Retool pricing in 2026 starts at $0 for teams of five or fewer and climbs to $50 per builder plus $15 per internal user per month on the Business plan, billed annually. Those two numbers are the ones every guide quotes, and they are the smallest part of the story. Retool bills for the people who touch the tool, and it now runs four meters that sit entirely outside your seat count: AI credits, agent runtime, workflow runs, and external users. This guide verifies every figure against Retool's live pricing page and its billing documentation on September 2, 2026, then runs the cost math over three years, which is the number nobody on page one of Google is showing you.
Quick Answer
- Retool pricing 2026, verified September 2: Free $0 (up to 5 users), Team $10 per builder and $5 per internal user per month billed annually, Business $50 per builder and $15 per internal user per month billed annually, Enterprise custom.
- Monthly billing costs materially more. Team is $12 and $7. Business is $65 and $18, a 30% premium over the annual Business rate.
- Self-hosting is now Enterprise-only. On the Free, Team and Business columns of Retool's own pricing page, the self-host view reads "Plan not available on Self-host".
- Four meters sit outside seats: AI credits (pooled, no rollover, $100 per 1,000 extra), Retool Agents (billed separately, $50 per month free), workflow runs ($75 per extra 5,000), and external users ($8, $6 or $4 each per month by volume, first 50 free on Business).
- The seat label is decided by behaviour, not by role. A $15 internal user who edits one app once in a month is billed as a $50 builder for that month.
Retool pricing in 2026: every plan and every rate
Retool sells four plans. The published rates below are per user per month, taken directly from retool.com/pricing on September 2, 2026, with both the annual and the monthly toggle read separately.
| Plan | Builder (annual) | Internal user (annual) | Builder (monthly) | Internal user (monthly) | Headline limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | Up to 5 users, 500 workflow runs/mo, 5GB database + 5GB file storage, 250 AI credits, up to 5 modules |
| Team | $10 | $5 | $12 | $7 | 5,000 workflow runs/mo, staging environment, app release versions, 1,000 AI credits |
| Business | $50 | $15 | $65 | $18 | Audit logging, rich permissions, portals and embedded apps, unlimited environments and modules, external user pricing, custom branding, 3,000 AI credits |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | SSO and SCIM, 2FA enforcement, audit log streaming, source control, white-labeling, self-hosting, 10,000 AI credits |
Two definitions decide which column you land in, and Retool states them precisely. A builder is an enabled user who built or edited an app or workflow during the billing cycle. An internal user is an enabled user who did not. An external user is somebody outside your organisation, such as a client or a vendor.
The jump from Team to Business is the steepest step in the ladder: 5x on builders and 3x on internal users. You take that step for audit logging, granular permission controls, and the ability to expose apps to people outside your company at all.
The Enterprise promotion running right now
Retool's pricing page currently carries a limited-time offer: organisations that sign an Enterprise contract by September 30, 2026 receive AI credits worth up to $10,000 per year of the contract term. If you are already in an Enterprise conversation, that is a real negotiating input with a hard date on it.
The four meters that sit outside your seat bill
This is the part most "Retool pricing" guides compress into a sentence, and it is where 2026 bills diverge from 2024 bills.
AI credits
Retool's AI features draw on a monthly pool of credits held at the organisation level, not per user. All builders share the same pool. Credits cover AI app generation in the new builder, Assist in the classic builder, and queries against AI provider resources such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google AI.
| Plan | Organisation credits | Bonus credits | Total per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 250 | none | 250 |
| Team | 750 | 250 | 1,000 |
| Business | 1,500 | 1,500 | 3,000 |
| Enterprise | Contact AE | Contact AE | 10,000 typical |
Three rules matter more than the allocations. Credits renew monthly and do not roll over. Extra packs cost $100 per 1,000 credits and are not available on the Free plan, so a free-tier team that runs dry simply stops using AI features until the cycle resets. And Enterprise customers can supply their own provider API key, which does not draw from the pool at all.
Retool Agents
Agents are billed separately from everything above. Every organisation gets $50 of free agent usage per billing month, which Retool describes as up to roughly 20 hours depending on which model you run. Past that, agent time is metered hourly and more capable models cost more per hour.
