The Padded-Envelope Economy
On any given day, a small board leaves a workbench and slips into a padded envelope. A few days later, it lands on a desk in another country. The label reads “Tindie.” The site is a quiet bazaar for parts, sensors, synth modules, and odd devices that rarely reach big retail. It did not start with a factory. It started with a question on Reddit, then a site in 2012, and a promise that the thing for sale already exists. (WIRED)
Tindie’s pitch is plain. It is a marketplace for indie hardware. It favors small runs over splashy preorders. Kickstarter raises money for ideas. Tindie lists goods that ship. That line held even as the maker boom moved from Arduino demos to short production runs. Wired took note early and called the site a straight market for devices that had left the breadboard. (WIRED)
The business changed hands in August 2015. Supplyframe, the company behind Hackaday, bought Tindie and folded it into a larger hardware media network. The deal did not turn Tindie into a storefront for one brand. It kept the market open to the spare and the niche. The point was reach, not uniform stock. (Hackaday, TechCrunch, Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers)
Scale, in this corner of commerce, looks modest on paper and vast on the bench. By 2025, Tindie reports more than 468,000 orders shipped, over 19,500 products listed, and sellers in more than 180 countries. The company also tells would-be vendors that the site draws about 150,000 unique visits a month and buyers in over 140 countries. Each figure marks a borderless trade in tiny runs. (Tindie)
The rules are straightforward. Sellers pay no listing fee and no monthly fee. Tindie takes a five percent cut, and the payment processor takes roughly three to four percent plus thirty cents. Payouts go through PayPal. New shops see funds held for a time before the first withdrawal. Established shops can receive money daily. It is a small toll for access to a crowd that knows what it wants. (Tindie, sf-tindie.zendesk.com, jcs.org)
The buyer side is simple too. You pay at checkout. Tindie holds the money in escrow. If the seller does not ship within fourteen days, Tindie refunds the order. Most sales move faster than that window. The promise is not speed for its own sake. The promise is trust that a one-person shop will send the thing it built. (sf-tindie.zendesk.com, Tindie)
There is a corner of the site that loosens that bond. The “Flea Market” lists surplus and half-finished gear. It invites rummaging. It also removes the shield. Items there sit outside the Tindie Guarantee. The label reads “buyer beware.” That is fair notice, and it fits the spirit of a drawer clean-out. (Tindie)
The objects on Tindie tell their own story. A GPS puck with open docs. A tiny board that reads soil moisture for a garden. A kit that teaches the signal path in a synthesizer. In the site’s early years, a student-made air-quality kit drew press and sales and gave two teenagers a start in hardware. The pattern has held. Small runs fund the next batch. A forum post becomes a product page. A padded envelope becomes a habit. (WIRED)
Running a Tindie shop is not yet a turnkey life. Shipping rates are manual. Cross-border postage takes patience. A few sellers write candid posts about the learning curve and the first-month cash hold. The site answers with an FAQ, a fee table, and help links, but the bench still needs a printer, labels, and a scale. Many shops find buyers through YouTube demos or a write-up on a personal blog. Tindie handles the cart. The seller still tells the story. (sf-tindie.zendesk.com, jcs.org)
The market’s size can be measured in another way. Commerce analysts estimate that in May 2025 the site logged about 2,500 transactions and roughly 485,000 sessions, with an average order value near the price of a mid-range dev board. Traffic moves where the projects move. Few sites publish this kind of niche footprint with such consistency. (Grips)
The appeal, in the end, is not a logo or a slogan. It is a sense that you can buy a thing that someone just proved on a desk lamp-lit bench. That thing may be a LoRa tracker with a 3D-printed shell. It may be a test jig for a chip that never gets shelf space at a big box. It may be a part that saves a weekend for a club or a class. The buyer meets the maker at the point where a hobby starts to look like work.
A site like this raises a basic question. How much scale do we want in the tools that shape our days. Big platforms turn craft into “units.” Tindie turns craft into shipments you can count on two hands. The sums are clear. Five percent to the house. Three to four percent to the rails. Fourteen days to ship or give the money back. The rest is solder and tape and patience. (Tindie, sf-tindie.zendesk.com)
It is easy to miss the cultural part. A crowded gadget site feels loud. Tindie does not feel loud. It has categories for drones and sound and camera rigs, and then it has rows of listings that read like notes to other builders. The tone comes from the goods and from a comment thread that often reads like a help desk. That quiet is not a lack of marketing. It is the sound of a market that still runs on “Will this work for my project” and “Here is the pinout.”
Tindie sits between the forum and the factory. It moves parts that would not survive a retailer’s margin. It keeps the feedback loop tight. A buyer writes a review that reads like a lab log. A seller ships a revision the next week. The cycle repeats until the envelope count turns into a small business. The numbers on the about page look tidy. The bench tells you what they mean. (Tindie)
Sources
Tindie About, fee table, payout details, and buyer guarantee. Aug 2025. (Tindie, sf-tindie.zendesk.com)
Acquisition coverage in Hackaday, TechCrunch, and Make. Aug 2015. (Hackaday, TechCrunch, Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers)
Early reporting on Tindie’s model and origin in Wired. 2012–2014. (WIRED)
Flea Market policy. Buyer beware status. (Tindie)
Third-party estimates of 2025 traffic and orders. (Grips)
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