> Content index: https://devbio.me/blogs/llms.txt > Canonical page: https://devbio.me/blogs/bento-me-shut-down --- title: Bento.me Shut Down: Where Your Links Go Now description: Bento.me shut down on February 13, 2026, and every bento.me URL now redirects to Linktree's homepage — not your page. Here's what broke and how to fix it. keywords: bento.me shut down, bento me, bento.me redirect published: 2026-09-09 updated: 2026-09-21 url: https://devbio.me/blogs/bento-me-shut-down word_count: 2321 --- # Bento.me Shut Down: Where Your Links Go Now > Bento.me shut down on February 13, 2026, and every bento.me URL now redirects to Linktree's homepage — not your page. Here's what broke and how to fix it. Canonical: https://devbio.me/blogs/bento-me-shut-down Published: 2026-09-09 ## Related Pages - [Read.cv Shutdown: What Happened and the Best Alternative](https://devbio.me/blogs/read-cv-alternative-developers) - [How to Change GitHub Username Without Breaking Links](https://devbio.me/blogs/change-github-username) - [NFC Business Card: The Chip Only Holds a URL](https://devbio.me/blogs/nfc-business-card-chip) - [Custom Domain Developer Bio: What the CNAME Doesn't Change](https://devbio.me/blogs/custom-domain-developer-bio) - [Vanity URL for Developers: The 2026 Guide](https://devbio.me/blogs/vanity-urls-for-developers) - [Bento.me Alternative for Developers in 2026](https://devbio.me/blogs/bento-alternative-developers) - [The Best Link in Bio for Developers in 2026](https://devbio.me/blogs/link-in-bio-for-developers) - [Linktree Pricing: What Each Tier Actually Unlocks](https://devbio.me/blogs/linktree-pricing-tiers) - [The Machine-Readable Developer Profile: What Actually Works in 2026](https://devbio.me/blogs/machine-readable-developer-profile) ![A closed sign hanging from a glass door](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1727767579106-c30a4c1c74c5?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3w4OTM1MDJ8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHwxfHxjbG9zZWQlMjBzaHV0dGVyZWQlMjBzdG9yZWZyb250JTIwc2lnbiUyMGVuZCUyMG9mJTIwc2VydmljZXxlbnwwfDB8fHwxNzg4OTE2MDcwfDA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=1080) *Photo by [Tim Mossholder](https://unsplash.com/@timmossholder?utm_source=quillly&utm_medium=referral) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com?utm_source=quillly&utm_medium=referral)* Somewhere in your GitHub profile, your conference bio, or the resume PDF you emailed out last spring, there's a link to a page that no longer exists. It doesn't 404. It quietly hands the visitor to a company you never mentioned. **Bento.me shut down on February 13, 2026, roughly two years after Linktree acquired it. Every URL on the domain — your profile, the sunset notice, even the homepage — now answers with a 301 redirect to Linktree's homepage. Your page is gone, the data behind it was deleted, and every link you ever shared points at someone else's marketing site.** That last part is the piece most people miss. A shutdown you can plan around. A silent redirect keeps working, looks fine in a link checker, and costs you every visitor it touches. **What's covered:** [what happened](#what-happened-when-bentome-shut-down) · [where your links point now](#where-your-bentome-links-point-now) · [why the redirect costs you](#why-a-homepage-redirect-costs-more-than-a-dead-link) · [the link audit](#find-every-bentome-link-you-still-have-out-there) · [what you can recover](#what-you-can-and-cant-get-back) · [the portability test](#the-portability-test-five-questions-before-you-move-in) · [FAQ](#frequently-asked-questions) ## What Happened When Bento.me Shut Down Bento was a visual, card-based link-in-bio product that landed well with designers and developers who found Linktree's list of buttons too plain. Linktree acquired it, ran it alongside its own product for about two years, and then folded it. The sunset ran on a published timeline. Users were told to save their content before the cutoff, and Bento emailed account holders migration instructions along with a discounted Linktree Pro offer. On February 13, 2026, profiles came down, stored content was removed, and the domain was repointed. If you exported in time, you have a zip file. If you didn't, there's no retrieval path — the accounts and their content are gone, not archived behind a login. This is the second time in recent memory that a well-liked profile product popped out from under the developers who adopted it. [Read.cv shut down on a similar arc](https://devbio.me/blogs/read-cv-alternative-developers), and the open-source BioDrop project was archived before that. The