The billing definition is worth reading closely, because it is not intuitive. Billable time runs from when an agent is triggered to when it returns an answer. Time spent waiting on subagents, resource authentication or human approval is not billable, but subagents accrue their own billable time separately. Crucially, runtime for a failed task is still billed. An agent that burns twelve minutes and then errors out costs the same as one that burns twelve minutes and succeeds.
Workflow runs
Free includes 500 successful runs per month. Team and Business each include 5,000. Beyond that, additional capacity is $75 per 5,000 runs per month.
Retool only counts a run as billable if it completed successfully and was triggered automatically, by a webhook, a schedule, another workflow, a query trigger, or an app. Failed runs, manual runs from the workflow IDE, and runs triggered by Retool platform events are not billed. That is a genuinely fair meter, and it means development and debugging do not eat your allowance.
External users
External users are only available on Business and Enterprise, and they are priced on a descending volume ladder. These rates took effect on September 13, 2025.
| External users | Annual Business | Monthly Business |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 50 | Free | Free |
| 51 to 250 | $8 each per month | $10 each per month |
| 251 to 500 | $6 each per month | $7 each per month |
| 501 and above | $4 each per month | $5 each per month |
Retool's documentation works a 510-user example: 50 free, then 200 at $8 ($1,600), then 250 at $6 ($1,500), then 10 at $4 ($40), for $3,140 per month. That is $37,680 a year for the privilege of letting 510 clients log in to a portal.
Four billing rules that change what you actually pay
The rate card is public. These rules are in the documentation, and they are the difference between the number you budget and the number you are invoiced.
1. Seat classification is recalculated every cycle from behaviour. Retool counts builders and internal users based on activity during the month. A support lead who normally just reads dashboards but tweaks one app in March is billed at the builder rate in March. On Business, that single edit moves the seat from $15 to $50 for the month. Business and Enterprise customers can prevent this by using permission groups to lock users out of editing, which pins them at the internal rate. On Team, you cannot.
2. Mid-cycle additions are not prorated. Retool's docs state it plainly: charges for users added during a billing cycle are not prorated, and internal users upgraded to builders during a cycle are charged at the builder rate. Adding a contractor on the 28th costs a full month.
3. Annual overage is billed at the monthly rate. This is the rule that surprises people. On an annual plan you prepay a fixed quantity of builders and internal users. If a month's actual usage exceeds that quantity, Retool bills the extra users at the monthly rate for that month, not your discounted annual rate. So on Business, an unplanned extra builder costs $65, not $50. And you can add users to an annual commitment at any time through Support, but you cannot subtract them.
4. Self-hosting moved to Enterprise. Toggle Retool's pricing page from Cloud to Self-host and the Free, Team and Business cards all render the same line: "Plan not available on Self-host". Self-hosting is an Enterprise capability now, on custom contract. If your reason for choosing Retool was running it inside your own VPC on a mid-tier plan, that route is closed, and any guide that still describes self-hosting as a Business-plan option is out of date.
What Retool actually costs: four worked scenarios
All figures use annual billing, the cheaper option, and count only seats. Add-on meters are listed separately so you can see which line is doing the damage.
| Scenario | Composition | Seat cost per month | Seat cost per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| A. Five-person startup | 3 builders + 2 viewers, Free plan | $0 | $0 |
| B. Growing team, Team plan | 4 builders + 14 internal users | $110 | $1,320 |
| C. Mid-size ops org, Business plan | 6 builders + 40 internal users | $900 | $10,800 |
| D. Agency client portal, Business plan | 3 builders + 5 internal + 300 external users | $2,125 | $25,500 |
Scenario A works until your sixth person needs access, at which point the Free plan ends and you are on Team.
Scenario B is where the classification rule bites. Prepay 4 builders and 14 internal users at $110 per month. In a busy quarter, three of those internal users each edit an app. They reclassify as builders, you exceed your prepaid builder quantity by three, and those three are billed at the $12 monthly rate. That month costs $146 instead of $110. Meanwhile the three internal seats you prepaid sit unused, and you cannot subtract them. Six months like that adds $216 to the year, a 16% overrun on a plan you thought was fixed.
