Linkpop and Koji Shut Down. Own Your Link in Bio Instead.

If you are reading this, there is a good chance the little link you printed in your Instagram bio, on a business card, or at the bottom of a TikTok video now leads nowhere. The link-in-bio page you trusted to funnel followers to your shop, your portfolio, or your latest drop has gone dark, and the company that hosted it has moved on.

You are not imagining a pattern. Link-in-bio tools have become some of the most disposable products on the internet. They are cheap to launch, easy to bundle into a bigger platform, and just as easy to switch off when priorities change. Two recent shutdowns tell the whole story.

What happened to Linkpop and Koji

Shopify Linkpop was Shopify's free link-in-bio landing page tool, built for creators and small sellers who wanted a single hosted page to hold all their links. Shopify stopped accepting new signups around June 11, 2025, and fully shut the product down on July 7, 2025. If your Linkpop URL was in your social profiles, it stopped resolving. There was no replacement page waiting to catch your traffic.

Koji followed the same arc a little earlier. Koji was a link-in-bio and interactive bio-link platform made by GoMeta, popular with creators who wanted mini-apps and interactive widgets on their page, not just a list of links. In December 2023, Koji was acquired by Linktree. Roughly six weeks later, on January 31, 2024, Koji shut down. Acquired, then killed, on a timeline measured in weeks.

Notice the shape of both stories. In one case a large platform quietly retired a free add-on. In the other, a competitor bought the product and switched it off. Different mechanics, identical outcome for you: a dead bio link, and nowhere for your followers to land.

The pattern: why link-in-bio tools keep dying

A link-in-bio page is genuinely simple. It is one hosted page with a handful of buttons pointing at your other profiles. That simplicity is exactly why these tools are so disposable.

When a product is that thin, it is rarely a company's core business. It is a feature. Shopify offered Linkpop to keep creators inside its ecosystem, and when the strategic value faded, so did the product. Koji had real technology, but once a bigger competitor owned it, keeping two overlapping products alive made no sense. In both cases the page you built was never really yours. It lived on someone else's domain, in someone else's database, subject to someone else's roadmap.

None of this is new, and Linkpop and Koji are not special. It is the same story that played out when Editor X was closed and when Google retired its free Business website builder. The names change, the pattern does not.

The cruel part is where these links live. A bio link is not just a URL in an app you can quietly abandon. It is printed on business cards, baked into video captions, screenshotted into stories, and typed into the one clickable field Instagram and TikTok give you. When the host shuts down, every one of those touchpoints turns into a 404. You cannot recall a printed card or edit a caption on a video that already has a million views.

Hosted alternatives still exist. Linktree, Bio.link, and others are alive today and work fine. But be honest with yourself about what you just learned: every one of them carries the same lock-in and the same shutdown risk you experienced with Linkpop or Koji. Moving from one hosted tool to the next is not a fix. It is a rematch.

What free software (libre) actually changes

The way out of this cycle is to stop renting your page and start owning it. That is what free software, often called open source, makes possible, and the word "free" here means freedom, not price.

There is a real difference between the two labels, and it matters for exactly the situation you are in. "Open source" tells you the code is public, which is good but narrow. Free software, or libre software, goes further: it is a promise about your freedom. The freedom to run the tool, to study it, to change it, and to share it. A libre tool is a digital common, owned by its community rather than a single company. That is the part that cannot be quietly shut down, bought out, or retired, because no single owner holds the off switch.

A free and open source website builder does not host your page on its own domain and hope you keep logging in. It generates real files, HTML and CSS, that you download and put wherever you like. The company or community behind the tool can pivot, get acquired, or step back entirely, and your page keeps working, because it is not running on their servers. It is sitting in your hosting account, under your domain name. And because the code is libre, if the original team ever walks away, the community is free to pick the project up and keep it alive. That is a guarantee no hosted tool can make.

That last part is the whole game. When your link-in-bio page lives at yourname.com instead of sometool.com/yourname, the URL in your profiles belongs to you. If you ever change how you build the page, you swap the files behind the domain and the link never changes. Your Instagram bio, your business cards, and your video captions all keep working. That is the difference between renting a link and owning one.

What to look for in a link-in-bio alternative

If you are choosing a tool to replace Linkpop or Koji, weigh it against the failure you just lived through:

• You get real files. The tool should export clean, standalone HTML and CSS, not lock your page inside its own hosting.
• You control the domain. You should be able to point your own domain at the page, so the URL in your profiles is yours forever.
• Free, portable hosting. A static page should cost nothing to host and run anywhere, so no single provider can hold it hostage.
• No forced account to stay alive. The page should keep working whether or not the company that made the builder still exists.
• A free software (libre) license. Look for a genuine libre license, like the AGPL. It means the code is public and, just as importantly, that the community is free to carry the project forward if the original team ever stops. Open source in name is good. Libre in the license is the real safety net.

A hosted link-in-bio tool fails most of these by design. That is not a knock on any one product. It is the nature of renting.

