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Windmill for Customer-Facing Apps - Tera Capital Case Study

· 3 min read
José Governo

"As clients, we are very satisfied with Windmill. We align with Windmill's mindset of using the littlest code as possible. Everything is well-structured and things do not break."


This is a testimonial written by José Governo, Responsible for Quantitative Strategies and Data Engineering at Tera Capital.

Tera Capital Case Study

What before Windmill?

Tera Capital is a Multi Family Office that offers exclusive asset management services.

Our team used to create everything using Excel and VBA which is what the financial industry is most accustomed with, everyone worked on common problem without collaborating, usually we repeatedly built analysis and formulations, and things didn’t hold together for long. From time to time the sheets broke and we needed to look into it again.

So, we decided to start over from scratch and since there were not many people on our team who can code, we needed a solution that would enable everyone to do their work from a high level abstraction.

Why Windmill over Retool?

To begin with, we migrated all our data to Supabase, which offers a good level of abstraction without the need to master engineering or S3.

Next, we started creating dashboards on this data using Retool. However, after a thorough analysis, we decided to switch from Retool to Windmill because:

  • Retool is JavaScript-only and does not support Python.
  • Retool is limiting in terms of UI capabilities.
  • Windmill was much more responsive and quickly installed the components we needed, including critical tools like OpenBB.

Within two weeks, everything was set to go with Windmill. Although self-hosting was possible, we opted for the Cloud Enterprise Edition to avoid maintenance concerns, have our issues addressed within hours, and have our feature requests prioritized.

How do we work with Windmill?

Today, 6 team members are directly using Windmill. Most of our Windmill's users are non-technical, but they can easily fork an app with our entire identity in CSS and use AI to write code.

While we initially came to Windmill for its App Editor, we ended up using scripts and flows to make our apps deeper and more complex.

In general, as clients, we are very satisfied with Windmill. We align with Windmill's mindset of using the littlest code as possible. Everything is well-structured and things do not break.

The enterprise services are very helpful. We have a dedicated Discord channel with the Windmill team, who responds very quickly, solves problems within 2 hours, and prioritizes our feature requests. This allows us to focus on our core job and assist our clients.

Focus on a client-facing admin panel

Among our apps in Windmill, one of the most critical ones is a custom interface for our clients. They simply need to log in any time to https://www.teracapital.com.br/app using Supabase's authentication system to access a personalized, real-time and interactive dashboard of their investments.

Before Windmill, our clients used to receive a monthly PDF with data that was difficult to keep up to date. Now, we have improved our client-facing service without having to subscribe to countless Saas subscriptions.

Here is an anonymized version of our client-facing dashboard:

Windmill Logo
Windmill is an open-source and self-hostable serverless runtime and platform combining the power of code with the velocity of low-code. We turn your scripts into internal apps and composable steps of flows that automate repetitive workflows.

You can self-host Windmill using a docker compose up, or go with the cloud app.