Retool Forms - Build custom forms on top of a SQL database 10x faster | Product...

Build custom forms on top of a SQL database 10x faster

Hi Product Hunt - I’m Jamie from the team who built Retool Forms, the fastest way to build a form on top of your database.

There are a ton of form builders out there (e.g. Typeform, Google Forms, Airtable Forms, etc.) and honestly we weren’t really looking to build another one. But most form builders trap you in a sheet or proprietary data table where you can’t join responses with other data, filter them with SQL or build apps on top of your data.

Forms are often just the start of a larger process and, as a developer, I wanted my data in my database. Surprisingly, the only way to build a form on top of my database was from scratch with code. There was no “one click” form-on-top-of-my-database tool available.

So we decided to build a form builder. Retool Forms are:

📊 Native to your data source: Generating a form on top of any SQL datastore (Postgres, MySQL, Snowflake, etc) in one click.

📋 Your form, your DB: Use your own or we’ll give you a Postgres DB—with a connection string if you want to take it elsewhere.

💻 Code-first: You can write JS almost anywhere, including libraries like moment and lodash, for custom validations, conditional logic, and data parsing.

⚡ The start of other processes: Build apps and workflows on top of your data to join data sources, send updates to Slack/email, and take action on your results.

🔒 Secure: Forms are public but the data, apps, and workflows you build are permissioned securely with granular access controls. Even self-host it in your own VPC.

And the best part, it’s free. No arbitrary limits on the number of users, forms or submissions.

Get started here → Check out the docs

We can’t wait to see what you build and would love any feedback in the comments!