pattern is consistent enough to plan around: a small, design-led profile product gets acquired by a larger one, runs in parallel for a year or two, then gets absorbed. ## Where Your Bento.me Links Point Now This is the part worth testing yourself rather than taking on faith. Every path on the domain — the root, a username path, and even the company's own sunset announcement page — returns the same response: ``` HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Location: https://linktr.ee/ ``` Note what's missing from that `Location` header: your username. It isn't a per-user redirect that carries `bento.me/yourname` to a matching Linktree profile. Every single URL on the domain collapses to one destination — [Linktree's homepage](https://linktr.ee/) — regardless of whose page it used to be. ![Flowchart showing a visitor clicking an old bento.me profile link, receiving a 301 redirect to Linktree's homepage, and landing on a marketing page with no profile information](https://quillly.com/serve/v1/019e3623-8b91-738d-ae30-42d5bcd996a0/images/a27f8537a12d1105f4dcdafe8c37b06c2d1587b9.webp) You can confirm this in one command, without a browser: ``` curl -sI https://bento.me/yourname | grep -i "^location" ``` The visitor experience is the real damage. Someone reads your talk abstract, taps your bio link, and arrives at a signup page for a product they didn't ask about. They don't know they were redirected. They assume that page is what you meant to send them to, or that you linked the wrong thing. ## Why a Homepage Redirect Costs More Than a Dead Link A 404 is honest. It tells the visitor the page is gone, and it tells search engines to drop it. A 301 to an unrelated homepage does something worse: it keeps every link alive while emptying it of meaning. MDN's documentation on [301 Moved Permanently](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Status/301) states the consequence plainly: "Search engines receiving this response will attribute links to the original URL to the redirected resource, passing the SEO ranking to the new URL." Google's own [guidance on redirects](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects) matches — a permanent redirect signals that the target should be treated as canonical. Read that against your situation. Every backlink you earned to your Bento page — the conference site that listed you as a speaker, the podcast show notes, the GitHub README of a project that credited you — now passes its value to Linktree. You did the work of earning those links. The redirect assigns the benefit elsewhere. ![Comparison of three redirect outcomes: a 404 that ends the journey honestly, a 301 to an unrelated homepage that silently misroutes visitors, and a 301 to your own new page that preserves both visitor and ranking](https://quillly.com/serve/v1/019e3623-8b91-738d-ae30-42d5bcd996a0/images/db0fa4dc8f4a02bbc7f3cf6eb3920da09021eaee.webp) There's no setting that fixes this from your side. You never controlled `bento.me`, so you can't change what it does. The only links you can repair are the ones you can still edit — which makes finding them the actual task. ## Find Every Bento.me Link You Still Have Out There Treat this like any other link migration: enumerate, replace, verify. The same discipline applies when you [change your GitHub username](https://devbio.me/blogs/change-github-username), where old links break in exactly the same quiet way. ![Four-stage audit process for finding and replacing old bento.me links: search your own repositories, check profile fields on other platforms, update static files you have already distributed, and re-verify after thirty days](https://quillly.com/serve/v1/019e3623-8b91-738d-ae30-42d5bcd996a0/images/80abed4f008aad9b37b52d12e095acaf3a0ee57e.webp) Work through it in that order, because the sources get progressively harder to reach: - **Your repositories.** Run `git grep -ri "bento.me"` across your projects. Profile READMEs, docs sites, and `package.json` author fields are the usual hiding places. - **Profile fields on other platforms.** GitHub's website field, your X and LinkedIn bios, npm author metadata, your Mastodon profile links, Dev.to and Hashnode settings. - **Files already in circulation.** A resume PDF you've emailed to forty people can't be recalled. Neither can a printed conference badge, a QR code on a sticker, or [an NFC card whose chip holds nothing but that URL](https://devbio.me/blogs/nfc-business-card-chip). This is the category that argues hardest for owning your own URL. - **Third-party pages that list you.