Tindie Outage & JC Devices Electronics Store Updates
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.
My electronics store, JC Devices is now back up on Tindie!
I also now list some of my products on Lectronz if you prefer
>UPDATES AT END OF ARTICLE — TINDIE IS BACK!<
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 15, 2026 (8:08 AM ET): Tindie is down
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.
April 18th, 2026 (9:10 AM ET): Still down, same message.
April 19th, 2026 (12:50 PM ET): Still down, same message.
April 20th, 2026 (12:24 PM ET): Saw this message/thread from a day or two ago:
April 20th, 2026 (12:26 PM ET): Still down, same message 5+ days now 🙁
April 20th, 2026 (2:21 PM ET): Saw below from earlier today. Apparently most of the work is complete and they’ll test it and put it live 🤞
April 21st, 2026 (8:02 AM ET): Still down, same message
April 22nd, 2026 (8:33 AM ET): Still down, same message
April 22nd, 2026 (4:21 PM ET): Received another email from Tindie support
We sincerely apologize for the ongoing downtime. Tindie is currently undergoing a more complex-than-expected technical migration. The migration is now largely complete, and the team is working through final testing to bring the site back online in a stable way as soon as possible.
Thank you for your patience and support.
April 23rd, 2026 (7:47 AM ET): Still down, same message
April 23rd, 2026 (8:21 PM ET): Still down, but a semi-official update. Tindie has been sold:
# Announcement
After much back and forth with the community and the team internally, we can reveal a bit more of what’s happening. Tindie transitioned to new ownership on April 14. Due to circumstances beyond the control of the new owners, the site was immediately put into maintenance mode.
Since then, the process of transitioning the site to new infrastructure and upgrading the aging codebase has been ongoing. The intention was, as I originally thought, to do this seamlessly with no downtime. However, once the site was put into maintenance mode and the transition happened. it was decided to take the time to work on the site and get things up to modern standards.
The new owners are genuinely excited about Tindie and what the platform can be. After a year or so on cruise control, we’re finally going to make substantial investments in the platform and community -- something which in my humble opinion is long overdue.
# Timeframe
Again, I still don’t have an exact timeframe for the completion of this work. I know that is what the community wants to know more than anything, and it’s very frustrating that I can’t satisfy your answers about that.
I know that the new tech team is working hard with the Supplyframe team to complete all the transition steps and ensure things are done properly.
# Who Am I?
I figured many of you already know me, but my name is Alexander Rowsell. I’m the editor of the Tindie Blog and the social media manager. I’ve been with Tindie for a few years, and I’ll be around for the foreseeable future. I do embedded development work, but I also really enjoy writing about what the community is up to. It’s always a blast to go through the newest listings on Tindie to see what people are creating!
I’ll be honest with you, I was worried about Tindie over the last few months. I could see that the site needed attention from a professional dev team and was worried the site would break totally before that happened. Well, there has been downtime, but the upside is that the site will be refreshed and ready for the long term. Short-term pain for long-term stability -- that’s where we’re at.
I wanted to write a longer statement, and seeing as how the Tindie Blog itself is down I figured this was the next best thing. To verify this statement is actually from me, I’ve signed it with my GPG key - B5CFBEB4EE9FE813. You can verify this signature by getting the raw text of this post, and verifying the signature using GPG.
April 24th, 2026 (8:02 AM ET): Still down, same message. A whole week 🙁
April 24th, 2026 (9:35 PM ET): Tindie is back! Yay!
April 25th, 2026 (3:11 PM ET): Tindie still up. Quite a bit of discussion on Reddit.
April 28th, 2026 (8:06 AM ET): Tindie still up, and I got an order which I fulfilled with no issue. HOWEVER, when I went to disburse funds it said that was currently unavailable. I hope they figure this out soon.
April 28th, 2026 (8:25 AM ET): Tindie put an official statement about being up on Twitter/their blog.
April 29th, 2026 (8:16 AM ET): Tindie still up. Disbursements still unavailable. Tindie sent out an email about new ownership and the transition. It says, in part:
Dear Tindie Community,
My name is Gongyu Su, and I am writing on behalf of the new Tindie ownership team.
First, we sincerely apologize for the recent downtime and the disruption it caused. We understand that many buyers and community members were left without clear information during the transition, and that this created frustration and concern.
Tindie is now owned by EETree LLC, a Washington State company. Our team took over Tindie because we believe it remains an important platform for makers, hardware creators, engineers, and independent sellers around the world.
So that’s a bit more information. Hopefully things will keep improving.
May 6th, 2026 (9:12 PM ET): Tindie put out more on the transition here. While they reportedly got things working with PayPal, it’s not letting me disburse funds as of now.
May 7th, 2026 (8:08 AM ET): Disbursement still not working.
May 8th, 2026 (8:11 AM ET): Disbursement still not working.
May 12th, 2026 (8:03 AM ET): Disbursement still not working. Shipped an order received yesterday.
May 13th, 2026 (7:54 AM ET): Disbursement still officially down. However, I emailed support yesterday, and they said they would process payments in the order they were received. 🤞
May 14th, 2026 (8:02 AM ET): Disbursement still officially down. They did pay me the money requested to PayPal (actually just a little bit more) and my Tindie account is at zero.
Thoughts? Insight into the situation? Please let me know in the comments.
If you’re wondering what to do while Tindie is down, you could [still] always read👇
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Addendum/Footnotes:
I usually don’t cover news per se, but I’ve seen very little about this. I may update this page over time, but wanted to get it out ASAP. Please forgive any typos, or better yet, let me know via email/comments/etc.
So I hope:
I don't believe their story. Every major cloud platform supports not just one, but several different methods of upgrading a web app without incurring any significant downtime. From a technical perspective, they'd have to do so many things wrong to find themselves in a situation that would require them to take down their website completely before having a replacement that I just don't see how that's possible. Maybe they were hacked by some really nasty hackers, or maybe they just stopped paying their cloud provider for some reason. Come to think of it, maybe their website or some crucial component of it, such as the database, was hosted on one of those Amazon datacenters in the UAE and Bahrain that were destroyed in an Iranian attack last month.