Past the Retool ceiling. Into a real internal tool.
Custom admin panel in React and Next.js with RBAC, audit log, and integrations. Shipped in 4–6 weeks on a flat monthly subscription.
Who this is for
Ops or engineering lead at a 10–100 person company where Retool has hit a complexity ceiling and a real custom tool with role-based access is now cheaper than another Retool app.
The pain today
- Retool bills approaching $10k+/year with complexity still growing
- Custom role-based access Retool cannot express cleanly
- Audit logging that compliance wants and Retool cannot provide
- Too many spreadsheets supplementing the tool nobody trusts
- Engineers rebuilding the same filter UI for the fourth time
The outcome you get
- Next.js admin with real RBAC (role, team, resource-level permissions)
- Audit log capturing every write action with actor, timestamp, and diff
- Integrations to Postgres, Salesforce, Stripe, internal APIs
- Export, search, and filter patterns that match your actual workflows
- Flat monthly subscription — ship continuously, no scope thrash
Build vs Retool vs off-the-shelf
Three questions decide the path. One: does the tool need real RBAC beyond Retool's team-level permissions? If yes, custom. Two: does audit logging need to be court-defensible (fintech, health, legal)? If yes, custom. Three: are you rebuilding the same UI patterns across five Retool apps? If yes, a custom admin with a shared component library saves more than it costs within a year. Otherwise, Retool, Internal, or Appsmith are often the right answer — faster to ship, cheaper to maintain, fine for teams of 5–20 operators. I'll tell you honestly which path fits; the Applications service exists for the cases where Retool genuinely doesn't.
Must-have capabilities
Every admin I ship includes the same core. RBAC: users, roles, permissions scoped to resources (a support agent sees their team's tickets, not everyone's). Audit log: every write action recorded with user, timestamp, table, row ID, old value, new value — queryable and exportable. Search: cross-resource (find anything by name, email, ID) with debounced server-side queries. Filters: composable, URL-persisted so links can be shared. Bulk actions: select-many, action, confirm, undo where safe. Exports: CSV and JSON for any filtered view. These are the building blocks that make an admin tool actually used, not just built.
Integrations to your existing stack
Admin tools earn their cost by replacing 'check three systems' with 'check one.' I wire the admin to whatever you already run. Postgres or MySQL as primary data source with read replicas for heavy queries. Salesforce or HubSpot for customer data with two-way sync. Stripe for billing and subscription state. Internal APIs for anything custom. Slack for notifications (new high-value signup, failed payment, flagged content). All integrations respect user permissions — the admin shows data the operator is allowed to see, not everything the service account can access. Data access isn't a detail; it's the compliance story.
Case study: Imohub admin (120k+ records)
Imohub's admin had to handle 120k+ property records, 40+ property types, multi-agent workflows, and deduplication of listings arriving from 20+ scraping sources. I built the admin as a Next.js app backed by Laravel APIs, MongoDB for property storage, Meilisearch for cross-field search. Operators could search, filter, merge, flag, and export in under 0.5 seconds end-to-end. Infrastructure cost dropped 70% vs the legacy stack. The admin isn't visible to end users but it's the reason the consumer portal stayed fast — good operator tooling is the hidden layer behind any high-scale consumer product.
Monthly subscription pricing
Custom admin panel work is delivered under the Applications service — Standard tier at $3,499/mo, Pro tier at $4,500/mo. The subscription means I ship continuously: new features, integrations, refactors, bug fixes within a 2–4 day delivery cycle. Typical first-version timeline: 4–6 weeks from kickoff to production deployment. After that, the subscription continues as long as you're building — most clients stay 4–8 months through the initial buildout and then step down to lower-intensity maintenance. 14-day money-back guarantee, cancel anytime after. Work Made for Hire — code, infra, docs all yours.
Why monthly, not fixed-price
Internal admin panels are living tools. Requirements change weekly as operators learn the product and find new edge cases. Fixed-price contracts force scope rigidity that hurts everyone — either I say no to small valuable changes or the project spawns constant change orders. Monthly subscription removes the scope fight. If something small needs to ship, it ships this week. If something big appears, we talk about whether this month's scope still makes sense. The pricing is the same either way. Most teams find they ship 3–5x faster under subscription than under a fixed-price 'phase 2 next quarter' cadence.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Rebuilt a real estate portal at a fraction of the cost
Rebuilt Imóveis SC's real estate portal as ImoHub — a faster, more scalable successor — handling 120k+ properties with sub-second search and drastically reduced AWS costs.
Frequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
- Can you migrate us off Retool gradually?
- Yes. The common pattern is: keep Retool running for everything except the first module I ship. Once that's stable and operators prefer it, the second module migrates. Over 3–6 months, the admin replaces Retool one workflow at a time. No big-bang cutover, no disrupted operations.
- What if my requirements change every week?
- That's why Applications is a monthly subscription, not a fixed-price project. Priorities shift as operators learn the tool. I ship in 2–4 day cycles, so new requirements land within the same sprint. No change-order negotiations.
- Do you handle hosting and DevOps?
- Yes. The app ships on Vercel or AWS depending on data residency and scale needs, with CI/CD, staging environment, monitoring (Sentry, Datadog, or similar), and backup procedures. Infrastructure is code (Terraform or Pulumi) so nothing is stuck in a console only I can access.
- What does the audit log actually capture?
- Every write action: who (user ID and role), when (timestamp), what (table, record ID), and the before/after diff of changed fields. Queryable by any dimension, exportable to CSV, retainable per compliance requirements. This is the detail that turns a custom admin into a court-defensible system of record.
- How does cancellation work?
- Cancel anytime after the 14-day money-back window. No termination fees. At cancellation, you get the final code, infrastructure-as-code, credentials, and documentation. Work Made for Hire means you own it outright — another engineer can pick it up without me.
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