Tailwind did a great job of building a fanbase. Even without LLMs I always thought they were on a collision course with market saturation, though. They generously gave lifetime access for a one-time payment, which was bound to run into problems as free alternatives became better and their core fanbase didn't have any reason to spend more money.

Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma and similar tools. I can think back to a couple different projects where the web developers wanted to use Tailwind [Plus] components but the company had a process that started in Figma. It's hard to sell the designers on using someone else's component library when they have to redraw it in Figma anyway.

I'll piggyback on this to highlight Refactoring UI as well. It's an ebook by Adam and Steve, though I'm not sure if it's technically part of Tailwind Labs or not.

This book taught me so much about modern UI design. If you've ever tried building a component and thought to yourself, "hmm something about this looks off," you might benefit from this book.

These days some of the examples might be a little bit dated (fashions come and go), but the principles it teaches you are rock solid.

I think think tailwind ui was one of the better purchases I’ve made (web tech wise). Up there with the lifetime acf pro license.

This sucks to see but was pretty obvious when it became the go to framework for LLMs.

What most don’t realize is that this will happen to most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery.

No discovery - no business.

And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly go out of business

Tailwind Plus is great - I love the lifetime access, but I always wondered how sustainable that model was. Even without AI, how many of those memberships could they sell?

I could never afford Tailwind UI but then again I don’t really use Tailwind. That said, as an open-source styling solution, they could be supported in other ways. A lot — and I really mean a lot — of websites are built with Tailwind, yet very few consider donating or buying what they have to offer.

Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. That’s mining The Commons. LLMs are just accelerating this trend.

It’s never gonna work in the long run. Let’s go back to writing everything in house then, since we’re 100x more productive and don’t have to pay a dime for other people’s work.

Are you referring to signing up for the blog[1] email or something else? It was last updated July 25, 2025.

[1]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog

> Btw the Tailwind newsletter/email that goes out is genuinely useful as well, so I recommend signing up for that if you use Tailwind CSS at all.

What is the signup link? I googled a bit but couldn't find it.

As a question regarding Tailwind Plus, we / I exclusively use Angular but the templates are all React / Vue / plain HTML.

Are these components mostly just the HTML styling which would then be easily used in Angular as well, or would it be too much of a hassle to adopt to Angular?

yeah this is so sad, I'm an early supporter of Tailwind since v1 and I also bought the tailwind UI as well to support them. I hope this era doesn't discourage the tailwind team or put them out of business

Early customer here too. Tailwind UI was one of my best purchases in the sense that it helped me learn and use Tailwind in the best way possible, by showing me, not telling me.

It was never sustainable as a product/business, as this pricing model requires constant growth. What I've seen along the way was a heavy pivot towards React (which left me wanting: I mostly use the Vue components & the HTML/JS components with Astro.js in the projects I work in) and even in the case of React, they haven't managed to arrive at a full, mature component library offering (while others have!).

TL;DR: I'd be struggling to justify it as a purchase for a new user now, even before factoring AI in.

Smells like unnecessary sycophancy: I grep'd Adam in every comment and every single. one. is positive and phrased like this.

I grew up on this site, from 20 year old dropout waiter in Buffalo to 37 year old ex-Googler. One of the things I'm noticing me reacting to the last year or two is a "putting on a pedestal" effect that's unnecessary.

Tools like Tailwind are one of the few cases where I totally believe it when the CEO says "we are cutting jobs because of AI".

Sucks that anytime you ask AI to generate a site for you Tailwind will have an impact on that.

Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks.

I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.

If there's anything AI coding is good at, it's writing react components and tailwind css.

Agreed. Also I could not imagine being in his shoes, it must be heartbreaking seeing all his work burn like this.

I think it's fairly sad that somebody feels this needs to be said.

I don't buy it. They failed to build a sustainable business model and are now suffering the consequences. Everybody is leaning into AI because it works (in the sense that it pays the bills). Saying the layoffs were because of AI offloads the blame.

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He fired a shitload of people, of course we can criticise him

>and he's being honest

oh, come the fuck on. it's "AI made us do it" drivel that companies began to justify layoffs with in 2023 (!!!).

Tailwind is just another FOTM frontend thing. I saw dozens of them come, gain some popularity, then abruptly disappear once the marketing budget ran out.

Having worked on a design system previously I think most people, especially non-frontend developers, discount how hard something like that is to build. LLMs will build stuff that looks plausible but falls short in a bunch of ways (particularly accessibility). This is for the same reason that people generate div-soup, it looks correct on the surface.

EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such thing." is wrong. My hunch is that AI has the appearance of eliminating the need for such things.

> The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things.

Or more cynically that it eliminates the need to pay for such things. Claude and friends were no doubt trained on the commercial Tailwind components, so the question becomes whether those models could have done the job of Tailwind UI without piggybacking on the unpaid labour of the Tailwind UI developers. If not then we clearly have a sustainability problem here - someone still has to do the hard work to push things forward, but with the knowledge that any attempt to profit from that work will be instantly undercut by the copyright laundering Borg.

