Zerply, the portfolio site a lot of VFX and animation people have used as their public reel for the last sixteen years, is closing. The site stops working on Monday, September 28, 2026 at 16:00 UTC. If you have work on it, the date that matters more is September 21 — that is the last day to request a profile export.
What the founders actually said
The closing notice is signed by Taaniel Jakobs, Christofer Karltorp, Josef Minařík and James Bennett, and it does not dress the reason up: “We ran out of time and resources to make it work. That’s the whole story.” There is no acquisition, no pivot, and no partner taking over the archive.
The two dates that matter
- September 21 — the deadline to request a profile export from your account settings. The export can optionally include your media assets, not just the text of your profile.
- September 28, 16:00 UTC — the site stops. Logins, uploads, messages and search all stop working at that point. Individual files stay downloadable from the Shot Library right up until then, so if you miss the bulk export you can still pull shots one at a time until the lights go out.
After the shutdown, user information is deleted within 90 days. Whatever you have not pulled by then is gone.
Do not skip the redirect setting
The one genuinely thoughtful thing in the wind-down: you can choose where your zerply.com URL sends people after the shutdown — LinkedIn, IMDb, Framerate or Vimeo — and those redirects run for at least a year. You have to set it before the 28th.
This is worth two minutes of your time even if you stopped using the site years ago. Your Zerply link is probably still sitting in an email signature, on a business card, in an old job application, or credited on a studio project page you do not control. The redirect is the difference between a recruiter hitting a dead domain and landing on something current.
Why this matters if you were never on Zerply
Zerply skewed film and television — animators, comp artists, FX TDs — more than games, so plenty of people working in Blender, Unreal or Unity never had an account. The lesson still applies to all of them.
Every portfolio platform you use is rented land. ArtStation, Sketchfab, itch.io, Gumroad, a Discord server full of your own WIP threads: none of it is yours, and a sixteen-year-old site with a real user base can still give three weeks’ notice and switch off. Two practical habits follow from that.
- Own the address people share. A cheap domain that redirects to whatever platform you currently favour costs less per year than one asset pack and survives any single site closing.
- Keep the masters locally. What a portfolio site holds is a compressed derivative — a re-encoded reel, a resized render. The .blend file, the uncompressed turntable, the layered texture set and the project file belong on a drive you control, backed up somewhere that is not also a startup.
If you have an account, go and request the export now rather than adding it to a list. The 21st is a Monday, and export requests are queued, not instant.