Scenario C is $10,800 a year in seats. Add one 1,000-credit AI pack in most months and that is another $1,200. Add a single workflow overage in four months of the year and that is $300. Agent usage past the free $50 per month is on top again. A realistic all-in figure for this org sits north of $12,000 a year, and over three years, north of $36,000.
Scenario D is the one agencies should stare at. Three builders and five internal staff cost $225 a month. The 300 client logins cost $1,900 a month: 50 free, 200 at $8, and 50 at $6. That is 89% of the bill, for one client portal. Land a second client of the same size and you are past $50,000 a year in Retool seats alone. If you are pricing client work, our AI app builder for agencies breakdown covers how that math compares against delivery models where the client's users are not a line item.
Where the ranking guides agree, and where they drift
Accuracy audits on pricing keywords usually find carnage. This one did not, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. I read the top guides ranking for "retool pricing" on September 2, 2026 and checked each against the live source.
| Source | Verdict on September 2, 2026 |
|---|---|
| UI Bakery | Accurate on all four price points, including Business monthly at $65 and $18 |
| Superblocks | Accurate, and correctly states that self-hosting comes only with Enterprise |
| Zite | Accurate on the annual Team and Business rates |
| Softr | Correct numbers, but labels the annual rates as monthly |
| Appsmith | Stale: uses the retired "standard user" and "end user" labels, and covers neither AI credits nor Agents |
So the prices themselves are mostly well covered. What is not covered anywhere on page one is the question that actually decides a purchase, and there is a structural reason for that: every one of those guides is published by a company selling a competing seat-based internal-tools platform. They all compare one rented seat against another rented seat. None of them asks what happens if you stop renting.
Rented seats against an app you own
Retool's pricing model is coherent and it is honest about itself: you pay for the people who touch the platform, forever, and the cost curve follows your headcount and your client list. Nothing you build leaves with you. That is the trade.
The alternative is to treat an internal tool as what it actually is, an application, and to own it. Totalum is an AI app builder that generates real Next.js applications with auth, database, file storage, payments, AI integrations and deployment already wired in, and it bills for the building rather than for the humans.
| Retool Business (annual) | Totalum Professional | |
|---|---|---|
| Plan price | $50 per builder + $15 per internal user, per month | $99 per month, flat |
| Team members | Billed individually, every month | 10 included in the plan |
| End users of the app you ship | $8, $6 or $4 each per month past the first 50 | Not billed, they are users of your app |
| Projects | Unlimited apps, but every seat is metered | 300 projects on one plan |
| Source code | Not yours to take | Edit and download the full Next.js source on every project |
| Custom domain | Enterprise for white-label | Included on every project from Starter |
| Hosting and database | Included in the seat model | Metered in credits: 6.3 credits per million requests, 15.75 credits per GB stored per month |
| Self-hosting your build | Enterprise contract only | You hold the code, so you choose |
Totalum's published ladder is Free (50 credits per month, 2 projects, solo, source code viewable), Starter $29 (300 credits, 10 projects, 3 team members, code editing and full download, GitHub, custom domain), Business $59 (600 credits, 50 projects, 5 team members), Professional $99 (1,200 credits, 300 projects, 10 team members) and Enterprise from $299. One plan covers every project on the account. The API and MCP interfaces are self-serve at $0.07 per credit on every plan, which is what lets an agency or a SaaS drive the builder programmatically rather than clicking through a UI.
Run scenario D through both models. The agency portal on Retool Business is $25,500 a year, and $76,500 over three years, at the end of which the agency owns nothing and the client cannot be handed their own system. The same agency on Totalum Professional pays $1,188 a year in plan cost plus metered infrastructure in credits, delivers the portal as a Next.js codebase the client can be given or the agency can keep hosting, and pays nothing per client login because those people are users of an app, not seats in a vendor's workspace.
