It has been an immense struggle with ups and mostly downs since we were kicked off of Stripe. Few services compare. We stayed in beta to try to solve issues such as backup processors shutting down, functional payment issues, compliance issues, and limiting bad actors. However, in the last few days, WishTender has been targeted by card testing. The card testers attacked without trying to profit financially. This is highly unusual. Most card testers want to make money. This tells us the attacker’s motive was to irreparably harm WishTender. Unfortunately, the attacks happened while we were more susceptible, and our resources and efforts to combat the attacks were not good enough.

Our new payment orchestration fraud tools struggled to detect the stolen cards. We kept adding new measures, but the testers found a way around. We finally thought we had it figured out. But it was too late. First, it caused issues with Visa that we felt we could work through but we were informed it created an existential issue for all of our payments. As hard as we tried, we could not solve this with the resources we had at our disposal. We feel our resources are too thin to keep going. We have never had investors. It’s only been us and our team trying to make things work.

I hope to speak more openly soon about everything that transpired over our journey. We need some time to handle what is going on.

I am beyond saddened that WishTender is done, but I truly enjoyed building a product that helped the adult creator community for the short time that it did. We launched almost exactly 3 years ago as the first cash wishlist, and your input helped us improve this concept over time. I know so many of you by name and found great joy in joining the community. I sincerely hope to keep in touch with the users who helped us build.

I will miss the glory days of Friday Findom memes, Steve the Spider, and the hilarious comments you posted on all our tweets. I will miss the bizarre copycats that popped up and accidentally left the name “WishTender” in their copy and how you all made fun of them. I will miss your impressive ability to get gifts from people who hardly knew you just by sending them a picture of your middle finger.

So many of you helped us build WishTender into what it became. I’m hopeful that the changes we made in the industry will continue to inspire other companies to put creators first. But I also have learned why this is rare. It’s a huge challenge. Ultimately, we missed the mark, too. This is a harsh industry. From financial discrimination to bad actors and lack of tools and funding, I completely understand why it is so rare to build as openly and fairly as we strived to do. It became harder for us over time.

We have been working with our payment partners to release payouts for the wishers who participate in the beta program. For users who did not participate in our beta program, there is no need for you to take any action. Again, we hope to share more about everything that transpired, but for the moment we will be focused on finalizing payouts for the beta testers.

In our last update, we shared how difficult it's been for our small business to fight through the challenges being hurled at us. Though we've had a challenging time, we are happy to say that many of the functional issues we previously had with third-party providers have been resolved. We have steadily added users to beta daily in the last few weeks, and we're happy to see more activity on WishTender again.
​
We know seeing other users on WishTender can be frustrating when your account is still down. However, for WishTender to survive, we need to approach reopening methodically. Inviting too many users at once could cause issues.
​
We plan to keep inviting users to closed beta, transition to open beta, and then return to normal as quickly as possible, but importantly, in a sustainable manner.
​
At this phase of beta testing, we are mostly using a programmatic script to invite users via email. The script detects wishers who have been active on WishTender and other factors showing that you are following our Terms of Service. So, if you'd like to be entered into closed beta, please ensure that your wishlist adheres to our Terms of Service and prohibited-wishlist-item rules.
​
Thank you to everyone who has sent us supportive messages encouraging us to rebuild WishTender. We have immense appreciation for the community. Without you, we would never have gotten here. Your input over the years helped us innovate and create the first-ever privacy-focused cash wishlist that protected the adult creator community from scams and chargebacks.

Thank you to those who have been sticking with us through this challenging transition and supported us as we continue to rebuild.
​
Please remember to direct any questions to the support chat on wishtender.com.
​

In our last update, we mentioned that we were waiting for some systems to be completed to mitigate scaling issues. We are still waiting for some necessary pieces of the infrastructure to be completed before reopening the beta to more users. We are getting close and hoping to add a new batch of beta testers.
​
Everything has been taking much longer than expected. After parting ways with Stripe, we have had to work to rebuild all of what Stripe offered our gifters and wishers and WishTender's infrastructure. Many services were excited to partner with us to provide a part of this solution. In that excitement and rush to get up and running, there was some overpromising of services and underestimation of the work needed to get fully up and running at scale.
​
Many curveballs have been thrown at us behind the scenes, complicating the payment orchestration and slowing things down. Though we have taken on and overcome these issues, one by one, they have also slowed our progress. However, now that we have overcome some of the most challenging problems, we feel optimistic and see a path forward.
​
We continue to work diligently daily to provide a working solution at scale and improve it over time as we add more functionality. Our goals are to get closer to our previous experience on the payments side and surpass it where we can, all while ensuring that we have a stable and trusted platform that can service our community long into the future.

