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The Mallet

👋 Hello, Retool community!

Last week we published new survey data from 101 technical leaders on how companies are managing AI costs in 2026. The picture is more complicated than the headlines suggest. 43% of leaders are already over their AI budgets, but that hasn’t made them pull back. Only 8% are showing any hesitation about adoption.

Poor visibility into what’s running is driving this overspend. Our June AI Governance Report found that just 5% of CIOs, CISOs, and CTOs say they’re confident they know what AI-generated tools are running in production—and shadow AI is much more likely to produce surprise bills than AI that's governed. Agentic workflows don't help: they use roughly 5–30x more tokens per task than a simple LLM query, per Gartner.

If costs spiked 20%, the most popular response was consolidating to fewer vendors (32%)—not cutting AI outright. Model routing is gaining ground for the same reason: directing routine requests to smaller, cheaper models instead of paying frontier prices every time.

Read the findings →

🚀 What’s new

Improved efficiency of app building

Builders will notice faster agent responses and lower AI credit consumption, especially on long-running building sessions. These improvements can result in up to 50% fewer credits consumed.

Retool CLI now in private beta

With the new CLI capabilities, you can use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or your favorite agent to write and deploy apps directly on your machine while Retool handles governance, permissions, resource access checks, and publishing.

Check out this demo.

Debug console for the app builder

Inspect errors, logs, and function run timelines directly in the app builder. The agent has access to the same view, so it can diagnose and fix issues faster.

Plan mode for app building

Ask the agent to plan before it builds—review and edit the plan as a Markdown file, then click Build plan when you’re ready.

Multi-instance releases for apps

Publish different release versions across staging, development, and production instances. Enable it under Settings > Source control > Edit settings.

Access policies for PostgreSQL resources

Enterprise orgs can restrict which data each user group can read or write on a PostgreSQL resource, enforced across apps, the query library, raw SQL, and agents.