Refine

Refine was founded by three Turkish developers, Civan Özseyhan, Eren Erkalkan, and Omar Aplak, in 2022. While running their own software development house, doing projects for big Turkish telcos and other companies, one of their side projects began to get traction in the web development community—a collection of open source React boiler plates.

That side project gradually became SuperPlay—an open source React project creation wizard inside a CLI. The developer chooses what kind of app they're building and what router they want to use, and SuperPlay automatically generates their boiler plate. That side project was featured on Product Hunt and got more than 2,000 stars on Github.

The challenges faced in developing admin panels, CMS tools, and dashboards for enterprise applications led to the creation of Refine—their productization of that side project.

Refine differentiated itself by being headless, separating UI logic from other functionalities, allowing for greater customization.

Refine uses an open-core business model. One of the key benefits of that model for Refine is that it has helped them receive a large volume of direct feedback from the developer community—one of the key drawbacks, however, has been that it has been more challenging to convert those users to paid.

Future plans involve transitioning from a framework to a platform, offering cloud tools, connectors, and other components that would cater to larger teams and enterprise applications. Monetization will be achieved via enterprise features, cloud tools, and connectors.

Refine's open-source core is supplemented with external packages that serve as plugins for extended functionality. These plugins simplify the contribution process for external developers, who extend the functionality of Refine and also work on documentation, translations, and error corrections.

In the future, Refine aims to expand its cloud offering, transitioning from just a framework to a more comprehensive platform. This shift aims to enable developers to build more while spending significantly less time.

Refine is not the only company going after the internal tools use case for the enterprise.

The largest player in this space from the startup side is Retool, which grew revenue from $10M ARR at the end of 2020 to $30M at the end of 2021 to $82M at the end of 2022. Retool has raised $140M from Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator and was last valued at $3.2B.

There are several other companies besides Refine that have fast-followed Retool on the internal tools opportunity, including Budibase, Appsmith, and Superblocks. Appsmith, like Refine, has differentiated on the basis of being open source. Appsmith has raised $51.5M and has roughly 120 employees.

In the years past, one of the key objections that Retool has heard from potential customers has been that they want whatever they're using to build their internal tools to be open source.