What happened to Bento.me?

Bento.me is gone. Linktree acquired it in 2023, and in December 2025 Bento's team announced that the platform would shut down on 13 February 2026. After that date, Bento said, user and profile data would be deleted and Bento pages would redirect to Linktree. When we checked on 21 Oct 2026, bento.me and its old pages returned a permanent redirect to linktr.ee. If you had a Bento page and didn't export it, there is no Bento account left to go back to.

This post explains what Bento was, what happened, and the sensible places to rebuild your page. The shutdown details come from Bento's own announcement, which we read in the Internet Archive's copy because the original now redirects.

What Bento was

Bento was a link-in-bio page with a different shape. Instead of a stack of buttons, your page was a grid of tiles in different sizes, each holding a link, a photo, a video or another piece of content. Its home page called it "a link in bio, but rich and beautiful" and pitched it at creatives: videos, podcasts, newsletters, photos, paid products, streams and a calendar shown on the page itself rather than hidden behind links. It said it was designed in Berlin, and pages lived at bento.me/yourname.

The grid made a profile look more like a small personal website than a list of links. The farewell post mentions how users hacked together playful widgets from custom images and arranged the grid in ways the team didn't expect.

What happened

1. 2023: Linktree bought Bento. Bento's home page carried the banner "Big news! Linktree acquired Bento", and the shutdown post, dated December 2025, says the acquisition was "a bit over two years" earlier.
2. 18 December 2025: the shutdown was announced. Mugeeb Hassan, Bento's co-founder and CTO, wrote that Bento would shut down on 13 February 2026.
3. Before the shutdown: users were to get an email with steps for moving to Linktree and a special Linktree Pro offer. The post said Linktree had been adding features inspired by Bento's layouts, content blocks and media embeds.
4. 13 February 2026: Bento closed. The announcement said user and profile data would be deleted and pages would redirect to Linktree, and asked people to export anything they wanted to keep before then.

We could not find a separate Linktree announcement of the acquisition on Linktree's own site, so the 2023 date rests on Bento's own statements. We also can't confirm what the Linktree Pro offer was, as it was sent by email.

If you had a Bento page

• Change the link in your bios. The old bento.me address now goes to Linktree's home page, not to a page of yours, so any bio, email signature or printed QR code that still uses it sends people nowhere useful.
• Check your email for the migration message from before February, if you want to take up the Linktree route.
• Rebuild from what you have. If you exported your page, start from that. If not, your images and links probably still live in the places they pointed to.

Where Bento users can go

What you liked about Bento should decide where you go next. Prices below were checked on each vendor's own pricing page on 21 Oct 2026.

Linktree is the path Bento itself pointed to. Carrd is closest in spirit if what you loved was building something that looked like yours, since it gives you a blank page rather than a fixed layout. None of these recreate Bento's grid exactly; Carrd comes nearest in freedom, and Linktree says its newer layouts borrow from it.

The lesson from Bento

A bio page on someone else's address is rented. When Bento closed, every bento.me link in every bio pointed somewhere new overnight. The cheapest insurance is a domain of your own pointed at whichever tool you use, so that a shutdown or a switch means changing one setting rather than every profile. Carrd, Beacons and CueDM all support custom domains on paid plans. For the wider field, see Linktree alternatives for Instagram.