Pillowfort Closes Up Shop in December
Posted on October 19, 2026 by Aywren
It’s not a happy thing to write this post. I always hate to see sites close down, especially ones that have been a home to others in terms of hosting content and fostering connections.
I’ve been a supporter and user of Pillowfort for almost 8 years, across two different accounts. Back before it launched public, I donated to the site monthly. I also took part in two of the large donation campaigns to help keep the site going.
I think I paid the $5 entry fee for my first account. I did my share of passing out free keys and encouraging friends in my social circles to try the site out. I also wrote posts about the open beta, the site redesign, and where it stood back in 2024.
Here’s the official email I received informing folks of the closure today – though I originally saw this announcement on other social channels. I won’t be linking the official post because it doesn’t seem like Pillowfort allows for the Wayback machine to archive anymore, and I don’t want to link out to something that might become a dead link in a few months.
Let this be a reminder that any third party site could up and poof on you at any time on short notice. Nothing is permanent, so be sure you keep backups of your content in a format that is useful to you.
Export Feature Incoming
Yes, Pillowfort will be providing an export feature, and that’s very kind of them! However, what that export format will be is a big question mark.
Will it include all the media images? Will the export be in a format that is of any use to the average person? Can you upload it somewhere else to another platform? Or is it just a big Zip file in a mumbo jumbo of files that have no way to reuse or sort through them?
For example, should you export from WordPress, you get your content, sure. But it’s exported into WordPress XML format which isn’t something you can just pop open on your computer and view in a standard way. It’s meant to be imported by another platform that understands WordPress XML – which is, to be sure, quite a few platforms out there.
Anyhow, just curious about that.
My Gradual Drift Away
While I hate to see Pillowfort closing up shop, I sadly admit that I am also not surprised by this announcement. The founder notes in her message to the community:
For me, as a user who financially supported the project for many years, it wasn’t really the security incident that pushed me away from using the site in the long run. It was more the warnings I saw that indicated this site was quite fragile and may not last, especially wording used in their posts requesting financial support.
I understand that Pillowfort was completely self-funded, and needed to consistently request funding from users to keep it afloat. I had no problem with that. But as I noted in my 2024 post about Pillowfort, some of their images looked like this:
The whole “if we don’t meet this goal, we’ll only have enough funding available until X month” really left me uncertain about putting anything on that site that I didn’t want to lose. I get that they were being transparent and that it drummed up a feeling of immediacy for others to take action. But for me, it did the opposite.
They did eventually move away from this kind of messaging, but the doubt was already in my mind by that point.
I did stop posting original content to Pillowfort. In fact, I pulled the entire 2022 Quest Calendar archive off Pillowfort and consolidated it into my own blog’s Microblog section earlier this year, which I’m glad to have done in retrospect. It was the only content that would have been completely lost to the site going down, and having a month and a half deadline to move the entire year’s worth of posting into HTML format would have been a stress to rush through (it took me several months to finish this move).
As much as I wanted to use Pillowfort for other things, such as posting blog and webcomic updates, the site often didn’t always allow me to do that. Often, posting a link to my blog posts wouldn’t resolve with the informational metadata and feature image that social media sites use for links. Sometimes this worked on Pillowfort, but more often than not, it didn’t.
So, when I went through to review and cull the number of sites and socials I post my content updates to – reviewing each for usefulness and engagement – Pillowfort was one that I stopped logging into for this. Even when the posting did work, engagement was low for the kind of things I posted, and the time it took to replicate a post there was better spent elsewhere.
My Final Thoughts
All that said, I appreciated what Pillowfort set out to do. While I wasn’t always thrilled with the NSFW content push (which was one of their big trumpeting points), there were enough tools provided that I rarely ran across anything there that I didn’t want to see. I even help moderate the largest FFXIV community there, back before I founded my own on Tumblr a few years later.
I’m not clear on whether the site is closing because of lack of funding, for other reasons, or a combination of the two. I send my condolences and thanks to the team who put time and effort into developing the site and the features for everyone to enjoy, those who did their best to make the vision happen, and the communities that brought it to life.
I hope those who are looking for a new home on the net find one soon. And I hope the backup process is an easy one in a format that makes sense to the normal user.
So long and thanks for all the posts, Pillowfort!