I bought a Tailwind Plus trial a few years ago and I've been using AI tools since they came out. I typically find the block or template I want to use via the Tailwind Plus site and then feed it into Claude Code and ask the agent to modify them as required. This has been working well for me. I think the problem is that the Internet is absolutely full of people who expect free shit and never even consider paying for it to support the devs. I don't really know how you fix that. In a sane world, we'd be funding the most popular/useful projects using government grants, since our entire fucking economy sits atop a pile of OSS.

AI's going to be a whole lot less useful when it doesn't have any open source component libraries to crib from.

Well, you can tell from the tone of his post that he isn't blaming anyone directly. They monetized convenience, and something more convenient came along.

I think it's more shocking to everyone how quickly something like that happens.

Is AI making component libraries redundant? Or is it just making it really easy to use free component libraries?

(Or is it really more about traffic to the documentation site and thus eyeballs on the sales pitch?)

I'm making an app using ShadCN, which is pretty good and free -- maybe Tailwind Plus would be significantly better, I don't know, I had to consider the possibility that this project never makes any money so I wanted free for the first shot. And the LLMs turn out to know it pretty well.

Once I get it built using ShadCN, it's hard to imagine when I'd have time to go redo all the component hackery with another library, even if it were way better.

I guess my point is just that "paid UI components" is a really tough business when there are so many people willing to make components just for the fun/glory/practice. Same with a lot of UI stuff it seems -- I highly respect icon designers, but I'm probably just going to use Lucide.

Does it matter whether it's been obvious that it would be a major issue? It's not unlikely that he did realise this a long time ago, and if he did, it's also not unlikely that he still hasn't found a solution, because there might not be one.

Well.. there are many fast growing companies that provide UI + APIs for certain components of your app. Sure you can build things easier in-house, but the opportunity cost of doing so also went up. Supabase, Stream, Clerk, Stainless all growing very well.

> I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with.

This is the money quote for me - charging for a different thing than the one that brings the value is unsustainable, and AI is accelerating that realization.

Unfortunately, without free distribution, Tailwind would never gain anywhere close to its current mindshare, so there just might not be an opening there (save for a "this year is a year of Linux on desktop" dream of bots and pnpm install paying with micropayments for each download).

How does it eliminates the need for simple templates and components? Templates and components are always gonna be more cost effective, back in the day we used to buy simple jQuery components for like 5*$ and even LLMs cant beat that, you will quickly end up with a shittier component with 0 accessibility and end up paying more to the Claude Opus

> The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily

The reality is that you need to figure out is that if you want people to pay when they make a ton of money from your code, you should put that in the license.

The only thing that can save open source software is open source LLMs

Unfortunately only the Chinese are really being serious about that

In the face of LLM's it won't be rational for many people to open source their work. People don't want their work/effort being used against them.

Agreed. I don't know how realistic it is without a major need that would force major player to abide by it, but yea..

Maybe we need patreon equivalents for open source development?

>The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products

Wall that's the problem, and it's tractable problem. Seems like tailwind needs a sales strategy beyond hoping people read the docs. And that it gives rise to a perverse incentive--making a less intuitive product to drive the need for documentation--is bound to affect the product.

If LLMs are really the problem, and it seems possible that they are, then you might need to lean in. Maybe selling access to mcps and skills. I'd still bet on hiring someone to chase down some contracts is going to be the easiest way out of the hole though.

I feel like if their docs are their only funnel into their commercial product, they need to fire their marketing staff and find people who are competent. There are so many other ways they could be reaching potential customers, even those only familiar with Tailwind's free product.

Thanks for that - the GitHub app “helpfully” collapsed this comment (along with most of the others in the thread), so I was confused how the headline related to this issue.

That traffic is down can have at least two separate AI related causes:

1) Lower amount of impressions on the google search pages due to the AI answers

2) Lower amount of searches since people are using code generators

I wonder which one it is primarily.

It is a business. Envato was a billion dollar business in 2017. I agree that AI makes these kinds of businesses vulnerable, but it's overstepping to say that these things aren't businesses.

Definitely more than 200k per head. I remember seeing a job posting for Tailwind Labs for a (design?) engineer which was 250-300k TC.

Seems like it was an insanely profitable product, but a risky business.

Telerik, DevExpress, and a lot of other companies have made profitable businesses that have lasted well over a decade on that business premise. Selling solid and easy to integrate pre-made components has been a pretty good business for a while.

Tailwind had several times more than 2M / ARR at their peak.

Lovable while claiming they are making $250m ARR heaving using Tailwind, doesnt even pay to support tailwind at all. Although with the AI companies you can never trust the numbers as they play the giving free trials and counting as future ARR game.

