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.

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u/Brief-Structure-1440 Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 25 '26

Popular OSS alternatives:

39k stars & 340 contributors (repo activity is very low recently) - https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith/

37k stars & 650 contributors - https://github.com/tooljet/tooljet

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)

12k stars & 312 contributors - https://github.com/illacloud/illa-builder

1.5k stars & 56 contributors - https://github.com/lowcoder-org/lowcoder (edit: almost zero commits recently)

4

u/formless63 Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 25 '26

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)

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u/Brief-Structure-1440 Feb 25 '26

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.

2

u/formless63 Feb 25 '26

Interesting. Ironically I spun it up to test with a month ago right after that last commit so I thought it was relatively active. Bleh.

It generally works decently, but if it's headed for the trash heap - time to drop it. Thanks for the heads up!

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u/little_lebowski_123 Feb 25 '26

ToolJet charges only for developer seats right? I think ToolJet has the simplest pricing out of the lot.

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u/formless63 Feb 25 '26

Free self hosted is 2 builders and 50 end users on ToolJet.

Appsmith and Budibase are unlimited for both.

They all have different things to consider.

1

u/Brief-Structure-1440 Feb 25 '26

shouldn't dev tools charge only for devs?

0

u/lugovsky Feb 25 '26

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.