Tell HN: An update from the new Tindie team

EETree LLC seems to be a shell company owned by EETree Info & Tech Limited in China (https://www.eetree.cn).

I'm not sure what that means as far as payment processing etc, apparently sellers were all cut off with money owing and still have no explanation.

Also the AI-generated blog post on the Tindie site (under the name/account of assumedly-previous staff?), and the post above that says absolutely nothing about what's actually going on...

It looks from the outside like a Chinese tech blog just randomly bought Tindie, broke the site while moving it to their own servers, and now are trying to figure out how to run it?

Yeah, pretty sure there is a better way to make a transition—even a complete stack rewrite. Get your new stack operating before you make the switch—and you could have even staged the switch-over starting with one region first.

If they purchased the site, I get it, new servers, etc. But part of the purchase agreement should have stated that the site continues to be run/maintained for 6 months or so until the new owners have a replacement ready.

(I feel like someone reading HN could have (vibe?) coded a replacement for Tindie by now. I mean Tindie does have the name recognition… kind of?)

I can't think of a worse first impression for the new owners of a marketplace that relies on buyer and seller loyalty than taking down the entire platform for weeks without any clear timeline or reasoning.

It also gives the impression that they have no idea how to set up a staging environment or seamlessly migrate to a new backend with a double write approach. Just spells trouble all around.

It's not clear to me WHY it was taken over.. Were there issues with the previous owners?

Also WHO are the new owners? The "About us" page has ZERO info on them. I wouldn't touch the new platform with a 30foot pole, so I guess it's time to find a new alternative marketplace.

Edit: on https://www.linkedin.com/in/gongyu/ it claims that the company name is "EEree LLC", in the email it's magically "EETree LLC"

> Our team took over Tindie because we believe it remains an important platform for makers, hardware creators, engineers, and independent sellers around the world.

How does this even explain why they "TOOK OVER" Tindie?

The lack of clear communication and transparency around this whole issue has been appaling. I've moved to Lectronz and will wipe out my store on Tindie as soon as they resolve payouts.

Found this statement from Alexander Rowsell, Tindie social media manager and editor of the Tindie Blog (link expires in one day):

https://privatebin.net/?db6418554d9d5728#3NjbsSUYzw227zG5P1k...

What's with the expiration?

> # 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.

> What's with the expiration?

Generous interpretation - perhaps this is the default for posts on that site.

Less generous interpretation - definitely quite a weird way of posting something, including references to a GPG key, rather than some kind of pre-existing public social media account (which I'm assuming a social media manager would have) or a page on the Tindie domain.

At first I thought this link was created by some customer who copy/pasted an email or something. But https://www.hackster.io/news/supplyframe-sells-tindie-now-in... says it's the official communication itself.

It does not appear that Hackster.io have received responses to their inquiries made >5 days ago (I assume they would make a follow-up post if they did):

> Tindie, Supplyframe, and Siemens have been approached for comment. Rowsell's full statement was available on document sharing site PrivateBin at the time of writing, but was set to automatically delete in the next six days.

> Makers' marketplace Tindie has been down for over a week, following its acquisition from former owner Supplyframe by parties unknown — with claims that it is undergoing a major overhaul following a period of apparent neglect failing to fully placate its sellers.

> Rowsell's announcement has done little to placate buyers wondering if their payments have vanished into a black hole, and sellers who have been left unable to fulfill — or even view — orders and to withdraw their funds.

> “It was decided”

Ah yes, definitely the language of an organization that totally wants to communicate with candor.

Also zero information about the new owners other than the name of a shell corp associated with an existing "EETree" company in Jiangsu, China that gets (mis?)represented as “a Washington State company”. Much honest, such wow. Sure, there's technically an LLC in Washington, but that's like calling pre-2020 Google "a Bermuda company" (which, tbf, is what Google did to avoid taxes via their Irish ~~subsidiary~~ "parent" company).

And still no information, remarks, or even acknowledgement for all the tindie sellers who’ve been unable to withdraw their funds.

The address listed at https://ccfs.sos.wa.gov/ ( 1475 NW SWENSON CT, POULSBO, WA, 98370 ) is shown on Google Maps as just being a completely empty plot by 2026 aerial photography. There's no way a whole house was built in < 10 weeks and someone was actually living there on February 25, 2026 when that address became their legally official place to reach someone at the company.

It's probably illegal to list that as the address -- the whole point of having a "Registered Agent" for businesses is so that if someone needs to serve the business with legal papers (like Tindie sellers suing for not being able to access their funds) then there's an actual person at an actual place where legal documents can be legally served. If someone doesn't want to make their own address public or isn't actually located in the state, "renting" a proper registered agent only costs $125/year - it doesn't require much more than a glorified mail-forwarding service, they receive your documents, scan them, and email them to you and the courts are happy with that because the business officially got served. It's a bit hard to serve papers to an empty lot.

Not providing a real address where someone can be located is a pretty bad sign for how much this ownership intends to respect any US laws. It's also potentially in violation of RCW 23.95.405, .415, .605 and RCW 43.07.210 & RCW 40.16.030, with penalties up to 6 years of incarceration and/or $15,000 in fines, dissolution of the company, and (most relevant to anyone who can't withdraw their funds from Tindie) a loss of "limited liability" status making the owners/directors/officers personally responsible for anything the LLC owes to anyone.

On the plus side, this year is the first year since the 2023 incorporation that the mandatory annual report wasn't a delinquent filing.

