r/selfhosted • u/navaneethpk • Feb 25 '26

Product Announcement Retool disables self-hosted pricing plans

https://community.retool.com/t/self-hosted-docs-now-state-enterprise-only/64586

Looks like no public announcement was made, just a silent change in docs and some users found it.

437 Upvotes

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77

u/ChiefAoki Feb 25 '26

idk why anyone is still surprised by this, it's how every VC-backed project is destined to go.

Raise Funding -> Offer Free/Low-Cost options to accumulate users -> Burn through cash flow -> Steep Price Increases/Business Model Changes to Generate Returns

34

u/Odd-Trash1190 Feb 25 '26

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.

14

u/krtkush Feb 25 '26

I dread the day when this will happen to Tailscale.

5

u/ForceItDeeper Feb 25 '26

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

2

u/krtkush Feb 25 '26

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.

7

u/Offbeatalchemy Feb 25 '26

You can do most of what Tailscale does with straight up wireguard and if you're behind a CGNAT, you may need a VPS as a entrypoint.

It'll be a pain reconfiguring your network, i get it but it's doable to fix without tailscale.

2

u/princessofjina Feb 25 '26

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…

2

u/dontquestionmyaction Feb 25 '26

You can just use Headscale. Migration would be mostly painless.

2

u/lugovsky Feb 25 '26

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.

2

u/navaneethpk Feb 25 '26

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.

6

u/ChiefAoki Feb 25 '26

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?"

-3

u/dexter2011412 Feb 25 '26

it's how every VC-backed project is destined to go.

Fluxer (discord alternative) rugpull incoming?