In December, we launched the Holiday Shipping Spree—a competition designed to help builders explore what's possible when you combine downtime, unlimited AI capabilities, and a free month of Retool.
We challenged builders to create apps in three categories:
- The Needle Mover award: The app with the biggest potential business impact—whether that's revenue growth, cost savings, or hours given back to your team.
- The AI in Action award: The smartest use of AI to automate a complex workflow—so good it practically runs itself.
- The "Wait, Retool Can Do That?" award: The app with the most creative approach, inventive solution, or eye-catching design.
The response was incredible. We saw everything from internal ops tools to industry-specific solutions to apps that pushed the platform in unexpected directions.
After careful review, our judges selected three winners that exemplified what great building looks like: identifying real problems, executing with care, and delivering measurable value. Each winner will receive a Builder Bundle (MacBook Air, Apple Studio Display, AirPods Max, and more) plus a full year of Retool Business for their team. Here's what they built, and why they were chosen in their respective categories.
Box-it tackles a deceptively expensive problem in eCommerce logistics: shipping inefficiency from poor box selection.
Built by the team at Bold Tech, the app integrates with Shopify to pull item dimensions. Then, it uses 3D visualization to show exactly how products should be packed into optimally-sized boxes. Even more impressive is that they embedded the entire app directly inside Shopify’s admin interface, showing how Retool apps can live seamlessly within other systems.
What elevated this submission was the end-to-end thinking. Beyond just building a cool visualization, they calculated actual shipping cost savings using real rates from Japan and demonstrated meaningful business impact.
Box-it shows both technical creativity and business sense. It identifies a specific, measurable problem and solves it in a way that delivers immediate value. This is exactly the kind of work we built Retool for.
HomeVault is a home insurance estimator that won for taking a refreshingly practical, industry-specific approach to AI integration. Instead of chasing the AI hype without clear purpose, HomeVault stood out by identifying a real-world use case where AI adds value—helping homeowners understand and estimate their insurance needs.
Using OpenAI’s Vision API, the app looks at photos of each room in a home and identifies any insurable items—returning a structured JSON file with a list of items and their estimated replacement value. A task that would normally take over twenty minutes turns into one that takes a few seconds.
Their submission included an excellent demo video that walked through the functionality clearly, showing how the app leverages AI capabilities in a targeted way that solves an actual problem.
HomeVault showed that the most impressive AI applications don’t have to be the most technically complex—they're the ones that apply the technology thoughtfully to solve real problems in specific industries.
Sorted is a file organization and cleanup tool that demonstrates just how far you can push Retool. The interface is polished and the experience is seamless (not to mention the adorable folder mascot!).
The app lets you upload a collection of files, provide custom instructions for how you want them organized, and then watch as they're automatically sorted into folders and renamed based on their actual contents. Sorted uses optical character recognition (OCR) to extract information from your documents, then uses an AI query to analyze the extracted information and find patterns and sort your files based on your instructions.
The technical achievement here is impressive, but what really sells it is that this isn't something most people would ever think to build in Retool— and that's exactly the spirit of this category.
To everyone who participated: thank you for building something real during the competition. Whether you won or not, you shipped something, and that matters. We saw builders tackle industry-specific problems, explore new AI capabilities, and create polished experiences that rival standalone SaaS products.
That's exactly what we hoped would happen when we launched this competition back in December.
Congratulations to our three winners. We can't wait to see what you build next with a full year of Retool. And for any other folks who built an app during the competition, share your app on X or LinkedIn and tag @retool. We saw some incredible submissions, and winner or not, your work matters—and we want to celebrate it.
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