How to Invite Retool External Users via API on Business Plan

If you're building external apps in Retool on the Business plan and trying to figure out how to invite external users without doing it manually one at a time, you're not alone. This is one of the most common friction points teams hit after launching a customer-facing Retool app. The good news: you can programmatically invite external users via the Retool API on the Business plan — but only for certain scopes. Here's exactly what works, what doesn't, and how to set it up.

What Are External Users in Retool?

Retool has three main user types, and understanding the difference is critical before you try to manage them via API:

• External users — Anyone who navigates to your Retool domain whose email does not belong to your organization. These are your customers or outside collaborators. Each external user costs $10/month.
• End users — Teammates with your org email who have no write permissions, or who haven't created or edited an app, module, or workflow in the current billing period.
• Standard users — Teammates with your org email who do have write permissions and have created or edited something in the current billing period.

A quick rule of thumb: external-user = unknown/customer, end-user = internal viewer, standard-user = internal builder.

Can You Invite External Users via the Retool API on the Business Plan?

Yes — but with important limitations. The Retool API endpoint used when you invite users from the Settings UI is /api/organization/admin/bulkInviteUsers. Business plan users can hit this endpoint programmatically using an API token scoped for user invites. What you cannot do on the Business plan is read user data — endpoints like listing users are restricted to Enterprise only.

So if you try to call the users read endpoint and get back {"success": false, "message": "API access is only available for enterprise customers"}, that's expected behavior — it's not a misconfiguration on your end. Even if your API token has all scopes granted, those read endpoints simply won't respond for Business plan accounts.

How to Invite External Users Programmatically (Business Plan)

Here's how to set up automated external user invites using the Retool API on the Business plan:

• Step 1: Generate an API token. Go to Settings → Retool API in your Retool instance. Create a new API token and grant it the user invites and user attributes scopes. The scopes available to your plan will be visible directly on that page — you won't see Enterprise-only scopes if you're on Business.
• Step 2: Identify the invite endpoint. The endpoint you'll call is POST /api/organization/admin/bulkInviteUsers. This is the same endpoint the Retool UI hits when you send an invite from Settings.
• Step 3: Construct your request. Pass the external user's email address in the request body. The email should not belong to your organization's domain — that's what flags the invitee as an external-user rather than an end-user. Reference the Retool API docs for the exact payload shape.
• Step 4: Call the API from a Retool resource query. You can create a REST API resource in Retool pointing to your own instance's API, then trigger invite sends from a Retool app — for example, an internal admin tool where your team enters a customer email and clicks a button to send the invite automatically.
• Step 5: Verify the invite was sent. The API will return a success response for valid invite requests on Business plan. You won't be able to programmatically list sent invites (Enterprise-only), but you can log responses in your triggering app for audit purposes.

Why You Can't Read Users on the Business Plan

This trips up a lot of people. The Retool API settings page shows you all possible scopes, including read scopes for users, but granting those scopes on a Business plan token doesn't unlock the underlying endpoints. The API enforces plan-level restrictions server-side, regardless of what scopes are assigned to your token. Only Enterprise plan customers can use the full /api/v2/users read endpoints to list, filter, and manage users programmatically.

This means on Business plan, you can push (invite) but not pull (read) user data via API. Plan accordingly if you're building an admin tool that needs to display existing user lists — you'll need to maintain that state elsewhere, such as in your own database or a Retool-connected data source.

The Case for a Native "Create External User" Query Action

The community has raised a valid product gap here. A dedicated Create External User action inside Retool's User Action query resource — similar to how other User Action queries work — would dramatically simplify this flow. It would only need an email input, would handle the invite server-side, and wouldn't require teams to wire up a custom REST API resource pointed at their own Retool instance. If you agree, upvoting this in the Retool community thread is worth doing.

Bottom Line

If you're on the Retool Business plan and need to scale external user invites without doing it manually through the UI, you have a working path: generate an API token with invite scopes, call /api/organization/admin/bulkInviteUsers, and trigger it from a Retool admin app or an external automation. You won't be able to read user data programmatically until you're on Enterprise, but invite automation alone can save significant time when onboarding customers to external apps at scale.