They were selling HTML templates. Not even anything else, literally just HTML with Tailwind classes. That wasn't a sustainable business even before AI.

i remember listening to Adam in one of the podcast he was in (I think it was either the Hackers Inc, or the Art of Product, but could've been something else where he was a guest) - and I remember that he mentioned that idea that there are always a new wave of new developers that they can sell the product to.

I still think he was correct. I myself bought tailwindUI as an aspirational purchase, and i doubt people would pay for it as a subscription.

But I think a lot has changed in the last few years. There arent probably as many new developers given the market, and among those there are probably even less that are willing to pay $100+ for a UI library, not when there are competitions like shadcn or radix or many others as free alternative, or when you could just ask an LLM to generate them for you.

Tailwind Labs definitely need to explore new revenue streams, but i dont think UI components is the way to go. Without knowing their internal data, this is just a guess, but I doubt traffic to docs or pipeline to premium products is much of a factor in the decline.

They had a business model good enough to employ a few people. Not every business needs to be Google’s Adsense.

LLMs are clearly to “blame” here. You can make any component with LLMs from scratch or it will expertly use one of the many existing UI frameworks.

They had a sensible business model UNTIL AI came around. As usual, AI is just destroying everything it touches.

Not every business should need hyperscaling mega-exit unicorn enshittification.

Lifestyle and small businesses are good and of course these are being crushed by our new oligarchs.

> It's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence

Literally everyone? No new developers being trained? No new tailwind users?

He goes into detail the motivation/decision to do lifetime pricing vs subscription pricing here: https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is...

The idea is that subscription businesses have churn, and if you can capture the lifetime value of a customer with your one time price, there isn't any difference (other than people feeling grateful when you add new content for "free").

> It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.

The one time fee should have been for personal licenses, and a annual subscription for businesses.

> I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.

Maybe. One data point isn't all that useful, but I never would have bought it if it weren't for the model he chose. I will never, ever do a subscription for something like that.

I think it’s simple that people aren’t using CSS frameworks because the AI creates CSS on its own.

i bought Tailwind UI years ago and have barely used it outside of like a couple of abandoned side projects. I bought it knowing that is going to happen because it is a one-time payment, and the idea of supporting the project/Adam is prob a bigger factor that the product.

I definitely wont even consider it if its a subscription.

Selling UI components is a hard sell to begin with - i think they made the right decision with a one-time point payment at that higher price point. If it were a subscription, i probably would've cancelled it within 2 or 3 months.

if the coding agents are already using Tailwind so much, I don't see why he is so adamant on add this to the repo. llms.txt is basically useless, and you need it you can add it to your user claude.md

that's why I complained about it in the PR, mmm, I thought it was grossly unprofessional of him (besides the things he said in the discussion.

e.g. Tech changes all the time, that isn't an excuse to be a dick. e.g. ok dude, don't expect any future free work from me in the future on any of your projects going forward. Rude AF.)

also, I just realised, that PR is an excuse to get the library he made (https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx) used within TailwindCSS :p

I'm not normally one to do armchair psychology but from the way he posts I'm pretty sure he's just on the spectrum, obviously smart but total inability to read the room or understand other people's perspectives

It's peak brain fried slop that's for sure

It's on Github, I'm not surprised. I'd be surprised if you got a TokTok response on sourcehut.

We really are in the worst timeline, huh? I wish there were professional consequences for this kind of online behavior.

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> everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components

This may be an exaggeration.

> everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components

I played around with shadcn for a new project a year or so ago, decided I really didn't like their fundamental approach of copying code (that now I have to maintain) into my code base. So I ended up using something else (DaisyUI), which has been reasonably nice so far.

I'm just one person (and one not super plugged into the frontend scene), but "everyone" feels like a gross overestimation. I would guess it's not even a majority.

>everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components

shadcn only works in react, tailwind works everywhere

> everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components.

This is the first time I've seen anyone ever mention it.

I don't even know who the hell uses them systems for components.

Just trowing a flex-box and a few good ol' css rules does 99.999% of the job usually.

$300 for UI blocks? For what? A div with flex, gap, and padding?

I like this prediction and it would be a good fit. Vercel can also monetize existing traffic much more broadly than tailwind can with just tailwind plus.

> Rightly or wrongly, everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components.

Everyone in your bubble on X maybe.

I wish Adam had addressed the impact of competition in a bit more detail.

Shadcn has definitely taken a big chunk, the premium ecosystem around Shadcn is absolutely exploding. I know. I run https://www.shadcnblocks.com and we saw huge month on month growth in revenue for the entire year.

Even with strong headwinds from AI, I expect our revenue to continue increasing throughout 2026.

> I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now."

I don't really understand how you can find a difference between your sentence with what he wrote:

> I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it.

> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.

Pretty sure those are the same picture

This is the most pragmatic, non-conformist and rational comment here.

