Panic put a tariff surcharge on Playdate orders when new tariffs landed this year, same as plenty of other companies building hardware right now. When some of that money came back, NPR’s Planet Money asked co-founder Cabel Sasser what they did with it.
They refunded it. Nobody made them — the surcharge was already collected, and plenty of bigger companies have quietly kept windfalls like that without a word to anyone. It only matters because Panic’s whole business runs on people trusting them enough to preorder a handheld console sight unseen, and that kind of trust is the one thing a direct-to-fan maker can’t buy back once it’s spent.
