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 If you are searching for Metro Retro, the product you want is Spreo; the original Metro Retro brand and domain are no longer maintained.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. It is now pitched as online whiteboard software for planning, refinement, workshops and retros, with retrospectives demoted to one use case among several. The vendor still trades on the old recognition: as of 1 September 2026 the spreo.io homepage title reads "Online Whiteboard Software | Spreo (formerly Metro Retro)".

If you arrived here searching for Metro Retro, the short answer: the product was never shut down — it was renamed twice. Metro Retro became Ludi on 4 August 2025, and Ludi became Spreo on 1 July 2026. Re-checked 1 September 2026: metroretro.io returns a single HTTP 301 to spreo.io, and so does ludi.co. Both are path-preserving — /features, /templates, /customers, /support, /blog and /login all forward to the matching spreo.io path — so old deep links and bookmarks still land somewhere sensible.

Two renames in under a year deserves context. The first was strategic: the vendor had broadened the canvas into planning, refinement and workshops, and said the retro-shaped name no longer fitted. The second was forced — in May 2026 Deqo Software was served a cease-and-desist by a US company holding the "Ludi" mark in trademark classes 9 and 42, and its counsel judged the escalation risk non-trivial. The vendor says accounts, boards, data and workflows came through both moves intact. The free board some teams remember did not: the continuation runs a 30-day trial and then paid, with Starter at $4/user/mo billed annually (Spreo's own worked example: ten members, $40/month). One wrinkle worth knowing — /pricing on both old domains returns HTTP 200 with a stale Non-prod environment stub rather than redirecting, so treat nothing served on metroretro.io or ludi.co as current.

What to do if you're a former user: log in at spreo.io with your existing account, update bookmarks, runbooks and any SSO or allowlist entries that still point at metroretro.io or ludi.co, and whitelist spreo.io for vendor email. Our live entry for the continuation is Spreo — that is where current pricing and features are tracked; the scores on this page describe Metro Retro as it stood when the brand was retired, and are kept as a historical record. 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.