I'm building a Bento competitor

Linktree (valued at 1.3 billion) acquired Bento in 2023, then promptly let it die. The product that achieved product-market fit is now collecting dust, outdated and stagnant. So I’m building my own.

Why am I building this?

There are three main reasons:

1. Proven Demand: Bento’s early traction shows there’s a real market for this kind of tool.
2. Superior Design: Personally, I love Bento’s unique grid-style UI/UX. I feel like they executed the design perfectly.
3. Room for Innovation: I want to add more features like custom domains—something Bento never addressed.

Where I’m at now

I’m still in the early stages - literally zero users because I’m focusing on getting the fundamentals right first. I’ve been working on two main things: figuring out custom domains and building the basic app structure.

The custom domain part turned into a bigger rabbit hole than I expected. I tested Cloudflare Workers and Render, but quickly realized I needed full DNS control for custom domains to work properly. So I ended up testing a simple server setup on AWS EC2 with nginx to get the concept working.

On the frontend side, I scaffolded the app with Firebase to see how the data structure would work. It’s very basic right now and I haven’t spent any time polishing the UI - I’m more focused on getting the scaffolding and database set up correctly.

What’s next

My immediate focus is getting custom domains fully functional since that’ll be one of the biggest value adds. While the EC2 setup proved the concept works, it was honestly a pain to configure. Nginx runs separately from the Node app, so I spent way too much time manually getting them to play nice together.

My next step is exploring Docker to hopefully make the nginx and Node app setup much smoother. Having everything containerized should eliminate the manual configuration headaches.

There are also two big things I need to tackle before production:

Security - As I was setting up the server, my biggest concern became security. I’ll need to implement basic protection against DDoS attacks and other common threats.

SSL certificate handling - Right now my proof of concept only works on HTTP, which obviously won’t fly for real users. I need to figure out automated SSL certificate management, probably with Let’s Encrypt, but doing it at scale for multiple custom domains adds complexity.

After the custom domain infrastructure is solid, I’ll focus on frontend features - drag and drop builders, custom widgets, maybe some analytics. The plan is to launch with custom domains as the main differentiator, then iterate quickly on the user experience from there.