Exactly, when the Renaissance was happening, the printing machine(s) were spreading across the Europe rapidly, priest(s) were trying to prevent the spread of machines because they were copying the books, by hand, which was their income stream.

So they were against it, in the end, they learned their lesson the hard way. It was inevitable, it's the same thing with the LLM(s).

> And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.

Yeah, that is a quite depressing situation, but saying "trying to do fun free things for the community..." is quite contradictory.

Isn't that how that community is created in the first place?

I also don't understand the logical thinking that made them think that, if we make it harder to gather information with LLM(s) or if we do not improve it, people will keep coming to our website, NO!

They would just simply grab something similar, or ask an LLM to use something else, there are hundreds of alternatives, no one, literally no one has moat in the today(s) world.

I believe that if they focused solely on open source, improving the developer experience, creating more libraries, abstraction(s) over the abstraction(s), open source component libraries like shadcn/ui, DaisyUI, Radix etc, their income today would have been much higher than from what they currently have I believe.

There are many, like so many action items that Adam could do, instead of throwing tantrums at people, easiest could have been the sponsor-first business model, which would have scaled out much better I mean, they don't have recurring revenue, OSS sponsorships are mostly recurring, unlike the current model.

I'd be sympathetic to this take if

1. The contribution actually made something useful

2. He actually said anything to the note of "I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with ai."

3. The contributor was not adding an external library that he authored without mentioning it in the comments

I defer 100% to maintainers of a project if an external contributor drops a pr that they are now in charge of maintaining with no evidence that it is useful, or that the author of the change will maintain.

The shorthand makes inline style more ergonomic, so you can see the wood for the trees, rather than long strings of style attributes in your markup.

Inline style is the thing. That's what tailwind is enabling in a readable way. And inlined style is what makes style more maintainable and less susceptible to override rot.

The separation between form and function is always a bit illusionary, but particularly so with CSS. Almost all markup is written to look a specific way, not a configurable way.

Every project I worked on that used CSS was a mess. It's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there.

There should be a monthly option - I'd pay for that.

i just gave my favorite LLM a screenshot of one of those components and it recreated it perfectly. i paid $0.

i dont see how any business model can compete with free. maybe they can focus on branding like Pepsi or Coke and see if developers will make their decisions based on that.

(IANAL) Using it for commercial products isn't grey area at all, it's explicitly allowed. Pretty much all you can't do is create a component library based on it. You can also freely use it in open source as long as you aren't making a component library.

If it wasn't usable in commercial products, I don't think anyone would pay for it.

>>Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design.

In the age of AI, if you have Table of Contents. ChatGPT can write the book for you.

Only books I buy these days are in fiction genre. Everything else is derived from facts that already exist some where and AI can derive and write the whole book.

The ad was "You wouldn't download a car." To which my response was always a loud "HELL yes, I would!"

I’m not sure this is such a reality check. I remember figuring this out maybe a month or so after October 2023, when ChatGippity first dropped. Like, if it’s a “do anything platform” won’t the first anything be to cannibalize low hanging anything’s, followed by progressively higher hanging anything’s until there’s no work left?

Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel, unless we hold them accountable for the changing landscape of stake-in-civilization distribution. Spoiler: haha, we sure fucking aren’t in the US.

this whole "ai is theft" argument is just pure cope. tailwind was always just a thin abstraction over css standards and they only became the industry standard by playing the seo game and dumping docs on the open web for everyone to see. you dont get to claim theft when a model actually learns the patterns you basically forced onto the world for free to build your brand. tailwinds business model was essentially rent seeking on the fact that css is tedious to write manually and now that the marginal cost of production has dropped to near zero they are suprised they cant sell 300 dollar templates anymore.

the car comparison is honestly embarassing for this community to even bring up lol. its not theft to recognize a pattern and its definately not illegal for a company to do what every junior dev has been doing for years which is reading the docs and then not buying the paid stuff. adam built a business that relied on human inefficiency and now that inefficiency is gone. its not a tragedy its just a market correction. if your moat is so shallow that a llm can drain it in one pass then you didnt really have a product you just had a temporary advantage. honestly tailwind should of seen this coming a mile away but i guess its easier to blame "scrapers" than admit the ui kit gravy train is over. move on and build something that actually provides value.

Apparently they were 8+ people, in 2024 team size was 6 and were hiring 2 more [0] and in 2020 they had $2m+ ARR [1].

Honestly, while I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs the news aren't exactly surprising. Overhiring is a game for VC funded OSS like bun, not usually a good idea for bootstrapped companies.

[0]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...

[1]: https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...

A lot of open source projects attempt to become a business in some form or another (or vice versa). Great examples of this include Astral (creators of UV and Ruff), TursoDB, TigerBeetle, etc etc etc. People want to get paid for the project they work on. Some of their business models will fail. This is probably a case of tailwind growing their engineering team faster than they should have when the AI writing was on the wall in 2023.

