🚀 Rocket Retros
Run a retro
Free sprint retrospectives: end-to-end encrypted, zero-setup. Solo retros need no account. For shared rooms, sign in to host — your team just clicks the link.
Up to 32 people. Tickets are anonymous, and the server never stores their contents.
- Sailboat — Where we're headed, what helped, what held us back, what's ahead.
- Start, Stop, Continue — The shortest retro that still changes something.
- 4 Ls — Feelings first, then the gaps.
- Custom — Name the columns yourself — two to eight of them.
How it works
01 · end-to-end encryption
Only your team sees your retro contents.
02 · easy to share
One link, and they're in.
03 · what we keep
What we keep — and what we don't.
The link contains the key used to encrypt your data. Our servers never see it. Only the people you share the link with will be able to read your retro contents.
Encrypted in your browser, and only your team members can decrypt it. We couldn't see your data if we wanted to.
Encrypted in your browser, with a key we have never had.
Every browser deletes its copy of your retrospective.
Four account tables keyed by an opaque id. No column for a ticket, a name or a vote.
What the server keeps of yours: an email address and a room count, linked by an opaque id — the retro's contents were never ours.
the fine print, in plain words
Questions you'd ask before using it at work
Can you read our retrospectives?
No. Everything is encrypted in your browser before it leaves, with a key only your team's browsers ever have. We pass the encrypted messages along; we were never given the key.
Who can get into my retro?
Anyone with the link, and nobody else. Links are long, random and unlisted — there's no directory to search. Treat one like a door key: it's also what decrypts the retro. Having it doesn't make anyone the host, though.
What if you were hacked, subpoenaed, or bought by someone worse?
They'd get what we have: the account's email address and room count, the room registry's routing data (a room id, a hash, a connection id), and the encrypted messages. The key was never on our side, so the retro's contents are still encrypted — for a court, an acquirer, or us.
What happens if the host closes their laptop mid-retro?
This is the ugly part. The retro would pause until the host re-opens their laptop. The concept of a "back-up" host is something we're working on.
Is anything kept for compliance, analytics or "improving the product"?
What we keep: the email you signed in with (for receipts and support), a count of the rooms you've created, and the sign-in tokens that let your browser stay signed in for up to 30 days. What we don't keep: your retro's contents — tickets, groups, votes and names are encrypted in your browser and the key was never ours. No analytics, no session recording, no backups of retro content. Your own browser keeps its working copy, too: the hosting tab stores the room's encrypted board and its identity until the session ends or you clear it by hand. Deletion of the account data is not yet available. Worth saying out loud: if you want a searchable history of past retros, this is the wrong tool.
Will it work in my browser?
Anything from 2023 on: a current Chrome, Edge or Firefox, or Safari 16.4 and up. The encryption is done by your browser's own built-in cryptography, which is where the age floor comes from — and one less thing to take our word for.
Why build Rocket Retros? There are a ton of other tools for running sprint retrospectives already.
I originally built Rocket Retros because my team needed a tool to run retrospectives and the tools our company offered were either terrible to use, bloated with features we didn't need, or too expensive. Rocket Retros on the other hand is exactly the tool my team needed. When I saw how cheap it was to host myself, I figured I might as well share it with the world!
where the guarantee stops
Three things this doesn't do
- The link is the key. Anyone you send it to can read the retro, and so can anyone they forward it to. A link can't be un-sent.
- The browser running the retro holds the unlocked copy while it's live. Nothing in the app ever shows who wrote what — but that machine has it.
- We can see the shape of a retro and who created it, never its contents. That one happened, when, and how much traffic it made. The account adds an email address and a room count — the retro's contents stay encrypted.
- End-to-end encrypted with AES-256-GCM, using the browser's own WebCrypto — no cryptography library of ours in the path.
- The key rides in the link's fragment — everything after the #, the part browsers never send to a server.
- The server is about a hundred lines. It routes messages between browsers and never parses them: an rr1: string in, the same string out.
- Four account tables behind the door: an opaque id keys an email, a usage count, sign-in tokens and mail throttles. No ticket, no vote, no retro content.
Don't take our word for it — the whole system is one small repo, design docs and threat model included. You don't have to audit it blind, either: rebuild the deployed commit exactly the way the deploy does and compare the hashes against what the site serves — the repo's README shows the commands.
Start a retro