Zerply shuts down on September 28: VFX artists have less than a month to export their portfolios

The platform Zerply, where tens of thousands of visual effects and animation professionals kept their portfolios and looked for work, is shutting down. The site will go offline on Monday, September 28, 2026, at 16:00 UTC — 16 years after its launch, the last 12 of which the project spent focused on high-end VFX and animation.

The founders explained the reason in two sentences: “We ran out of time and resources to make this work. That’s the whole story.” The announcement was signed by Taaniel Jakobs, Christofer Karltorp, Josef Minařík and James Bennett. It says nothing about selling the platform or handing the database over to a new owner: the service is being switched off and the data deleted.

What needs to be done before September 28

For users, this comes down to two deadlines with specific dates.

The first is the export. A request to download your profile and work is submitted through the link in the announcement, and you can choose whether to include the uploaded media files; the team sends the download link by email. Requests are processed manually, so Zerply asks that they be submitted by September 21 — the company does not guarantee that later requests will be processed. Individual media files, meanwhile, can be downloaded directly from the Shot Library at any point up to the 28th.

The second is the redirect. Many people have their Zerply profile link in their résumé, in their email signature and on project pages, and once the site goes offline all those links would stop working. To prevent that, you need to choose where your personal address will point: to LinkedIn, IMDb, Framerate or Vimeo. The redirects are promised to stay up for at least a year after the shutdown, but the destination has to be set before September 28, while login still works — it cannot be changed later.

Once it is switched off, zerply.com turns into a static page: login, file uploads, messages and search stop working. User data will be deleted from the systems of the company and its contractors within 90 days; the team says it will take questions about it at hello@zerply.com both before and after that date. New sign-ups have already been disabled and recurring subscription charges have been cancelled — there will be no further payments.

What Zerply was

From the very beginning the project described its mission as promoting the creative process and the people behind it; for the last 12 years that meant working with high-end VFX and animation. Besides portfolios and a Shot Library of individual shots, the platform let an artist tell studios they were available for a new project and keep track of job openings. The catalogue was broken down by discipline — from modellers, riggers and animators to compositors, supervisors and producers — and by industry: film, TV, games, advertising, immersive media. To studios, Zerply offered access to vetted candidates ready for production work.

The company itself remained small and fully distributed — with staff in California, Ohio, Stockholm and Tallinn. On the founding team, Taaniel Jakobs handled product and design, Josef Minařík was the technical director, Christofer Karltorp sat on the board, and James Bennett, an animation supervisor, served as an adviser.

The wider context

The closure comes at a time when the client base for services like this — the studios — is contracting. In recent years the VFX and animation industry has been going through bankruptcies, acquisitions and waves of layoffs: major vendors have closed or changed hands, and production volumes have shrunk. For a service that lives on recruiter subscriptions, that trend hits revenue directly: the ones who pay are the ones who hire, and there is less hiring going on.

At the same time, the market of platforms artists are being pointed toward is being reshaped as well. Vimeo has changed owners and gone through layoffs, IMDb has wound down part of its hiring tools, ArtStation has passed to a new owner, and Framerate is a comparatively young project. LinkedIn, for its part, remains a general-purpose network with no specialised tools for showreels. None of the four redirect options on offer looks like a direct replacement.

The practical consequence for a professional is simple: for now, the industry is left without a place where a studio could see both the work and current availability at once, and maintaining your own visibility will have to happen across several services simultaneously. If the contraction in production continues, the weight of general-purpose platforms in VFX and animation hiring will probably grow, and specialised catalogues will appear as a feature inside larger ecosystems rather than as standalone businesses.

Why did Zerply not make it to the end of 2026: management missteps, the slump in VFX hiring, portfolios moving to general-purpose platforms?