For what it's worth, Cursor does support Tailwind, see their sponsors page. But certainly agree.

https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor

> It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.

You don't get rich by paying people what they deserve.

How would you possibly enforce this? I can disconnect my laptop from the internet and the local LLM will still autocomplete TW classes. Does JetBrains therefore owe TW every time it does this? What if it was actually completing UnoCSS class names that happen to overlap? How about when it's just simple autocomplete based on what classes are visible and what I've used within the same file?

These might sound like snide rhetorical questions, but when you start demanding payment, they're very real.

If they tailwind, it sets a precedent for others. They can't pay everyone.

> It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.

Paying someone fairly for its contribution to society? This won't pass here in the free world as it sounds like a dangerous communist idea. How are we supposed to become richer than our neighbor that way?

> The truth is, business opportunities are rarely eternal, usually they are just an opportunity to make money within a short window of time, such as a decade or two. Sometimes even shorter than that, perhaps even only a year or two.

Agreed, and Adam and Steve made a life-changing amount of money from Refactoring UI and then Tailwind UI. That's a great outcome on its own.

Nope. Started with regex but it was brittle so I used my library which parses to AST which is easier to work with. It's a docs site, so I'm getting one more download woohoo.

I’m sorry for what’s happening to Tailwind, it clearly sucks, but a library like that is definitely not a key piece of foundational web tech the same way bootstrap and jquery weren’t.

As an engineer, I want to believe this, but really - does it?

Most folks use frameworks because it's easier than learning how to build it all yourself - things are done for you instead. This niche is now getting eroded by AI and low-code substantially.

Couple that with my experience maintaining frontends that are far too complex for their use cases - e.g. do we really need SPA's, state sync, and reusable components for our admin tool that doesn't reuse components?

This leads me to think there's been bloat here for at least a decade. So, while vibe coding will also lead to bloat, it's easier to work with, and arguably higher value than paying for a specific framework.

It's a tragedy in life that things that are useful don't always get valued, instead being used as a stepping stone for progress, but I'm not sure that has a solution.

This "key piece of foundational web tech" was released 5 years ago and gained prominence maybe 2-3 years ago. Let's not exaggerate its impact. We were perfectly fine before Tailwind and will be fine after it.

> key piece of foundational web tech is staring down unsustainability

This must be satire. CSS is what's actually foundational; literally, a foundation upon which Tailwind was built.

I've never used Tailwind. I guess it's just an alternative to Bootstrap from the docs?

There's plenty of alternative CSS frameworks.

I can absolutely see why it's difficult to monetize.

CSS is foundational.

Tailwind is not.

“Foundational” seems a bit overkill here. There is nothing foundational about it – it’s a convenience tool, albeit a very good one.

AI is disruptive technology - like other tech innovations before it, there will be casualties to incumbents. If anything, this just shows how small businesses with need to be more creative when establishing moats and sustainability in this new landscape.

You could go back in time and say this about jQuery. Tailwind's future was always questionable because CSS is growing in new and amazing ways, and wrapping the complexity of new CSS features into helper classes isn't really a sustainable model.

That said if someone wants a business model, figure out a way to get paid to get AI to make UIs using newer CSS features, because right now it's quite terrible at it.

Sounds shady.

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I didn’t know he started a new podcast!

I actually emailed about this after reading this thread, got a warm response from a person, which did not make this any clearer.

I want to use it in an OSS project, does that mean every drive by contributor needs a license?

I was going to say before LLMs Tailwind UI helped me get moving much faster on front-end code. Now I wish there was some kind of context I can provide to use the Tailwind UI instead of hallucinating its own. Tailwind UI still looks better than the generic stuff LLMs generate.

(Open to any suggestions to feed existing ui components from Tailwind into my projects/llm).

Make Tailwind Plus an annual subscription, not a one-time purchase.

Corporate sponsorships.

In-person training focused on big corps.

Acquisition.

How does their stewardship of a CSS library exempt them from being a valid company? The fact that the market is competitive alone isn't justification.

I agree that it's not obvious to me how or why Tailwind should turn a profit as a business, but there are examples of other similar companies turning profits, no?

I think of Motion (formerly framer motion) for example, which is primarily an animation library: https://motion.dev/

It solved a problem, people will pay for that.

Now LLMs have removed the problem, so there's declining interest in solutions.

I believe a lot of this expectation is that as people replace Google searches with LLMs, or even enriched LLM results pushed at the top of Google results, far less click through to the actual sources happens.

This is happening across a lot of web verticals that previously relied on excellent SEO ranking and click through performance to drive ad revenue/conversions/sales. I have direct knowledge of some fairly catastrophic metrics coming out of knowledge base businesses; it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that something like Tailwind is suffering a similar fate.