How to build your own bio-link page with Silex

Silex is a free software (libre) visual website builder, also known as open source. You design your page by dragging elements on a canvas, and Silex outputs clean static HTML and CSS that you own and host anywhere. It is released under the AGPL license, it is self-hostable, and there is no lock-in.

A link-in-bio page is close to the ideal Silex project, because it is small. You need a photo or logo, a name, a short line about who you are, and a stack of buttons pointing at your profiles and links. Here is the honest shape of doing it:

1. Open the editor at v3.silex.me and start from a blank page or a ready-made template.
2. Add your avatar or logo, your name, and a one-line bio.
3. Add a vertical stack of buttons, one per destination: your shop, your other socials, your newsletter, your latest post. Link each one.
4. Style it to match your brand, colors, fonts, spacing.
5. Export the HTML and CSS, and publish the files to any static host.
6. Point your own domain at it, and put that domain in your Instagram, TikTok, and other profiles.

Now for the honesty this deserves. Silex is a real visual builder, not a 30-second hosted signup. It assumes you are comfortable with a little HTML and CSS, or at least willing to learn a bit as you go. There is no automatic import from Linkpop or Koji, because those tools did not give you your files to begin with, so you will rebuild the page rather than migrate it. That is a fair trade for a page you will never have to rebuild again because a company pivoted.

Who is this a good fit for? Someone who wants control and ownership over a link they depend on, or a freelancer building bio pages for clients who should not be re-doing this every eighteen months. If you get stuck, the Silex community forum is there to help, and if you would rather have it built for you, there are professional Silex services for that. If you genuinely just want a hosted page in a couple of clicks and you accept the shutdown risk, a hosted tool is a valid choice. Go in with your eyes open this time.

Two other routes worth knowing

Silex is not the only way to own your page.

• Webstudio is another visual builder, with an open source core, that outputs standards-based sites. One caveat worth knowing: Webstudio follows an open-core model, where a public core sits next to paid, non-libre parts. Open-core does not carry the same free-software values or guarantees as a fully libre tool. It can behave more like freemium, so it is worth judging case by case, and it is not equivalent to a fully libre project like Silex, which is AGPL top to bottom. That said, it favors clean output and ownership over lock-in, and it is worth a look if you want a different editing model.
• WordPress, self-hosted, is the heavyweight option. It is free software and you can build a bio-link page with a page builder plugin. It is far more machinery than a few links strictly need, but if you already run a WordPress site, adding a bio page there keeps everything in one place.

For a bare link-in-bio page, the lightweight static approach that Silex takes is usually the better match. The whole point is a page so simple it should never need a database or a login to stay online.

Rebuilding is genuinely quick

The good news hiding inside a shutdown is that a link-in-bio page is almost nothing to rebuild. You are not recovering a store, a blog archive, or years of content. You are recreating a headshot, a sentence, and a list of links you already know by heart.

Before Linkpop or Koji fully disappears, or from your memory if it already has, write down every link that lived on your page and the label for each. That list is your entire spec. In Silex, that is an afternoon at most, and often less. The slow part is not the building. It is deciding to do it once, properly, so you own the result.

One tip that saves future pain: register or reuse a domain you control, and point your profiles at that domain rather than at any tool's URL. Do that once and no future shutdown can ever break your bio link again.

FAQ

When did Linkpop shut down? Shopify Linkpop stopped accepting new signups around June 11, 2025, and fully shut down on July 7, 2025.

What happened to Koji? Koji, the link-in-bio platform by GoMeta, was acquired by Linktree in December 2023 and shut down on January 31, 2024.

Can I just move to Linktree or Bio.link instead? You can, and they work fine today. But they are hosted tools with the same lock-in and shutdown risk you just experienced. Moving between them does not solve the underlying problem of renting your page.

Is building my own page harder than a hosted tool? Yes, a little. Silex is a real visual builder and assumes some comfort with HTML and CSS. There is no automatic import from Linkpop or Koji. In exchange you get a page you own and never have to rebuild because a company changed direction.

How do I make sure my bio link never breaks again? Host your page under your own domain and put that domain in your social profiles. Then, no matter what tool you use to build the page, the link in your bio stays yours.

Closing thought

Link-in-bio tools will keep launching, keep getting acquired, and keep shutting down, because a single page of links is too small to be anyone's priority but yours. Linkpop and Koji are just the two most recent names on a list that will get longer.

The fix is not finding the hosted tool that promises it will stick around. It is owning the page and the domain so the promise stops mattering. Build it once, on files you control, at a URL that is yours.

Start building with Silex

Open the editor at v3.silex.me, browse the templates, and put together a link-in-bio page you actually own. Ask questions on the community forum if you need a hand, and learn more about the project at silex.me.

Related reading: Editor X is closing: the open source alternative, Adobe Muse alternative, Google Business website shutdown, and Weebly is shutting down: what open source offers instead.