Brookwood Design and the Tindie Saga

I have been selling my products on Tindie.com since 2020. Six years in June, tempus fugit. While it is a bit of a barebones operation, Tindie worked ok for me. I sold thousands of units. Many customers became friends. I learned a lot about what people are doing in the CNC world and learned a lot about online retailing. It was a good experience. But, that all changed in April, 2026. Tindie, owned by Supplyframe, was sold with no announcement to an anonymous buyer. The site transitioned to the new buyer on April 14. It promptly stopped working - visiting the site gave a "scheduled maintenance" page. Supplyframe was sold to Siemens in 2021 and I suspect the hobbyist nature of Tindie did not sit well with them and they finally got around to kicking it to the curb. I emailed Tindie support and got a message that they are working on it and will be back ASAP. That is a theme that will be repeated in the coming days. Ten days later on April 24, Tindie finally comes back up. Though it was slow and frequently up and down. Tindie announced that they were put into maintenance mode due to unforeseen circumstances. I thought that was rather odd wording. And, 10 days of maintenance mode before they came back up clearly indicated something deeper than a maintenance issue.

When it went down on April 14, they had multi-hundred dollars of my sales that I had not received (disbursed, in Tindie parlance). When I went to start the disbursement on April 24th, Tindie gave me an error message and maked all the transactions as "Paid". They should have transferred the funds to my PayPal account. I checked PayPal and no money was transferred. Email to support acknowledged the problem. They said are working on it and it will be fixed ASAP. In the next day, I got a slew of Tindie orders and fulfilled them. My account balance was now well over $1000 and no way to get the money since the disbursement page now said

Disbursements are currently unavailable. We'll have them back online ASAP and auto payments will resume. If you have any questions, please contact Tindie Support.

At this point, I decided to not fulfill any more orders since the ASAP theme was starting to look a little fishy and messages to support yielded no specifics.

During the initial outage, I started seriously looking at Shopify as a Tindie replacement. I knew there was demand for my products and.wanted to continue selling them. I wasn't getting rich but really enjoy helping people build CNC systems. By plowing the profits back into the company, I was able to build up my lab to a much higher professional level. Previously, I had spent some time looking at Shopify but never pulled the trigger. Tindie being down for 10 days pushed me over the edge. Over the course of 2 days, I was able to put together a store on Shopify. What really helped is their AI agent that made navigating through the process easy. I'm still tweaking it but am pretty happy with the results. It does so many things that Tindie doesn't. Primarily, it's shipping/mailing support is all automated so I don't have to manually enter mailing addresses and I can use product weight to calculate mailing costs. This makes fulfilling orders easier and way less error prone. Shopify isn't perfect but it's way ahead of Tindie. Meanwhile, back at the ranch... On April 28, Tindie did a slow reveal. They said the buyer is a Washington State Company - EETree LLC. But, a bit later, that turned out to be a shell for a Chinese company - EETree Info & Tech Limited. Sigh. And disbursements were still in "ASAP" mode - not happening. On several forums, Tindie sellers were talking about suspending sales. I was still seeing a steady trickle of orders.

On April 30, Tindie posted that they were having problems with PayPal payments and withdrawals. At least they started to be less opaque. But that raises questions about how well the new owners worked through the transaction of buying Tindie. It will later become clear that very little thought had been put into buying Tindie. A posting by Tindie on May 3 indicated that they did not fully understand the fees being charged to their sellers, not increasing confidence in the buying team. At that point, Tindie did offer to payout any sellers but wanted bank account and routing numbers. Given all the problems they have had with the web site, acquisition/contract related issues and a lack of transparency, I was not willing to trust them with that and decided to wait. I mean, it's coming ASAP, right?

On May 5, another post by Tindie indicated that they were still having problems with the PayPal transition to the new owners. They were hoping to get this resolved within 72 hours. My level of hope improved but their lack of understanding of the process suggested a failure of due diligence. On May 6 they posted that a test transaction triggered more PayPal issues. Sigh. At least they had fixed my disbursement page to show all the undisbursed transactions and the total amount agreed with my calculations.

I began contacting my customers regarding the suspension of fulfillment and offered assistance in canceling their orders so they could reorder from my new store site. Some accepted the offer, while others did not.

This brings us to today (May 12). No change.

Disbursements are currently unavailable. We'll have them back online ASAP and auto payments will resume. If you have any questions, please contact Tindie Support.

Meanwhile, my Shopify store is doing ok. Though, it is not yet fully up to the Tindie level of sales but I still have Tindie orders trickling in that I won't fulfill until disbursement works. Overall, it looks like between the new store and Tindie, the level of demand for my products has not dropped off. I really do hope Tindie gets their act together. It is a good resource for someone to test the waters of designing and selling electronics. I haven't yet decided whether to continue my Tindie store once (if?) disbursement comes back. But, I will definitely focus on my Shopify based store going forward.

Stay tuned! I will add more of the story as it develops.

About Me.

I'm Phil Barrett, a long time CNC enthusiast. I run a small company, Brookwood Design, that makes several breakout boards for grblHAL and love to help people get the most out of their CNC machines.