** Conference speaker pages, podcast show notes, and coauthor bios. You'll need to email someone for these, so prioritize the ones that actually send traffic. One detail that trips people up: browsers cache permanent redirects aggressively. MDN's example response for a 301 carries a `cache-control` header with a 30-day lifetime. Even after you fix a link, a visitor whose browser already followed the old one may keep getting sent to the cached destination. Test in a private window before you conclude a fix worked. If you want to see what your page used to contain, the [Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/) may hold a snapshot. It won't restore anything, but it's often enough to reconstruct your project list and copy. [Give your links one home that survives the next acquisition — start free on DevBio](https://devbio.me). ## What You Can and Can't Get Back Worth being precise here, because the answer differs sharply depending on what you did before February. **If you saved your content before the cutoff:** you have your text, links, and uploaded images — enough to rebuild by hand on any platform in an afternoon. Accounts differ on how much Bento automated this: some coverage describes a downloadable archive, while other reports say there was no built-in export tool and users copied their pages by hand. Either way, the window closed in February. **If you didn't:** the content is deleted. There is no grace-period login, no support queue that can restore an account, and no archive behind the redirect. What you can recover comes from outside Bento: an Internet Archive snapshot, your own local copies of the images you uploaded, and whatever you can reconstruct from memory. **Either way, your URL is unrecoverable.** This is the asymmetry that matters. Content can be retyped in an hour. A URL that has been printed, emailed, linked from a hundred pages, and indexed for two years cannot be recreated anywhere else — and it now belongs to whoever owns the domain. That asymmetry is the whole argument for a [custom domain on your developer bio](https://devbio.me/blogs/custom-domain-developer-bio). If your page had been at `yourname.dev` with a platform rendering it, the platform's shutdown would have cost you a rendering layer, not your address. You'd repoint a DNS record and every link you ever shared would keep working. For the broader case, see the guide to [vanity URLs for developers](https://devbio.me/blogs/vanity-urls-for-developers). [Point your own domain at a profile you control — set one up on DevBio](https://devbio.me). ## The Portability Test: Five Questions Before You Move In Picking the next platform on features alone is how you end up doing this again. When Bento.me shut down, the product wasn't the problem — it was a good one. The address was. Before you rebuild anywhere, ask what happens on the day that platform is acquired: 1. **Can you point your own domain at it?** If your public address is `theirdomain.com/you`, their exit is your exit. 2. **Can you get your data out without asking?** An export button behind a support ticket is a promise. A public endpoint that returns your profile as JSON on demand is a guarantee. 3. **Is your content readable by machines, not just browsers?** If the only representation is rendered HTML, "export" means scraping. 4. **Does anything paid disappear on the way out?** Analytics history and custom domain configuration usually don't survive a migration. 5. **What happens to your URL if they shut down?** Almost nobody publishes an answer. Assume the Bento outcome — a blanket redirect to whoever bought them — and decide whether you can live with it. Question two is the sharpest one, because it's the only one you can test in ten seconds instead of taking on trust. ## How DevBio Answers the Portability Test Full disclosure: DevBio is our product, so weigh this accordingly — but the mechanics are checkable, which is the point of the test above. A DevBio profile isn't only an HTML page. The same data is served from a set of public, machine-readable endpoints on your own profile path, so "export" is a GET request rather than a request to support: ![Table of DevBio machine-readable profile endpoints including bio.json for a full data dump, me.json for IndieWeb h-card, projects.json for a project feed, llms.txt for AI tools, resume for a compiled PDF, and a WebFinger endpoint for the fediverse](https://quillly.com/serve/v1/019e3623-8b91-738d-ae30-42d5bcd996a0/images/4f62f8627a6d353dea2cb9e1995866a9ab2c9ef5.webp) The `bio.json` endpoint exists specifically so your profile can live somewhere other than our renderer — your own site can consume it, a third-party service can embed it, and you can