We appreciate everyone's patience while we work towards our goals, but we also understand all the frustrations surrounding how this happened, our lack of preparedness, and our struggles with communicating while trying to navigate WishTender into calmer waters.

Our immediate goal is to begin onboarding more users as soon as we have an outstanding deliverable from one of our partners. We can't make any promises on dates as it's already behind schedule and largely out of our hands, but we can promise that we will continue to do everything we can to bring WishTender back to the community as quickly as possible. However, we will not sacrifice stability & longevity for this goal.

As much as we want WishTender operational for everyone who wants to use it, we have to ensure that all the right tools and partnerships are in place and running smoothly before we can open up fully.

The adult creator community is underserved. We naively believed we could contribute our small part to bringing much-needed services to the community. While our naiveté made us bold enough to think we could accomplish this goal, it also contributed to some of the mistakes we've made along the way.

We proceed now with a much more robust understanding of what is needed to serve our community long-term, and we cannot sacrifice critical implementations for speed. We understand that many of our users have found alternatives out of necessity but also due to a lack of faith and trust in WishTender. We get it, and we want you to continue to do what is best for you. We aim to win you back by proving that we have the strongest and most stable platform and will continue to listen to your needs as we move through this journey together.

All we ask for is your patience, some grace, and the benefit of the doubt that if this were just about money to us, we would have shut down as soon as we got the news that we were off-boarded by Stripe. We believe in the goal of providing our community with the same sort of services and basic decency that any other community has access to.

WishTender started as a basement business, with the founder, Dash, building a tool to protect a friend who was an adult industry creator. Dash has shared the journey publicly from the time she began to learn to develop software in order to build WishTender. Since then, we have worked closely with the community to create a new product that had not existed before us. We are happy that we inspired other companies to adopt new standards to protect the community, like chargeback protection and no refunds. We are not a VC company with endless resources, but a team that is passionate about the solution we're providing with our own WishTender adult creator community members on our team as well. We're grateful for the trust we developed over the years, serving the community through successes and failures. Though we are struggling to move fast, we have not given up.
​

We were happy to launch beta on February 15th. Given Stripe's 10-day notice, we were thrilled that we got the system up and running for beta internationally.

While beta testing had started optimistically, issues have surfaced, making adding more beta testers difficult. We've halted adding users to the beta at this time. We are waiting for some systems to be completed to mitigate these issues.

We hope to sort these issues out in the next 2-4 weeks to onboard more users.
​

We apologize for not keeping users as updated as we’d like. Developments have been changing frequently, making updates hard to publicize. It's been hard to be as transparent as we'd typically aim for.
​
We also apologize for the tweets we posted that the community felt implied we were not taking the situation seriously. This was our misguided attempt to bring lightheartedness and humor to our less-than-optimal predicament. We want to assure the community that we do realize that users depend on platforms like ours for their income. We share your sentiment that this is a serious matter.
​
We appreciate the severity of the situation. Like you, we also want to exit beta testing.
​
We hope to bring you more updates when we can. Thank you for your patience during this time.
​
​

Thanks to our beta testers, we've added numerous bug fixes and UX improvements to our payments system. We've successfully paid out $100k internationally during our first week of beta testing to 274 age-verified users.
​
We are adding beta testers daily while waiting for service providers to go live to support larger volumes of users. These services are not related to payments but services that support our ability to manage higher volumes on this new system. We are waiting for estimates on how long this implementation will take from the services, but their original projection was a few weeks.
​
We will still be adding more beta testers in the meantime who meet all the beta testing criteria.
​
​

​
Once these services are live, we plan to open up to larger groups of users.

100+ countries added! North Macedonia is not yet supported.
​
We continue to invite users to beta who have a history of activity on WishTender and fit most or all of the beta testing criteria.
​

​

We are live with beta for users in The United States, Great Britain, Europe, Canada, South Africa, India, Singapore, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
​
Other countries may be able to receive payment in beta but may not pay out yet.
​

Invites to beta were prioritized for Wishers who:

Additionally, users who reached out to our support chat on wishtender.com and asked to participate in beta may have also been given access to the beta testing application. We may have missed some users due to overwhelming support tickets.
​
​