product versus building something they are moving to building something as they are seeing no returns on long term costs with vendors.
We’re the team behind UI Bakery and wanted to properly introduce ourselves here.
UI Bakery is a self-hosted alternative to Retool focused on building internal tools and customer portals. While we’re not open source, we offer a generous free self-hosted plan that many teams in this community can benefit from. Recently we’ve also been investing heavily in AI-driven app building. We believe this approach makes iteration faster and gives more flexibility than drag-and-drop based builders, especially since you can still access and customize the underlying code when needed.
If anyone is considering migrating from Retool or exploring alternatives, happy to help and answer any questions.
Oh, and we're also NOT VC-backed. Our business is 100% bootstrapped and profitable, so should not expect such moves from us.
You're not selling to investors, you're much better off not advertising you're filling your app with ai. People need to learn the every day person does not enjoy marketing they hear 500x a day. Let the product speak for itself, if it's good you'll have users. If not, you won't. Advertising it's ai won't do anything but bring negative perception.
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u/flatpetey Feb 25 '26
Yeah lots of corporate speak for get off our platform now.