The advantage is in both the speed of the shorthand when transferring the CSS you know you need for a layout from your brain to the element (flex items-center gap-2 vs. display: flex; align-items: center; gap: .5rem; - just try typing them both out), plus all the stuff inline styles can't do, such as variants based on screen size, colour scheme, user preference, pseudo-classes, parent/sibling state, etc. which you can get done in one place in one file in one sitting.

The money wasn't coming from that.

Narrowing in on background color is an extreme oversimplification of what Tailwind provides. I found it to be a great tool for working with CSS, especially for layout. Business viability can be debated, but the value is way beyond what you suggested.

For your first question, IMO the purported advantage is mainly convention at scale. There's nothing inherently wrong with raw CSS in style tags or other authoring models (well, except CSS-in-JS at runtime...). Tailwind is one simple authoring model that works at scale without fuss and bikeshedding. Wrote up my experience with the advantages and disadvantages on this though a bit ago to be able to point to[1].

For the second question, depends on your definition of "meaningful" I guess. I doubt the original goal was to make money. There's OSS less prolific than Tailwind that makes money. Is it unreasonable for those projects to seek ways to compensate their projects?

[1] https://wlls.dev/blog/on-tailwind

> why anyone ever thought they could make meaningful money from enabling the former

A better question might be why buyers thought it was worth paying for that "advantage" you want explained. When buyers think a thing like that, someone will fulfill their ask.

If LLMs are eating the revenue stream, that likely gives the answer:

Buyers thought Tailwind meant they didn't have to learn or do a thing in order to achieve an outcome. And someone built a niche around that.

Is it true, and if not, why does it persist? Also not hard to explain given today's approaches to learning and the abysmal state of the ad delivery sites that used to be web search.

It's almost impossible today to find the very few sites that show the standard component lib rendered as web components with modern CSS as supported cross browser -- no single party stands to profit from making that case. You'll see it in parts from other frameworks that aren't trying to do the UI saying "our framework drives native HTML/CSS/JS/WASM" with a few examples, but that's surprisingly unlikely to find from Google with "How do I make my web app look good?" if you don't know which terms to use.

One could probably make a niche living giving modern web-native training for corporates. (Plenty firms purport to offer this, but generally don't really teach past the days of bootstrap.) Price against their recurring licensing costs, and a $10K to $30K class (the type enterprise SaaS products like Hashicorp offers for e.g. Terraform ecosystem) for modern web might even pay better than Tailwind.

Generally, though, arbitrage plays can't be expected to last unless the value-add is actual work others don't want to do, so business model decay is likely to happen to things like Tailwind that have their ideas become standards that get implemented by the browser industry (see Apple and "Sherlocking": https://appdevelopermagazine.com/sherlocked:-the-controversi...

Can you modify your style tag to make the background turn purple on a mobile device? No? Ok.

They had 8 employees

Before LLMs, Google was showing highlights which took crawled content and displayed it on google search results, meaning they’d get less traffic on their site while google stole their content.

It’s unfortunate that google helped kickstart the world wide web but now they’re extracting everything while polluting search results with ads

Doesn't matter. Even if people were for some reason still going to their docs there would simply be no need for the types of paid products they offer - prebuilt template components.

Why pay for a template when AI's can shit out your entire design system and multiple templates in 5 minutes, not to mention competition from other template systems like shadcn that are completely free.

And yes they might not be the best quality but you just prompt it until you like it and then use it as a reference.

Its almost like he is asking users to take a stand between using LLMs and using Tailwind.

LLMs, or Tailwind. Pick one!

> Seems like their whole business model was based on the fact that tailwind was difficult to use

Uhhh no... People already struggle with CSS. No one would use Tailwind if it made it even more difficult. I've used and loved Tailwind for 5 years and some without ever having any components written for me. At worst it's as difficult as CSS (centering a div is not any easier, you just write it in a different place), and in some areas like responsiveness (media queries like screen size breakpoints) the syntax is way easier to read and write.

The problem their business model was solving is first that good design is hard, and second that even if you can design something that looks good, you might not be good at implementing it in CSS. They did those things for you, and you can copy-paste it straight into your app with a single block of code thanks to Tailwind.

You're right that LLMs essentially solved this same issue in a more flexible way that most people would prefer, and it's just one feature of many.

Bolt is what turned me onto it (same with React Aria).

source?

It is clearly the beginning of the end of many small shops in the supply chain. I hope bigger fish buy them so the tech can be more integrated into future AI products, but I doubt they will be smart enough to do that.

I know CSS and was quite sceptical about tailwind before I used it in anger.

I was going to write a longer response, but instead I keep reading your last sentence:

> Is normal that this people now use other products more effective how AI for this task.

I think it's too early to tell on that.

It’s open source under an MIT license, I wouldn’t use Tailwind if it wasn’t open source but there is nothing stopping them from future releases being non-open source.