The business has had 3 addresses filed for it since incorporation:

(2023-2024) Principal place of business (a townhome): 1605 S WASHINGTON ST STE A, SEATTLE, WA, 98144-3193, UNITED STATES

(2023-2025) Registered agent (a house with 3 boats): 23022 49TH A VE SE, BOTHELL, WA, 98021

(Effective Feb 25 2026) Registered agent (which was photographed in 2026 to be a completely barren residential plot): 1475 NW SWENSON CT, POULSBO, WA, 98370

Thanks, this is exactly the content I come here for. Apt handle :P

I am very not comfortable with the situation, as a seller. I mailed out the stuff that was paid for before the outage...but I don't think I'm mailing anything else until I can disburse.

https://archive.ph/po2UN

This archive never expires :)

Don't jinx it

Nobody seems to be using the word "bankrupt", but I'm getting the impression that's what happened here? Sudden un-announced sale?

Some background and other details are on the Adafruit blog: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/04/29/tindie-is-back-online-a...

If there were a time to compete, it would be now ;)

https://lectronz.com

Thanks. I didn't know about this site. I've been browsing for a bit, and I actually think it's a better site than Tindie ever was.

Ooo hey, I recognize some of my favorite Tindie sellers right on the Lectronz front page too.

Excellent, thank you.

Honestly, I would just sell off my own site if processing payments were simple to add. (And I suspect they are easy to add but that I'm just lazy and wouldn't know which service to wire up in the HTML.)

It depends on your scale. I sell on my own site at a very small scale and I just made a webform that let the user select the quantity of product on their own and get the quotation and the order would be created automatically. After that the user would be provided a link to my Paypal and they'd have to manually enter the amount and the order ID on Paypal as a remark and make the payment. Then they'd have to click on the "I paid" button on their order on my website. Then I'd receive a notification on the payment, manually verify if it's paid and fulfill the order. The payment processing is done without the being technically integrated into my site.

Since my scale is small enough, even if the user forgot to enter the order ID, it'd still work because I could just map the order and payment manually by timing.

If you don't want to create your own order handling website, even a Google Form would work for that. Just get the user to pay you on their own and fill in a form. Then you'd do the payment mapping manually and send them the product.

This is probably a good reminder that the EU-based alternative https://www.lectronz.com exists!

A site that hijacks the back button. Pressing back takes you to the loading screen, which takes you forward to the site again. Ouch.

Appears not to take over Safari for me.

Or Firefox.

This is the kind of statement that gets made when everything is awesome.

>and the migration from the previous operating environment to the new one took longer and caused more disruption than anyone wanted

I mean, this is unacceptable by any metric. Downtime for a platform like this means lost revenue. If Amazon was down for weeks at a time how do you think that would affect them as a retailer? So at this point I can't imagine what the mystery purchasers are getting, certainly not a steady revenue stream? I can't imagine the user data is that valuable for such a niche market focus. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be delighted to observe more embarrassing fumbles from your nameless owners, and whoever you are because I suspect your given name is false as well.

Scam or spy?

context?

interssting

Personally, I trust EETree LLC, a Washington State company, a digital powerhouse to the information super highway foster technological innovation and progress to digital future bridging to the electronic divide.

Is it not obvious this is satire?

SATIRE DOES NOT COMPUTE

In the age of meme stocks, NFTs, vibe coding and orange clowns in the white house, no, it's not obvious. The world has gone right past satire and into a reality of collective delusion.

Not at all

It is. How could anyone take “progress to digital future bridging to the electronic divide” seriously?

Most folk unsurprisingly would. Folk get suckered in by these lores all the time.

For my project, I am charging the environmental bridge between LLMs and the world; whatever that means.

Poe's law applies

Disclaimer: I’m the founder of Lectronz, a hardware marketplace based in the EU.

This email leaves a lot of questions unanswered, especially regarding the long-term stewardship of the maker community. While I wish the new team at EETree LLC luck in modernizing the stack, "stabilizing the platform" after a two-week blackout is a tough starting point for earning back seller trust.

For makers who are concerned about the current uncertainty or the move to a new ownership structure, I want to reiterate that there are independent alternatives. We built Lectronz specifically to provide a modern, stable home for the OSHW community with a few specific goals in mind:

Data Sovereignty: We have a built-in Tindie importer. You can use it to rescue your product data, photos, and stock levels right now so you aren't "locked in" while waiting for the new team to stabilize their infrastructure.

Transparent Payouts: We use Stripe for daily payouts. There are no "disbursement windows" or mystery ownership of your funds.

Regulatory Focus: Being based in the EU, we’ve already solved IOSS/VAT. This allows sellers (inside and outside the EU) to keep shipping without their customers getting hit by surprise fees.

Our focus is on being a lean, developer-led platform. We aren't backed by large parent corporations or shell companies—just a dedicated team and a Discord/GitHub where you can talk to us directly.

If anyone needs help backing up their Tindie store data or has questions about EU shipping compliance, I'm happy to dive into the technical details here.

What is Tindie?

Too lazy, didn't google: it's "Etsy for electronics".

It was a huge part of the DIY maker scene in the 2010's, alongside pioneers like Adafruit, Hackaday, and SparkFun. It meant a lot to people back when 3D printers and drones were something you built, instead of bought. You know, back when "men were men" and The Register (yes, that one) send homemade UAV glider-planes to the edge of space launched by rockets that were themselves launched from high-altitude weather balloons: https://www.theregister.com/2011/07/29/lohan_concepts/

It was a place to buy the things that didn’t exist on any major marketplaces yet. Today, the electronic DIY scene is dominated by Chinese hackers and most things people want are available from China so Tindie got squeezed out over time.