All roads lead to link-in-bio

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The “link-in-bio” has quietly become one of the most important features in the creator economy.

What started as a simple workaround for Instagram’s single-link limitation has evolved into a multi-billion-click gateway - dominated for years by Linktree. But over the past five years, the space has exploded with challengers and major platforms racing to own this critical piece of the creator tech stack.

One of those challengers was KOMI, where I spent nearly three years as the product manager leading its link-in-bio product.

With Groover’s recent acquisition of Temple (a link-in-bio for musicians) and Shopify’s decision earlier this year to retire Linkpop, it feels like the right moment to break down:

The evolution of the link-in-bio category
Why it’s so difficult to win as a standalone tool
When it actually makes sense to launch one
Why every company ends up with the same positioning
2026 predictions

1. The evolution of the link-in-bio category

Wave 1: The monopoly years
- Linktree is arguably the best proof that distribution & brand is more important than product.
- Despite the remarkably basic product, they have amassed over 50m users with the combination of a free product and super effective PLG (product led growth) watermark-loop, ensuring a constant stream of free traffic and brand awareness.
Wave 2: The challenger era
- That level of success, combined with the lack of product quality and innovation invited a ton of ambitious entrepreneurs to launch competitors
- Platforms like KOMI, Beacons and Stan all entered with superior products, each specialising in some way; KOMI focusing on design and functionality, Stan on commerce, Beacons on features and additional tooling eg media kits.
Wave 3: The web-builder awakening
- The website platforms (Squarespace, Wix, Shopify) recognized that traffic was increasingly coming from social, and they were leaving themselves vulnerable to whichever platform owned the link-in-bio real estate
- Squarespace rolled out bio.sites, Shopify launched Linkpop (RIP) and Wix introduced Hopp, each offering it for free.
Wave 4: the horizontal expansion
- Non-website platforms like Later (social scheduling & analytics) and Groover (promotion platform for musicians) begin to enter the link-in-bio market with Linkin.bio and Temple.

Now that we’ve got an understanding of who’s competing in the market, let’s dive into why it’s so tough…

2. The standalone problem

There is a graveyard of failed and languishing link-in-bio tools (Milkshake, Linkpop, koij, Snipfeed to name a few), who tried to make a pure-play link-in-bio tool work. But why are link-in-bio businesses so difficult? It comes down to three core issues:

Unit economics
Maintaining differentiation
The vitamin vs painkiller challenge

The unit economics dilemma

When your competition starts at $0, it’s almost impossible to build a sustainable business.

That’s been the challenge with link-in-bio tools from day one. Linktree’s free plan set the benchmark, and when your biggest competitor is free, your product has to be 10x better just to make a dent (think Superhuman vs Gmail).

As the third wave kicked off, companies like Squarespace and Wix followed suit, offering their own versions for free to maximize adoption.

At KOMI, we knew our product was 10x better than Linktree’s. Even with a stronger product, like others in the space, we were constrained by what users were willing to pay. Across the market, it quickly became clear there was a ceiling price of around $10–$14 per month.

The reality is that, at that price point, unless your churn rate is exceptional, your customers simply aren’t worth much over their lifetime. Let me explain:

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Average lifetime value for a typical link-in-bio customer:
(using Lenny’s churn benchmarks)

- Monthly price is $10/month
- A “good” monthly churn rate for b2c SaaS = 3-5%
- “average” churn rates are closer to 7%

LTV (Avg revenue per subscriber over time) ≈ monthly price ÷ monthly churn (%)

@ 3% churn → LTV ≈ $10 ÷ 3% = $333
@ 5% churn → LTV ≈ $10 ÷ 5% = $200
@ 7% churn → LTV ≈ $10 ÷ 7% = $142

When your average customer is worth $142–$200, you need to acquire them very cheaply to make the math work.

Even with good conversion rates (8–12% sign-up-to-paid) and good churn, that means you’d need to acquire users for $16–$24 per signup just to break even.

For the average platform, with average churn and average conversion, even $10 per signup is too high. They’d quickly be losing money on every customer.

That’s the unit economics dilemma: How do you scale your user base enough to kick-start PLG and word-of-mouth, without losing lots of money in the process.

