About FocusRetro
FocusRetro is an online retrospective tool for agile, remote, and hybrid teams, built by a small team operating from within the European Union. We built it because a retrospective that changes nothing is worse than no retrospective at all — it teaches a team that saying the true thing has no effect.
Why we built it
The itch was not retrospectives. Retrospectives work. The itch was the software: we kept running a whole-team ritual on tools that were priced and shaped to be something else, and after enough sprints it became clear the friction was structural rather than accidental.
Per-seat pricing turns an invitation into a purchasing decision. A retro is the one meeting where the point is that everyone gets to write a card. When the tool bills for every participant, somebody eventually has to decide which teammates are worth a license — and the contractor, the designer who joins every third sprint, and the new hire in their first week all quietly stop being invited. That is not a billing detail. It changes who gets to speak.
Board quotas do the same thing to frequency. Tiers metered by how many boards you create in a month look cheap until a busy quarter, when an incident post-mortem competes with the sprint retro for the same monthly allowance. Teams respond by running fewer retros in exactly the weeks that produced the most to learn from.
And the boards were built for the meeting, not for the fortnight after it. An infinite canvas is genuinely enjoyable for forty-five minutes and nearly useless on Wednesday. Cards get dragged into clusters, someone types a few action items into a corner of the canvas, the tab is closed — and two sprints later the same complaint comes back and nobody can say whether anything was ever tried.
So we built the product around the loop instead of around the meeting. Everything below follows from that one decision.
What we think a retro tool is for
Honest input first
Private writing, anonymous cards, and blind voting that reveals results only once everyone has voted. The first loud opinion should not anchor the room, and the quietest person on the team should not need courage to file a blocker. Team health-check answers are stored only as anonymous aggregates — individual answers are never linked to a user identity anywhere in our database.
Facilitation that does not drift
Phase timers, locked phases, topic grouping, and moderation controls, so the facilitator spends their attention on the conversation instead of herding twenty people through it. Structure is what makes a hard conversation possible; process theater is what makes it pointless.
Follow-through, or it did not happen
Action items carry an owner, a due date, and a status, and they resurface at the start of the next retro. The only honest measure of a retrospective is what is different next sprint — so that is the part of the loop we refuse to leave as an afterthought.
What we deliberately left out
A product is defined at least as much by what it refuses to do. These are the four omissions we get asked about most, and none of them is a roadmap item waiting for time.
Per-seat pricing
The Team plan is a flat $12 per month billed annually with unlimited workspace members. We rejected the seat model as a business model, not just as a number: the moment a tool bills per head, it has a commercial interest in you inviting fewer people to a meeting whose entire value depends on everyone being there. Guests join from a link with no account and count toward nothing.
A wall of integrations
We ship Jira and Slack, because those are where action items go to live or die. We have not built the grid of twenty logos that makes a comparison table look impressive. Every integration is a permanent maintenance obligation and another set of credentials to protect — ours are encrypted at rest and revoked the moment you disconnect one. Two we keep working beats twenty we half-maintain.
An email gate on the free tools
The sprint calculators, the sprint name generator, and the icebreaker question lists need no account and run entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent to us, which is also why you can use them with real team data. Putting a signup form in front of them would turn a useful thing into a lead-capture form that happens to do arithmetic.
Badges we have not earned
We do not hold SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certifications yet, and we say so plainly on the security page rather than implying otherwise with a row of logos. If your security team has a questionnaire, we answer it directly.
How we operate
A small team, in the EU
FocusRetro and the app at app.focusretro.com are operated from within the European Union, and the privacy policy is written to meet the GDPR rather than to survive it. Support email is answered by the people who write the code, which is one of the few genuine advantages of being small.
One revenue model: subscriptions
No ads, and we do not sell personal data. That is not restraint — it is the reason we charge a fair flat price in the first place. A tool that holds a team’s most candid feedback should not also need a second business model that runs against the people using it. Payments are handled end to end by Stripe and card details never touch our servers.
Honest about what we are not
We do not have every enterprise certification, the largest template library, or the longest integrations list — and where a competitor is genuinely better at something, our comparison pages say so on the page rather than leaving it out. The list of omissions above is the same commitment in a different form.
Published in four languages
The product and this site are English-first, with the landing page also published in German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian — carrying the same product and pricing facts, because a translated page that quietly promises something different is its own kind of dishonesty.
Talk to us
Three addresses, all read by humans. Press, partnership, and directory enquiries can go to the first one.
- [email protected]Product questions, billing, and anything that is broken.
- [email protected]Vulnerability reports and security questionnaires.
- [email protected]Data access, export, and deletion requests under the GDPR.
Good-faith security research is welcome and we will not pursue legal action over it — the details are on the security page.
About FocusRetro: common questions
Who is behind FocusRetro?+
A small team that builds and operates FocusRetro from within the European Union. We are not a large company and we do not present ourselves as one: the security page says outright which certifications we do not yet hold, and support questions are answered by the people who wrote the code.
Where is FocusRetro based?+
FocusRetro and the app at app.focusretro.com are operated from within the European Union. The privacy policy and terms are written to meet the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and where a sub-processor handles data outside the European Economic Area, those transfers run on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses.
How does FocusRetro make money?+
Subscriptions, and nothing else. The Team plan is a flat $12 per month billed annually for the whole workspace, and Business is custom annual pricing. We show no ads and we do not sell personal data — the point of charging a fair, flat price is that we never need a second revenue model that works against you.
What makes FocusRetro different from other retrospective tools?+
Two things. The pricing is flat per team rather than per seat or metered by boards per month, so inviting the whole team and running a retro every sprint never costs more. And the product is built around the full loop — anonymous input, blind voting, timed phases, then action items with owners that resurface at the next retro — rather than around the 45 minutes of the meeting itself.
Is FocusRetro free to try?+
Yes. The Starter plan is free forever and does not expire: 3 personal boards a month with the core templates, voting and reactions, phase timers, and action items. Paid plans add a 14-day trial that starts without a credit card.
Does FocusRetro track visitors to this site?+
One analytics cookie, and only with your consent. Analytics storage defaults to denied before you answer the banner and stays denied if you decline, so no analytics cookie is ever stored. Advertising storage and personalization are denied on every page load whatever you choose — there are no ad networks and no cross-site tracking here at all.
See whether we got it right
Run a real retro on the free plan in under a minute. Your team joins from a link with no accounts, and nothing asks for a card.
Start a retro freeNo credit card required
Read further
Pricing
The flat $12/mo Team plan, and what the same team costs on a per-seat tool at 5, 10, 25, and 50 people.
Security
Passwordless sign-in, TLS everywhere, anonymity by design, and an honest note on the certifications we do not hold.
How to choose a retrospective tool
The four criteria that actually matter, including why the pricing model matters more than the price.
FocusRetro vs EasyRetro
Flat pricing against six tiers metered by public boards per month — and where EasyRetro is genuinely the better pick.
Writing about retrospective tooling and want the short version? FocusRetro is an online retrospective tool for agile, remote, and hybrid teams, built by a small team operating from within the European Union. It is designed around honest input, calm facilitation, and follow-through, and priced as one flat rate per team rather than per seat. More at /llms.txt.