back the whole thing up offline. Access is public by default, with per-hostname origin rules and an optional token if you'd rather lock embedding down. The resume endpoint compiles a PDF from those same components rather than a separately maintained file, so the PDF and the page can't drift apart. And custom domains are supported, which is the answer to question one: your address stays yours. None of that makes DevBio immune to going away. It does mean that if we did, you'd still hold your domain, your JSON, and your PDF — and you'd repoint a DNS record instead of hunting through four years of links. That's the difference the Bento.me shutdown made concrete. If you're weighing specific replacements, we've compared the options in the [Bento.me alternative guide for developers](https://devbio.me/blogs/bento-alternative-developers) and the broader roundup of [link-in-bio tools for developers](https://devbio.me/blogs/link-in-bio-for-developers). [Claim your handle and keep your profile in a format you can take with you](https://devbio.me). ## Frequently Asked Questions ### When exactly did Bento.me shut down? February 13, 2026, roughly two years after Linktree acquired the product. Users were notified ahead of time by email with export instructions and a discounted Linktree Pro offer. After that date, profiles came down and stored content was deleted rather than archived. ### Where does my old bento.me link go now? To Linktree's homepage. The domain returns a 301 permanent redirect for every path — your username included — with a `Location` header pointing at Linktree's homepage. It does not map your old profile to a matching Linktree page, so visitors land on a generic marketing page with nothing about you on it. ### Can I still export my Bento data? No. Whatever export path existed closed with the shutdown, and accounts differ on whether Bento shipped a real export tool or left users copying pages by hand. If you saved your content before February 13, 2026, you have it. If not, it's deleted, and there's no login or support path to retrieve it. An Internet Archive snapshot is the remaining option for reconstructing what the page said. ### Does the Bento.me redirect hurt my search visibility? It doesn't penalize your other pages, but it does hand over the value of every backlink to your old profile. Per MDN, search engines attribute links from the original URL to the redirect target and pass ranking along with them. Links you earned now benefit Linktree instead of you. ### Why do searches for bento me still show the old pages? Search engines take time to reprocess a domain that redirects every path to an unrelated destination, so cached titles and descriptions can linger in results for a while. Third-party pages that still link to old profiles keep those URLs in circulation too. Clicking any of them lands on the same Linktree homepage. ### Should I just move to Linktree? It's the path of least resistance, and the migration offer makes it cheap at first — our breakdown of [Linktree's pricing tiers](https://devbio.me/blogs/linktree-pricing-tiers) covers what each level actually unlocks. The thing to weigh is that moving to the company that just absorbed your last platform puts your address back on a domain you don't control. If you take that route, attach a custom domain so the next migration is a DNS change. ### How do I stop this from happening again? Own the address. Put your profile on a domain you control and treat the platform as a rendering layer you can swap. Pair that with a machine-readable copy of your data — the [machine-readable developer profile guide](https://devbio.me/blogs/machine-readable-developer-profile) covers the formats worth having — so a rebuild is an import rather than a retype. ## Key Takeaways - Bento.me shut down on February 13, 2026, about two years after Linktree acquired it. Profiles are down and stored content was deleted, not archived. - Every bento.me URL now returns a 301 whose `Location` header is Linktree's homepage. There is no per-user mapping, so old links land visitors on a generic homepage. - The redirect passes your accumulated link value to Linktree, per MDN's documented 301 behavior — a quieter cost than a 404, and a larger one. - Audit in order: your repos, your profile fields elsewhere, files already distributed, then third-party pages. Re-check after 30 days, since browsers cache permanent redirects. - The unrecoverable asset was never the content — it was the URL. A custom domain turns the next shutdown into a DNS change. [Put your profile somewhere you can take it with you — get started on DevBio](https://devbio.me).