And it’s why most players dropped out, leaving only the few platforms who managed to figure it out (like KOMI and Beacons) still standing.

Differentiation erodes fast

One of the hardest challenges for link-in-bios is maintaining differentiation when users ultimately want simplicity and low prices.

As platforms expand from serving a niche to trying to serve all creators, they sacrifice depth for breadth and lose defensibility.

Beacons is a good example. They serve everyone, which makes them versatile but also leaves them without a clear edge. In contrast, Linkfire and Temple focus exclusively on musicians and have built features that only make sense for that audience.

When you chase the broader market, any advantage is quickly copied.

That’s what happened with Stan, which started with digital products before everyone else added them, and with KOMI, whose design and functionality helped set the standard many others later followed.

The vitamin vs painkiller challenge

For creators, if your product isn’t saving them time or directly driving revenue, it’s a nice-to-have; a vitamin, not a painkiller.

In almost every conversation I’ve ever had with a creator, they said they cared about their link-in-bio. But when asked what actually keeps them up at night, the answers were always the same: producing enough content, keeping up with the algorithm, and finding new ways to earn money.

The reality is that many creators can go days or even weeks without noticing if their link-in-bio is out of date or broken. It doesn’t solve an urgent problem. It’s just another to-do item that can always wait until tomorrow, and so it’s easy to settle for something free that’s okay.

3. When to launch a link-in-bio

Despite the challenges I’ve outlined above, launching a new link-in-bio platform can (and does) make sense, providing its done for one of three reasons:

Owning the stack:
If you already have an established tool that services creators, then expanding your product suite to consolidate more of the tech stack is obvious move.

Whether you’re a social tool (Later), Website (Wix/squarespace) or run a brand marketplace (Shopmy/LTK), owning this key bottleneck adds value across the rest of the business. It gives you access to more data, more customers and access to a crucial directory for buyers.

It also is an easy tool to offer for free to bring users into your ecosystem and to upsell across the rest of your suite.
Adding value to your existing niche:
A key challenge with the creator economy is the diversity of creators and their needs (eg. Fashion vs Knowledge vs Twitch streamers vs music etc).

As I’ve mentioned, trying to compete for everyone is a recipe for disaster and makes it hard to differentiate.

If you already service a niche, launching a niche-specific link-in-bio and leaning into advanced functionality can be very effective, eg. Groover or Linkfire with musicians.

This gives you clear path to adding more value to your users AND a relatively easy path to differentiation due to your ability to go deep and narrow with new features.
Using creators as a way of monetising brands:
Fundamentally, brands are a much better customer than creators:
1. they have bigger budgets / less price sensitive
2. they have less diverse needs (most brands are similar when it comes to marketing)
3. there is a huge opportunity to take a cut of the budget that brands allocate towards creators. (this is the real reason)
Shopmy is probably the best illustration of the potential of using creators to monetize brands, with brands reportedly paying between $1k-7k/month to be on the platform.

However, shopmy is still reliant on traffic being sent to them from a link in bio… so it would make a lot of sense for them to launch their own (see #1 Owning the Stack)

4. Why every link-in-bio end up with the same positioning

Glance at any link-in-bio homepage and you’d be forgiven for thinking many of them are the same company. Usually offering some combination of

“Own your audience”,
“monetize your audience”
“work with brands“.

Why? It’s all because of the challenges I outlined above - as each platform makes efforts to address them, a few things become necessary. Platforms need a way to:

become a painkiller instead of a vitamin
- achieved by creating ways to monetize via audience and/or brands
capture some of the brand budget
- achieved by bridging the gap between brands and creators
find a way to charge more to increase LTV
- achieved by offering non-link-in-bio features like email

Closing thoughts & predictions

Link-in-bio’s are, and will continue to be, a core piece of the creator stack. But expect some big changes in the next 12 months.

My 2026 predictions are:

Existing link-in-bio’s will lean more towards working directly with, and monetizing via, brands
Creator platforms like Patreon, SKOOL, LTK and Shopmy (especially with their recent fundraise) will expand vertically and enter the market with their own link-in-bio option
We will see more consolidation and acquisitions as established players expand to focus on brands, languishing platforms start to struggle and new players enter the market.

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