Tindie Outage & JC Devices Electronics Store

I sell (sold?) electronics on Tindie. Then it went offline without any warning. Lessons learned: own your platform (or at least have a backup) and keep your $$$ close.

Apr 17, 2026

My electronics store JC Devices can now be found here.

April 15, 8:08 AM, online sales platform Tindie was down. I emailed support there to let them know that their site — where I make a small, but meaningful, portion of my income — was down. And it remains down as of this writing on April 17th, 9:32 AM.

What’s frustrating here is that I really like this platform, and have been involved in it in one way or another for around a decade. I even wrote for their blog for several years before learning PCB design and having things to sell, and have sold hundreds of items there at this point.

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Tindie outage or not, I don’t want to leave this platform, but if they are simply non-functional then I at least have to find an alternative. Website performance was a bit of an issue even before this, and the community aspect of people selling, designing, and collaborating to make cool stuff seems to have dampened in the last few years.

To their credit, Tindie paid out my balance soon before this debacle, purportedly because it had reached a certain threshold. The timing is a bit strange though, and I have to wonder if it was in anticipation of whatever is going on now. If so, the did the right thing, but adding a warning to sellers would have been even better.

I was told by support that the site would be back as they were updating things, but that was a few days ago. I sincerely hope they come back better than ever.

Acquisitions and changes

Circa 2015 Tindie was acquired by Supplyframe — which appeared to be good for the platform. Then Supplyframe was acquired by Siemens in 2021. While I can’t say for sure whether this is the inflection point which eventually led to their current problems, it seems that somewhere along the line things stagnated.

Own your platform — or at least have a backup

The general lesson here is that if there is something critical to your business or personal life, don’t wait until things shut down/break to consider alternative solutions. In this case at least, I did a few things correctly:

What I did well:

I recently put my current best-selling product on another electronics seller site called Lectronz. They have a fairly easy export-from-Tindie setup, but I assume it doesn’t work when Tindie is non-functional.
The address jcdevices.com was pointed to my Tindie store, which I share in various places. This was easy enough to point to my Lectronz store, so that at least takes someone to an active page.
While in this case Tindie did it automatically, I made regular withdraws from my account there. Don’t keep too much $$$ in various accounts if you can avoid it.

What I could have improved:

I don’t have nearly the seller reputation on Lectronz (or any reputation really) as I do/did on Tindie. I probably should have started there some time ago, but you have to start somewhere.
Sell on my own site and avoid some fees. I.e. own the platform.
Preemptively exported other products.

Will Tindie be back? [I hope so]

As noted earlier, I hope Tindie will be back1 from this outage and better than ever. Perhaps it will again become the electronics platform that we have came to know and love.

Whatever happens, I hope to keep selling electronics one way or another, and if that means building up my reputation on another platform, that could be beneficial in the end. If you need something from me — i.e. JC Devices — that’s not currently listed, shoot me an email: hi@jeremyscook.com - I am happy to manually take payment and fulfill orders!

Updates:

April 17th, 2026. Just as I was about to hit publish, Tindie support sent out an update via email. I don’t think anything here is privileged, and it appears to be fairly generic, so here’s an excerpt:

We know how important Tindie is to your work and we sincerely apologize for any disruption this downtime might be causing. Please know that this is maintenance that will benefit our sellers and buyers alike, and we're working incredibly hard to get Tindie back online as quickly as possible.

Think of this as a significant "spring cleaning" and a bit of a glow-up for Tindie! We're laying the groundwork for some really exciting improvements and enhancements that we believe will make your experience even better, more efficient, and more enjoyable in the long run.

So that is encouraging, and probably needed. However, it would have been MUCH better to get such an email a few days ago before anything happened. Fingers crossed that Tindie will emerge as an awesome platform again.

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