Teleport Cities ran from Tallinn for ten years. Then the domain started selling slot machines.

By Skyler Bissell · September 2, 2026 · 9 min read

Teleport Cities was built in Tallinn in 2014, had 250,000 users by 2016, was acquired in April 2017, kept running for another seven years, and was gone by the middle of 2024. Nobody announced its death. If you followed a bookmark to teleport.org today you would get a 195 byte error page, and if you searched for an explanation you would find third-party directories marking it "discontinued" with no date attached. Here is the sequence, with the date and the source for each step, and then the more useful half: what now does each of the jobs it did.

The timeline, with a source for every row

Everything below either comes from contemporaneous trade coverage or from reading the raw HTML that the Internet Archive captured on that date. Where the record runs out, the table says so rather than filling the gap with a tidy story.

The 20 April 2024 row is the one that matters, because it is Teleport pointing at its own buyer. A site does not redirect to its acquirer's explainer page while it is still trading. Two months later the domain was in somebody else's hands, and the gambling site is the proof: no company hands its own brand to an operator selling slot machines. Between those two captures the registration lapsed or was sold.

One honest limit on all of this. An archived page proves what the front end served on that date. It does not prove the database behind it still answered, so the January 2024 capture is the last date the site was served, and the product may have been hollow for a while before that.

What Teleport was, in its own words

The tagline on its own pages, in its own words, was this: "Teleport helps you find your best place to live and work. Lower cost and increase opportunities by choosing smartly. Free people move." That last sentence was the founding idea. Sten Tamkivi put it as founding the company "with the vision of helping free people move, by giving mobile millennials access to modern software tools to smoothly get to wherever they need to be."

By the time of the acquisition Teleport reported 250,000 users. Under the surface it had grown well past a single comparison tool, and reading its own navigation is the clearest picture of what it was trying to become. Six products were still listed in January 2024, and the 2018 version of the site also carried Teleport Scouts and Teleport Directory:

• Teleport Cities, at /cities/, the flagship. Compared places to live and work on cost of living, employment opportunities and health benefits.
• Teleport Zen, at /checklist/, a relocation checklist.
• Teleport Eightball, at /salaries/, salary estimates.
• Teleport Sundial, on its own subdomain, which emailed "availability updates of Teleport Sundial group members" and so appears to have tracked people across locations.
• Teleport Flock and Teleport Runway, whose functions are not recoverable from the archive.
• Teleport Trail, a "weekly reading digest" newsletter.

Only the first of those is confirmed by outside reporting. The rest are read off the site's own navigation and settings labels, and where a product's job is a guess from its URL, this page says so instead of inventing a description.

Why the buyer is not the answer

The obvious place to look for a successor is the company that bought it. Topia is alive and doing well. It sells a global mobility platform to "enterprise HR, Mobility, Finance, Payroll, Legal, and Compliance teams managing distributed workforces" across more than 190 countries, and it names Novartis, Dell, ASML and H&M among its clients.

Every one of those words describes a company as the customer. Topia answers the question an employer has when it moves somebody. Teleport Cities answered the question a person has when they are thinking about moving themselves, and those are different products with different buyers. Nothing on Topia today is a consumer city comparison, so the honest answer to "did the acquirer keep it going" is no, and the 250,000 people who used it were left to find something else on their own.

That pattern is common enough to be worth naming when you evaluate any free consumer tool: a business-to-business acquirer buys the data and the team, and the free product is the part that does not survive contact with an enterprise roadmap.

What replaced it, job by job

Teleport did several things, and no single site picked all of them up. Mapped by the job rather than by the brand:

If you want the wider field rather than this mapping, seven sites like Numbeo sorts the current tools by the job each does best, and it is where Teleport's absence originally sent us looking. For how the surviving price indexes work, what a cost of living index measures takes one row apart.

The part nobody picked up

Teleport Cities scored places on attributes: cost of living, employment opportunities, health benefits and similar metrics, rolled into a comparison you could sort. That is a useful shape, and Numbeo and Expatistan still do a version of it. It also leaves out the thing that decides most real moves, which is what a household keeps after the tax office and the childcare bill have taken their share.

