Supplyframe Sells Tindie, Now in Its Second Week of Site Outage, to Parties Unknown

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.

Tindie was originally founded as a marketplace for independent hardware makers to sell their goods, and its specificity compared to more general-purpose platforms like Etsy or Ebay drove its success. In 2015 the company was acquired by Supplyframe, which had previously bought project hosting and news site Hackaday two years earlier — with Supplyframe chief technology officer Aleksandar Bradic promising at the time to "more closely integrate the two" while helping its sellers "improve margins and ship better products [and to] grow the overall Tindie audience."

A decade and change on, though, and Tindie's journey with Supplyframe — itself acquired by Siemens back in 2021 — appears to have come to an abrupt end. The site has, at the time of writing, been inaccessible for over a week, with visitors — sellers and buyers alike — being greeted with a "503" error message claiming it was down for "scheduled maintenance." As the days stretched, though, so did the believability of that claim, and with no more formal statements forthcoming it's been up to Tindie's social media manager to reveal the real cause: Supplyframe has sold the site to parties unknown, who have yet to make an announcement of their own.

"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," Alexander Rowsell explains in a semi-formal announcement on behalf of the company, which expands on earlier claims that the downtime was the result of a planned platform upgrade running long. "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. 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."

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. The current outage, though, is being positioned as short-term pain for long-term gain, but when Tindie's new owners do break cover and make themselves known the sentiment on social media suggests that they're going to have a lot of work to do in order to get the platform's users back on-side.

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.