They can’t retroactively pull the license, and most people would just start using a OSS fork of tailwind if they did.

That's not what they're talking about here, though, is it? They have premium offerings as well, which LLMs are causing people to not buy.

Put another way: Adam said traffic to their docs was down 40% and revenue was down 80%. I don't think it's purely traffic-driven revenue.

I don’t know how big the “team” was, but 75% suggests maybe 4 engineers, one left. The next number up that works is 8, and 8 full time engineers to work on tailwind seems like a lot.

LinkedIn says the company was 2-10 employees. 75% laid off wouldn't have been a lot of people. Tough for them though.

It was three out of four people.

https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/1467...

In this comment, he says that he had to lay off 3 people.

Not sure if this means it was him+4engs and now it’s just him+1eng or if he’s including himself and he’s working alone now.

But either way, can’t be fun

3 of 4. Not a behemoth by any stretch. A bit sad.

I was wondering the same thing.

Out of curiosity, do you think the decrease in revenue for your tech course business is due to lack of demand (i.e. potential customers just ask an LLM rather than learn from a course now), or due to disruption in your acquisition channel (i.e. reduced traffic from SEO to your blog due to potential customers seeing Google's LLM answers at the top of the search results page)? Like for example, do you have other marketing channels such as social media, youtube or paid ads?

Hey! you just discovered media piracy dude! Congrats!

Im currently considering buying it actually. I’ve landed a decent side-project building out a CRM for a small business that wants to ditch Salesforce. It’s all internal tooling so the customer has no care or need for a highly customized fancy UI and that $299 is peanuts relative to the time saved and my hourly rate. While I could just use Bootstrap it’s starting to feel a bit too dated (subjective).

That's no better than robots.txt, it's simple to bypass and with the current LLM tech there's lots of plausible deniability regarding the output.

I'm fairly convinced these are bot / LLM generated PR's in the first place; the content is nonsensical garbage.

Companies like Vercel, Lovable, and Stackblitz should dissolve because their existence is a net negative for humanity.

I agree with the sentiment that companies should help fund open source they depend on, but I think it's a stretch to say those business succeeded "only" because of Tailwind. It's a great project, although I'm pretty sure they would have figured out a way to work with CSS without it.

Welcome to the internet, most of it is build by unknown OSS developers, how many people will you go ask these companies to pay for?

I think you're underestimating the composition.

It's not React only. It has pure/regular HTML, React, and Vue. I have mainly only used the pure HTML personally as I use Phoenix/LiveView for most of my stuff, and it works phenomenally well and is very copy/paste friendly. The UI/console they provide is also top notch. For others who do use React, the React stuff also worked well too for one project I did that was a SPA.

It's well worth the money IMHO.

You can actually use tailwind via the script tag in a plain HTML file. Not for production, but great for whipping up prototypes

shadcn/ui I'd argue is probably the single biggest factor in the declining Tailwind revenue more so than just LLMs in general.

As said is it is to say shadcn is what Tailwind should've created and maintained for a fee rather than some html/css templates that are easily replicated.

I say this as someone who bought Tailwind+ to support the project many years ago and still use Tailwind every single day.

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I listened to his podcast this morning where he mentions 75% of their four person engineering team was laid off (only the founders and one engineer remain)

https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...

if you actually read the thread: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...

Adam added a comment to that thread with the 75% number and more context.

Scroll down

ctrl+F 75%

I think in this case, just about everyone falls into the funnel. I think it's difficult to find a potential buyer of tailwind who doesn't visit the documentation.

I also made a horrible life decision in starting a company around developer tools, and I agree. Taking one of the comments from the PR:

> It's insane to blame everybody else for not being able to create a viable business model from an OSS project. Everybody who is using Tailwind is actually SUPPORTING Tailwind. Everybody who is reporting bugs properly is SUPPORTING Tailwind. Everybody who is collaborating and PRs changes is SUPPORTING Tailwind.

> Tailwind grew a lot due to community acceptance and support, and collaborations.

> The only person to blame here is the CEO/Main maintainer of Tailwind. They've made bad decisions, hired coders without knowing how to make enough money to pay them.

> If you want to monetize a free service, you either know what you do or you make mistakes and lose what you've built. It was always a risk; we are not at fault.

> @adamwathan I respect you for everything you've done, but you need to take a few breaths, take a walk, think, sleep, and come back, ask apologize of the community, and start working on solutions/crisis management.

And you always know that when you open the GH profile of people saying such things, you'll see an empty timeline. This particular user has a single repository which he's committed to a handful of times over the last year and has setup a GitHub sponsorship for it.

I try to remind myself that these types of people are a (loud) minority but it's absolutely soul destroying.

there's no knowledge on deepwiki

only slop

It says 75% of the engineer team. There might be other roles not affected.

Because of point 3 most SWE's are also hesistant to pay for software. The positive feedback loop of "I did well out of this so i will support others as well" is over.

