Last week we zoomed in on the on-call vertical and found that three of three self-host PagerDuty alternatives we recommend are not alive. Today we're zooming in on the opposite end of the SaaS market — link-in-bio landing pages. The same data exercise; a totally different failure mode.
On our /linktree/ page we list three self-hostable replacements: LinkStack, LittleLink, and BioDrop. As of today, two are not alive. The third has held on at 82 days since its last commit — eight days short of our 90-day "stale" line.
That's not the headline. The headline is why this category looks the way it does. On-call OSS is dying because well-funded vendors are killing it. Link-in-bio OSS is dying because nobody bothered.
The three we list (and what their health pill says today)
| Repo | Stars | Last commit | Archived | State |
|---|---|---|---|---|
linkstackorg/linkstack |
3,567 | 2026-02-17 | no | alive (just) |
sethcottle/littlelink |
2,947 | 2026-01-28 | no | stale |
EddieHubCommunity/BioDrop |
5,709 | 2024-07-01 | yes | dead |
Three different stories of "not maintained anymore" — none of them dramatic, which is itself the point.
BioDrop — archived 22 months ago, after a pivot
BioDrop is the most-starred of the three (5,709 stars). It started life as EddieHub/LinkFree, rebranded to BioDrop, then quietly broadened from a Linktree clone into "a developer profile site with a links section." Then in mid-2024 the maintainer archived the repo. No farewell post, no successor announcement — the README still reads like the project is welcoming contributors.
Star count is the worst signal in this category. BioDrop has the most stars and is the most comprehensively dead. The stars accumulated in 2022–2023; the archive happened in 2024; nobody updated the README. A directory that ranks by stars promotes BioDrop. A directory that surfaces archived: true demotes it. We wrote about this exact failure mode in the May overview — BioDrop is the cleanest example we've found.
LittleLink — quietly stale
LittleLink is the most charming of the three: a single-file static site, no DB, no admin, deploy-it-on-any-static-host. The README is friendly. The brand-icon CSS is genuinely useful. And the last commit was January 28, 2026 — 102 days ago.
That's not a project in trouble; that's a project that doesn't need to ship anything. Static HTML doesn't have integrations to keep current. The brand-class catalogue (the value prop) gets PR'd by users when a new social network shows up. The maintainer can leave for three months and nothing technically breaks.
But three months without a commit is also exactly how a project becomes inactive without anyone noticing. There's no roadmap to compare against. Our pill calls it stale; in practice that's "fine if you accept that no PR will be merged quickly." Which, for a static-HTML link page, may genuinely be fine.
LinkStack — the survivor, eight days from stale
LinkStack is the only one our pill calls alive: 3,567 stars, last commit February 17, 2026 — 82 days ago. Our threshold for stale is 90 days. So LinkStack is alive in the same way Schrödinger's project is alive. If today is 2026-05-10 and nothing lands in main by 2026-05-18, our snapshot will flip it to stale on the next sweep without a single thing changing about the codebase.
Look at the cadence of the project's contribution graph and that's not a one-off lull — this is a maintainer-led PHP/Laravel project that ships in bursts. It's the most viable link-in-bio option in OSS today, and that's only true because BioDrop quit and LittleLink is essentially a CSS file.
The link-in-bio failure mode is the inverse of on-call
Our PagerDuty post argued that on-call OSS dies because the vendor money in that space is huge: PagerDuty, Splunk On-Call, Opsgenie, FireHydrant. Maintainers get acquihired. Projects get archived after a scramble of farewell fixes. Grafana OnCall → Grafana IRM is the canonical arc.
Link-in-bio is the opposite. Linktree raised $110M in 2022 at a $1.3B valuation. Beacons, Bento, Carrd are all alive and well. There is plenty of money in this category. None of it is being spent on killing the OSS competition, because the OSS competition isn't a threat. A static page with a list of links is too cheap to clone, too low-value per user, and too cosmetic to displace the SaaS option for the audience that actually pays for one (creators, who want analytics + custom domains + a 30-second signup).
So link-in-bio OSS doesn't die from vendor sabotage. It dies from indifference. Nobody hires the LittleLink maintainer away. Nobody archives BioDrop because Linktree bought the project. The maintainer just gets bored and stops. The project drifts. Eventually the README still says it's accepting PRs while the repo is technically archived. That's the whole arc.
What's actually missing from our /linktree/ page
In the PagerDuty post we declared an editorial debt — we hadn't listed keephq/keep, the obvious current successor, on /pagerduty/. (Now we have.)
For link-in-bio, the editorial debt is the opposite shape. There isn't a well-funded, fast-shipping OSS successor we forgot to list. We looked. The best candidates are forks of the three projects above; most are unmaintained themselves. The category doesn't have its Keep, and in our reading, it's unlikely to grow one — there's no business model that funds a maintainer here. Self-hosters either accept LinkStack-as-it-is, fork LittleLink and treat it as a static-site template, or write 30 lines of HTML themselves.
That last option is the dark horse. A link-in-bio "page" is genuinely 30 lines of HTML, zero dependencies, deployable on any free static host. The reason a SaaS like Linktree commands $110M in funding isn't the page; it's the analytics, the dashboard, and the creator who doesn't want to think about DNS. A self-hoster who is willing to think about DNS already has the answer in 30 minutes without using any of the three projects above.
If you trusted our /linktree/ page last week
Our pill colors today are honest — BioDrop renders dead, LittleLink renders stale, LinkStack renders alive. The page itself still presents all three with equal weight in the alternatives table, which understates how much the practical recommendation has narrowed to "use LinkStack, or accept a static-site template, or just write the HTML." That nuance is in the body of this post but not yet on the directory page. The next sweep should reorder the table to lead with LinkStack and demote the archived BioDrop entry visually, not only via a freshness pill.
We hold off on rewriting the page right now for the same reason we did for /pagerduty/ last week: the page being out of date is the post's wedge. Rewrite it after publishing, not before.
Where this leaves us
Two posts in, two verticals deep, two opposite failure modes:
-
On-call OSS: dies under vendor pressure. PagerDuty alts at 3-of-3 not-alive. Successor exists (
keephq/keep) — added to our directory. - Link-in-bio OSS: dies under vendor indifference. Linktree alts at 2-of-3 not-alive. No clear successor. The directory entry that survives is the one that doesn't require ongoing maintenance to stay correct.
Both share the same underlying truth: a self-host directory that ranks by stars promotes the wrong projects, because stars accumulate slowly and don't decay when a project dies. Last-commit date and the archived flag together catch most of what stars miss. That's the entire premise of os-alt, and the graveyard page is where it shows up most concretely — every not-alive repo across our 100 SaaS pages, with backlinks to the SaaS each is listed under.
What's next
This is the third post in the monthly snapshot series. Coming up:
- The first month-over-month diff (June 2026 — what flipped state, including whether LinkStack went stale on schedule)
- Form builders post-Typeform (
ohmyformabandoned — what's actually shipping for self-host forms) - Categories where OSS is winning the freshness race, for contrast
If you'd rather get the diff post in your inbox than rediscover us via search later, subscribe on the directory homepage — the form below ships the monthly digest the same day each post lands.
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