Metro Retro

Metro Retro was a fun, freeform online whiteboard built for sprint retrospectives, known for its playful templates, timer and engagement features. The product has since been renamed twice by its maker, Deqo Software Limited: to Ludi on 4 August 2025, then to Spreo on 1 July 2026 after a trademark cease-and-desist. The metroretro.io domain now 301-redirects straight to spreo.io. If you are searching for Metro Retro, the product you want is Spreo; the original Metro Retro brand and domain are no longer maintained.

Metro Retro built its identity around being the fun retro tool — a playful freeform canvas with retro-flavoured templates, a session timer, GIFs and icebreakers, aimed at engineering teams who found traditional retro boards dry.

Its maker, Deqo Software Limited, retired the name on 4 August 2025 as the product broadened into planning, refinement and workshops. The vendor's own explanation:

"As a name, Metro Retro served us very well for the first six years, reflecting our roots in retrospective meetings. But as we've grown and expanded our capabilities, our name no longer captures the full scope of our platform, or where we're headed."

The replacement name, Ludi, lasted eleven months. A trademark cease-and-desist in May 2026 forced a second rename to Spreo on 1 July 2026 — the brand the product carries today, now pitched as "The Online Whiteboard For Agile Teams" rather than as a retro tool.

If you arrived here searching for Metro Retro, the short answer: the product is alive, the name isn't. It became Ludi on 4 August 2025 and Spreo on 1 July 2026. Re-checked 3 August 2026 — metroretro.io returns a single HTTP 301 straight to spreo.io, and it is path-preserving, so old deep links still land on the matching page. The Wayback Machine has the old site serving its own content on 17 July 2025 and already 301-ing by 29 August 2025, which brackets the first rename.

Two renames in under a year deserves context. The first was strategic; the second was forced, after Deqo Software was served a cease-and-desist by a US company holding the "Ludi" mark in trademark classes 9 and 42. The vendor says accounts, boards and workflows came through both moves intact. The free board some teams remember did not — the continuation runs a 30-day trial, then $4/user/mo billed annually. One wrinkle: metroretro.io/pricing still serves a stale Non-prod environment stub instead of redirecting, so treat nothing on the old domain as current.

Fit: if you want the Metro Retro experience, our continuation entry is Spreo. If what you actually need is a dedicated retro platform — health checks, async participation, Jira and Slack in the loop — rather than a whiteboard adapted for retros, start with the rankings.