Retool Pricing 2026: $10 a Builder, $5 a User, and the Workflow Runs That Add $75 Packs

How much does Retool cost? The short answer

As of November 7, 2026, Retool is free for up to 5 users. Team costs $10 a month per builder and $5 per internal user, and Business costs $50 per builder and $15 per internal user, at the annual-billing rates Retool's pricing page shows by default (it says annual saves 20%). Enterprise is a sales quote. For a 3-builder, 25-user ops team that is $155 a month on Team or $525 on Business. The costs people miss are the builder rule, workflow runs past 5,000 a month, and agent hours.

Plan prices, limits and the external-user bands come from retool.com/pricing. The agent billing rules come from Retool's "Agents billing and usage" support doc, and the user types from its "Billing and usage" doc. All three were read November 7, 2026. The team examples are our arithmetic on those numbers.

Retool plans side by side

The prices above are the ones the page shows with "Billed annually" selected. Monthly billing costs more; Retool states the gap as a 20% saving for annual, not as a separate monthly rate, so check the toggle in your account before you budget. Free is production-only. Team adds a staging environment. Audit logs, rich permissions, app themes, embedded apps and portals for outside users all start on Business. Git source control and SSO start on Enterprise.

The builder rule: who you actually pay $10 or $50 for

Retool bills by what each person did that month, not by a role you assign. A builder is anyone who created or edited an app or workflow during the billing cycle; everyone else who only uses apps is an internal user. So the operations manager who fixes one query in March is billed as a builder for March. On Team that turns a $5 seat into a $10 seat. On Business it turns $15 into $50, a $35 jump for one edit.

Here is a 30-person company running its back office on Retool: 3 people build, 25 staff use the apps, and in a busy month 2 of those staff tweak something themselves.

The practical rule: give edit access to the people whose job is building, and route everyone else's change requests to them. On Business that habit is worth $35 a person a month.

The limit that breaks automations: workflow runs

Retool Workflows is its backend automation tool: scheduled jobs and webhook-triggered flows. Steps are unlimited on every plan, but runs are not. Every successful execution counts as one run, so the limit is about how often a workflow fires, not how big it is.

• A sync scheduled every 15 minutes runs 96 times a day, about 2,880 a month. That alone uses most of Free's 500 in under 6 days.
• A sync every 5 minutes is 288 a day, about 8,640 a month. On Team or Business that is 3,640 runs past the 5,000 included, which is one extra $75 pack.
• A webhook that fires on each new order at 300 orders a day is about 9,000 runs a month, also one extra $75 pack. At 600 orders a day it is 18,000 runs and three packs, $225 a month on top of seats.

Before you move a high-frequency sync into Retool, count how often it fires. Batch where you can: one run every 15 minutes that processes all new orders is cheaper than one run per order. If you are deciding between Retool Workflows and a dedicated automation tool, our n8n pricing breakdown shows how a per-execution meter compares.

External users: the client portal math

Team has no external users at all. If customers, vendors or clients need to log in, you are on Business. Retool lists external users on Business in bands: the first 50 free, then $8 a month for users 51 to 250, $6 for 251 to 500 and $4 over 500. Reading the bands as graduated, a portal with 200 active clients adds 150 x $8 = $1,200 a month, on top of at least one $50 builder. Retool also notes that apps with external-user pricing need a custom annual plan if you self-host.

For a client portal, that is usually the moment to compare. Softr and Glide price outside users very differently; our Softr pricing and Glide pricing pages run the same kind of team through each.

Retool AI: credits and agent hours are two different meters

Every plan includes a pool of AI credits for app building and AI Actions: 250 a month on Free, 1,000 on Team, 3,000 on Business and 10,000 on Enterprise. Credits are shared across the account, renew monthly and do not roll over. Retool sells more packs on paid plans; the pricing page does not print a pack price.

Retool Agents do not use those credits. They bill by runtime. Retool's support doc says each organization gets $50 of free agent usage a month, which is up to 20 hours depending on the model. Billable time runs from when an agent is triggered to when it answers, and failed runs count. Time spent waiting on a human approval, a sub-agent or a login does not. On Team and Business, usage past the free $50 is charged to the card on file monthly, even on an annual subscription. On Free, agents stop until the next cycle. Hourly rates vary by model and are listed in Retool's docs rather than on the pricing page.

An example: an agent that triages inbound requests and takes 30 seconds a task uses about 8.3 hours for 1,000 tasks. That fits inside the free allowance on a cheaper model. At 5,000 tasks a month it is about 42 hours, so expect to pay for roughly 22 or more of them. Measure your real average task time in Retool's monitoring page for two weeks before you trust any estimate. For what a dedicated agent costs outside a platform, see how much an AI agent costs.

When does a team outgrow Retool?

Retool is a strong fit when you have a technical person on staff and the apps are for your own employees. The bill grows fastest in three cases: you need Business for permissions or audit logs (the per-person price triples), outside users need to log in, or workflows fire thousands of times a day. Two numbers to watch: if your Retool bill passes about $600 a month on Business, or external users add more than the seats do, price out a custom build next to the renewal.

Who can build internal tools and automations for my business?

If someone on your team writes SQL and enjoys it, start in Retool's Free or Team plan and see how far it goes. Bring in a builder when no one on staff will own the apps, when the work is mostly automation rather than screens, or when the tool has to serve customers. SuperDupr, the AI ops shop Justin McKelvey runs, builds these systems: the workflows that connect your CRM, accounting, email and scheduling tools, the internal dashboards on top, and AI agents where they pay for themselves. Sometimes the answer is a Retool app we set up; sometimes it is a custom build you own outright with no per-seat bill. An AI workflow automation project is published at $10,000 to $25,000, and most systems go live in 2 to 4 weeks. Bring your current user count and workflow run numbers to a free strategy session and we'll tell you which path costs less over two years.

Sources

• Retool, Pricing (retool.com/pricing), read November 7, 2026: plan prices per builder and internal user as shown with annual billing, "Save 20% with annual billing", user limits, AI credits per plan, workflow runs (500 Free, 5,000 Team and Business, $75 per 5,000 extra), external-user bands on Business ($0 for 0-50, $8 for 51-250, $6 for 251-500, $4 over 500), features by plan, the self-hosting note for external-user apps.
• Retool Docs, "Billing and usage" (docs.retool.com/support/billing-usage), read November 7, 2026: monthly or annual subscriptions, builder, internal and external user definitions.
• Retool Docs, "Agents billing and usage" (docs.retool.com/support/billing-usage/agents), read November 7, 2026: $50 of free agent usage a month (up to 20 hours depending on model), billable and non-billable time, failed runs count, monthly overage invoicing on Team and Business, Free plan stops at the limit.
• Worked examples: SuperDupr's arithmetic on the published prices and limits above, for the team sizes and volumes stated.