When you are thinking your days are numbered any cost to develop software (even token budget) is measured. As coding becomes commoditized the ROI in code will drop of that code (capitalism rewards scarcity; not value delivered) and you suddenly become cost conscious. We are moving from a monopoly-moat like market to a competitive cost based market in SWE as AI improves.

It would appear that they pay their employees fairly well, as seen in this old job posting [1] (not all levels will make this much of course but it gives you a general idea, almost 300k a year is a lot even for a staff engineer).

$275,000 is almost $23,000 a month. Take that times N amount of employees, and other business overhead, and suddenly $80k a month is literally peanuts.

[1] https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...

Do you think they’d survive?

People with that perspective shouldn't have been doing open source in the first place. AI isn't hurting people sharing things, only people who are pretending to share but actually indirectly selling things.

Sounds like 3:

https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/1467...

Six of eight

What was the monetization opportunity exactly? Pay for updated versions of the tailwind classes or something?

The core product was basically a library and those seem pretty hard to sell in any language, right?

I logged in just to tell you you're being a non-empathic ass.

What have _you_ created that makes money sustainably? What challenges have _you_ navigated around AI driving traffic to your docs down by 80%?

Some people...

> This is incredibly dumb and greedy on so many fronts.

Please don't fulminate on HN. Thoughtful critique is fine, rage is not. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Greed implies excessive accumulation of wealth. Based on the public statements, they are laying people off because they cannot afford to keep paying them while keeping the project afloat. It doesn't seem like greed is a factor here.

AI putting people out of work is a very real issue, and it is discussed on HN quite often. Here we have a very real example of it (apparently) and the reaction is vitriolic, but not against the AI processes, but the creators who are losing their work.

He's still trying to figure it out. I've been a customer for years now and I've rarely ever bought a product that is an user-friendly and user-respecting as Tailwind UI (Tailwind Plus). If you've never had to lay people off before, it is an absolutely gut wrenching experience, surely moreso when you have to be the one to make the call. Let the man be a human and experience some emotions. I have a lot of faith that he'll make the right call.

Greedy? He said revenue was down 80%.

Here's some more context, which you seem to need: the reason they've laid off 75% of their devs is because their revenue is down 80%, despite tailwind being more popular than ever. This seems to be caused by a drop in visits to their documentation, which is really the only way people find out about their commercial offerings. This drop in visits to the docs is, in turn, most likely caused by the increased use of LLMs.

Why hate on someone doing their best and building.

Why?

I don't think that's what they're saying. They're saying people don't need to pay for their services because AI can do it and has "taken their jobs". Not that their CEO replaced employees with AI

> At around 1 PM Pacific yesterday, Adam called someone who had just been laid off from Laracasts an idiot. The person was lamenting about being replaced by AI.

This is totally untrue. The person who got laid off from Laracasts is @simonswiss, the person Adam is calling an idiot is @benjamincrozat.

You might want to clarify that Adam responded to someone commenting about another individual being laid off from Laracasts; he did not call the individual who was laid off an idiot

he wasn't, he was calling the person who responded to the individual who got laid off

Maybe they don't, since CSS is the easiest to tap into in terms of programming. Database-driven software still heavily relies on seasoned engineers and cannot be messed with AI.

For something basic like CSS, it is true. Ask ChatGPT or Claude Code to come up with any Tailwind template, and it will spit out within seconds for free, and even integrate it into the project effortlessly. This approach does not apply to heavy software such as a comprehensive CRM or another type of CRUD platform.

You need engineers but they have to pay for tokens now. Paying subscription just to have ability to do the job.

I think it's too late for that. For new projects? Of course.

I urge you to understand what he is going through, he started the project, made it available freely, as more effort was required he added a premium offering to keep the whole thing running and hire more help. Please pause to think before coming to a rush judgement. How would you react if you had done exactly the things he had done, and you just had to lay off most of your team yesterday. We are humans and not robots, for all he has done, he has certainly earned the right to some times focus on what's affecting him first before he can focus on OSS.

Be Kind, we are all born billionaires with billions of "kindness tokens" in the bank, don't use them sparingly.

He gives a gift to the world and you’re telling him to just give it up because somebody did work nobody asked for and he doesn’t want it for his project

Get a grip.

You might have mistaken tailwind and tailscale.

I have done so on countless occasions, but this is about the css "framework".

You're thinking of Tailscale.

Tailwind is a UI styling and components company. Are you thinking of Tailscale?

I think you mean tailscale

Please don't fulminate or post flame bait on HN. This low-effort comment started just the kind of flamewar we're trying to avoid on HN. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529364 and marked it off topic.

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hm, families need to eat.

WTF?

So your answer to "how should open source projects achieve financial sustainability" is "don't even try"?

You're existing in hyper-capitalism. So yes big surprise, people need to make money.