Take Tallinn, the city Teleport itself was built in. On a $150,000 single earner's life in New York, our engine solves the Estonian equivalent at €58,678, which is $67,993 at current rates. The visible reason sits in the tax line: Estonia takes 22.4% of that household's gross where New York takes 31.1%. An attribute score can tell you Tallinn is cheaper. It cannot tell you the number your offer letter has to clear, because the tax code, the childcare regime and the statutory benefits are not attributes of a city, they are rules about a household.

That gap is the reason this site exists, and it is the same gap described in what every cost of living calculator gets wrong. Where whole countries sit on the surviving half of the question is in take-home pay by country, and you can run your own two cities whenever the shortlist gets real.

The bookmark lesson

There is a practical takeaway underneath the corporate history. Teleport Cities was free, well built, well funded and backed by an acquirer, and it still evaporated without a notice, taking ten years of city data with it. Its own domain now points at a parking page. Anyone who built a relocation decision on those numbers in 2023 cannot go back and check them today.

So when a free tool is carrying weight in a decision this size, save the figures that mattered and note the date you took them, and prefer tools that publish where their numbers come from so you can rebuild the answer somewhere else if you have to. That is why our own sources sit in the open at the methodology, and why every correction we make is logged publicly. A number you cannot re-derive is a number you are renting.

Questions people ask

When did Teleport Cities shut down?

No shutdown date was ever announced, and anyone quoting one is guessing. What is documented is a sequence. The Internet Archive's captures of teleport.org still show the full product suite on 1 January 2024. By 20 April 2024 the site had become a redirect to Topia's own page about Teleport. By 1 July 2024 the domain served an unrelated gambling site, which means it had left the company's hands. The site was therefore gone during the first half of 2024, without a notice ever being posted.

Who bought Teleport?

MOVE Guides, an employee relocation platform that later renamed itself Topia. The acquisition was announced on 3 April 2017 for an undisclosed sum. At the time, the companies said users would keep using Teleport Cities under its existing branding, and Teleport's founders joined the MOVE Guides leadership team with Tallinn becoming an office alongside London, San Francisco and Hong Kong. The consumer product then ran for roughly seven more years.

Is teleport.org still online?

No. Checked on 2 September 2026, teleport.org does not respond over HTTPS at all, and over plain HTTP it returns a 195 byte page reading Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your service provider for more details. The domain still resolves and is still registered, which is why it looks alive to a DNS lookup, but no product is served there and there is no redirect to a successor.

Did Topia replace Teleport Cities?

Not for individuals. Topia is alive and sells to enterprise HR, mobility, finance, payroll, legal and compliance teams managing distributed workforces across 190 or more countries, with clients including Novartis, Dell, ASML and H and M. Its product answers a company's question about moving an employee. Nothing on it is a consumer tool for a person comparing two cities, so the audience Teleport Cities served was left without a direct replacement.

Ten years of somebody's careful work is now a parking page, which is a reminder that the web forgets faster than the people who used it do. The part worth keeping from Teleport is the premise: that where you live is a decision you can put numbers on. We just think the numbers have to include the tax office.

Sources. Founding, founders, user count and the acquisition: Tech.eu, "Tallinn-based Teleport acquired by MOVE Guides", 3 April 2017, retrieved 2 September 2026. Topia's original press release at topia.com now returns 404, checked the same day. Every dated row in the timeline was read from the raw HTML of the corresponding Internet Archive capture of teleport.org, retrieved 2 September 2026. Topia's current positioning and client list: Topia, retrieved 2 September 2026. The live state of teleport.org was checked directly on 2 September 2026. Equivalent salaries and tax rates are computed by cityparity's engine; per-field provenance is in data/_meta.json, and our own price lines split between official and crowdsourced sources as described in the methodology.

Equivalent salaries solve for equal net cash after tax, housing, childcare, healthcare and the cash value of statutory benefits, and they are the salary an offer has to clear rather than a salary any employer is obliged to pay. See the methodology.