read.cv was acquired and sunset, taking thousands of clean designer / engineer / writer portfolios with it. Most of those people have spent the last year quietly comparing alternatives. This page is a straight read on where they're landing — and where I think they should land.
read.cv hit a sweet spot that most "link-in-bio" tools never tried for. It treated a portfolio as a long-form, typographically-careful document — not a card with social icons. You didn't pick a template; the template was read.cv. And because the format was tight, the network attracted designers, founders, indie devs, and writers who cared about how their CV looked in detail.
After Perplexity acquired the team and sunset the product, three things broke at once:
read.cv/yourname URL stopped resolving.Anyone replacing read.cv has to answer at least the first two. The third is a longer game — and is mostly an argument for picking a tool whose owner is still actively building.
I'll skip the "no-code page builder" generalists (Squarespace, Carrd) — read.cv users tried those and bounced. The five options people actually evaluate post-shutdown are below.
| What you care about | RemoteWorks.pro | Bento | Polywork | Personal site (Next.js / Astro) |
Notion / Super |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Closest to read.cv format | yes long-form CV templates | no link-in-bio card | partly activity feed, not CV | whatever you build | if you template hard |
| Time to live | ~2 min | ~3 min | ~10 min (activity setup) | ~weekend | ~30 min |
| Custom domain | Pro plan | Pro plan | Some tiers | Free, you bring it | Super addon |
| SEO control | Built-in (per template) | Limited | Limited | Total | Through Super |
| Analytics | Built-in | Pro plan | Built-in | You add Plausible / Vercel | Add via Super |
| Maintained / shipping | solo founder shipping weekly | active | slower since pivot | Forever — it's your repo | Active (Notion + Super) |
| Free tier good enough? | Yes — first 500 get free Pro forever | Free with limits | Free for individuals | Free (Vercel hobby) | Free Notion + paid Super |
Closest spiritual successor to read.cv. 12 templates organized by profession (designer, engineer, writer, PM, etc.), live in 2 minutes, and the founder's actively shipping — early adopters get free Pro forever (the first-500 founding-member offer). If you're a remote pro who wants something nice up by tonight and not a side project, this is the lowest-friction path.
Best if: you don't want to learn a framework, you'd rather pick a template than a font, and you want analytics + SEO out of the box.
A clean, modern Linktree replacement. Bento's good at the link-in-bio format — one card, your headshot, your links. It is not a long-form CV substitute. If your portfolio is "here's my Substack, my GitHub, my three Dribbble shots, and my email," Bento works. If your portfolio is a story, it doesn't.
Polywork's bet was always "your timeline is your portfolio". For people who ship continuously and want every launch / talk / post to update a public feed, that's a real value prop. The format is different from read.cv's static CV though, so it's a different product fit, not a closer one.
The maximalist answer. You write the markdown, you pick the typography, you bring your own domain, you never worry about a future acquihire breaking the URL. Cost is one weekend up front and ~one hour a year of maintenance after that. If you have any frontend chops at all, this is what you'd do for the long term.
Some of the read.cv crowd had a Notion-based "everything page" anyway, and Super lets you ship it as a real custom-domain site. Reasonable if your CV literally already exists in Notion. Skip if you'd be making the Notion page just to publish it — that's a long way to go for a portfolio.
LinkedIn is a CV viewer, not a portfolio. read.cv's whole point was that the portfolio was the artifact — typographically-considered, scannable, shareable as a URL that didn't require a sign-in. LinkedIn is none of those things. Plenty of people who use both hit "send people my read.cv link" specifically to avoid the LinkedIn UX.
If you exported your read.cv profile before sunset, you have JSON / markdown of your sections. RemoteWorks.pro and a personal site can both consume that — the manual labor is mapping sections to a template (or to your own layout). No tool will auto-import for you; the data shapes are too different.
Honest read: it's run by a solo founder who's bootstrapping it and hiring marketing help (per his recent HN hiring post). That means: shipping fast, no VC pressure to flip, but also no committed roadmap from a big team. The single best mitigation against another read.cv situation is to own your domain — custom-domain on Pro, then if anything ever happens, your URL keeps working anywhere you point it.
Probably good. The five above are the ones the post-read.cv conversation kept coming back to. If you've got a tool that fits "long-form CV-shaped portfolio, custom domain, fast to ship", I'd add it to the table — tell the team.