If you used read.cv, you probably remember exactly what made it good.
It wasn't feature-heavy. It wasn't trying to be a social network. It was just a clean page with your name, your work, and good typography. You uploaded something, got a link, and shared it. That was the whole product.
When read.cv shut down in May 2025, a lot of people lost their go-to professional link. And the replacements didn't quite hit the same note.
What read.cv got right
The appeal was restraint.
No feed. No connection requests. No "open to work" badges competing for attention. Just a profile that looked considered — like someone had actually designed it, not templated it.
That minimalism mattered because it put your work first. Recruiters and clients could scan your experience without wading through platform chrome. You felt proud sending the link.
The problem with anything that good is dependency. When the platform goes away, your primary professional URL goes with it.
Where people went next (and why it often felt wrong)
LinkedIn — Still useful for networking, but noisy. Your accomplishments sit next to a feed, recruiter spam, and content you didn't ask for. It's not a portfolio — it's a social network with a profile attached.
Notion — Easy to set up, hard to take seriously as a public portfolio. Slow pages, weak SEO, and the look of internal documentation.
Linktree / About.me — Fine for a grid of links. Less fine when you want structured experience, projects, and a CV that reads like a professional presence.
Back to PDF attachments — Familiar, but outdated by Friday. No analytics, no mobile-friendly view, and a new file version every time you tweak a bullet point.
What read.cv users wanted wasn't "another profile builder." They wanted that same quiet, well-designed page back.
What to look for in a read.cv replacement
If you're searching for an alternative, skip the feature checklists for a second. Ask simpler questions:
- Does it look good by default, without hours of customization?
- Is it minimal — your work, not platform upsells?
- Do you get a URL you own (
yourname.comorcurvit.me/@you)? - Can you still export a PDF when a form asks for a file?
- Will it still be there in two years if the product pivots?
You want the read.cv feeling: upload, share, done. Not a second job maintaining a website.
How Curvit approaches this
Full disclosure: we built Curvit partly because we missed read.cv ourselves.
The idea is the same — upload your CV, get a live profile in about 20 seconds — with a few things read.cv users asked for over the years:
- ATS-ready PDF export from the same source data (so you're not maintaining two versions)
- Optional Pro features like analytics, custom domains, multi-language profiles, and articles — without cluttering the free experience
- Layouts and themes if you want to go beyond default minimal (or stay close to it)
The free tier is the whole point: a shareable profile at curvit.me/@you that stays free. No credit card to get started.
If you still have an old read.cv export or your CV handy, upload it and claim your URL. Takes about a minute.
For a direct comparison of features and positioning, see our read.cv alternative page.
The bigger lesson
Platforms come and go. Polywork, read.cv, and plenty of others proved there's demand for better ways to present your work online.
The durable move is the same one read.cv hinted at: own a URL that represents you, keep it updated, and treat it as your professional home — not a profile on someone else's product.
Minimal. Clean. Yours.
Create your profile free — especially if you've been missing read.cv.