The honest caveat: those two numbers are not measuring identical products. Retool's price buys a governed platform with audit logging, RBAC, SSO and a mature support organisation already assembled. Totalum's price buys you an application and the responsibility for it. Which one is cheaper depends entirely on whether you want to run software or rent access to it. For a deeper feature-level view, see our Retool alternative guide and the direct Retool vs Totalum comparison, or the wider survey in best AI app builder for internal tools.
When Retool is genuinely the right call
There are situations where Retool's pricing is money well spent, and it is worth naming them.
- You need governance on day one. Audit logging, granular permission groups, SSO and SCIM are assembled, tested and supported. Rebuilding that yourself is not a weekend.
- Your tools are read-heavy dashboards over many data sources. Retool's integration library and query model are excellent, and connecting a dozen internal databases and APIs is genuinely faster there.
- Your internal user population is small and stable. Ten builders and twenty viewers on Team is $200 a month. That is cheap for what you get, and the per-seat model works in your favour.
- You have no appetite to own a codebase. If nobody on your team wants to be responsible for a Next.js repository, seat rental is a legitimate answer.
Retool's pricing becomes a problem in the opposite conditions: many light-touch internal users, any meaningful number of external users, or a client-delivery business where every new logo multiplies your seat bill.
FAQ
How much does Retool cost per month in 2026?
Retool is free for up to five users. The Team plan is $10 per builder and $5 per internal user per month on annual billing, or $12 and $7 on monthly billing. The Business plan is $50 per builder and $15 per internal user annually, or $65 and $18 monthly. Enterprise is custom priced. All figures verified against Retool's pricing page on September 2, 2026.
What is the difference between a builder and an internal user in Retool billing?
A builder is an enabled user who built or edited an app or workflow during that billing cycle. An internal user is an enabled user who did not. The classification is recalculated every month from actual behaviour, so a single app edit moves a seat to the higher rate for that month. On the Business and Enterprise plans you can use permission groups to block editing and keep those seats at the internal rate.
Can you still self-host Retool on the Business plan?
No. As of September 2, 2026, Retool's pricing page shows "Plan not available on Self-host" for the Free, Team and Business plans. Self-hosting is available only under an Enterprise contract with custom pricing. Guides that describe self-hosting as available on lower tiers are describing an earlier version of the pricing model.
How much do Retool AI credits and Agents cost?
AI credits are pooled at the organisation level: 250 per month on Free, 1,000 on Team, 3,000 on Business and typically 10,000 on Enterprise. They do not roll over. Additional packs cost $100 per 1,000 credits and are unavailable on the Free plan. Retool Agents are billed separately, with $50 of free agent usage per organisation per month, roughly 20 hours depending on the model, after which runtime is metered hourly. Failed agent runs are still billable.
What does Retool cost for external or client users?
External users require the Business plan or above. The first 50 per month are free. On annual Business the tiers are $8 each for users 51 to 250, $6 each for 251 to 500, and $4 each above 500. Monthly Business rates are $10, $7 and $5. A 300-user client portal therefore costs $1,900 per month in external users alone.
Is Retool cheaper than building the tool yourself with an AI app builder?
It depends on how many people use the result. For a small, stable team of builders and viewers, Retool's seat pricing is competitive and you get governance features for free. Once you have dozens of light-touch internal users or any external users, the seat model compounds quickly, and a flat-plan AI app builder that produces an application you own becomes cheaper on a three-year view while also leaving you with an asset.
Ready to see what owning the tool looks like?
If you build internal tools for clients, the external-user line is the one that decides your margin, and it is the line that grows every time you win business. Totalum produces real Next.js applications with auth, database, storage and deployment included, driveable through the UI, the API or MCP, with the source code yours to download on every project.
Agencies and SaaS teams: book a 30-minute discovery call and we will walk through your current internal-tools bill and what the same delivery looks like on an owned codebase, including the API and white-label options.
Everyone else: start building free at totalum.app and ship your first internal tool this week.
Author: Francesc, Co-founder at Totalum. All Retool figures verified against retool.com/pricing and Retool's billing documentation on September 2, 2026. Pricing changes frequently, so check the source before you sign.