There’s no doubt that AI has had a significant impact on this type of business model - selling premium components. That said, in 2026 there are still plenty of premium kits generating substantial revenue despite AI.

I believe something else has had a much greater impact on Tailwind UI’s business than AI, and that is shadcn, which was released in September 2023. The fact that Adam didn’t recognize this shift and adapt Tailwind UI to align with the shadcn ecosystem is, in my view, the primary reason sales have declined, not AI.

I used Tailwind UI Plus extensively before shadcn, but after its release, I lost the motivation to copy, paste, and manually modify components when I can simply pull free components (or components from another kit) directly via shadcn.

I genuinely hope Adam updates Tailwind Plus and creates a shadcn compatible registry for their components. That alone could significantly boost sales.

The lack of Figma integration or a first-party plugin was a huge bummer for me. I still use Tailwind almost religiously because it just clicked for me and I have been on enough projects with terrible SCSS organization that I want to leave that as far behind me as I can.

I do appreciate that even without an integration, it’s fairly easy to set up vim on one screen and figma on the other and be able to translate the css to TW without any issues or having to constantly look things up.

alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy. had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down?

i wouldn't have bought a sub, but i did pay for tailwind premium (and, frankly, didn't use it like i'd've hoped). however, it was a bit of a Kickstarter investment for me. i like Adam's persona, and was happy to see continued investment down this path.

as many a business knows, you need to bring new initiatives to the table over, or accept that your one product carries all your risk.

thank you for Tailwind, Adam.

> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.

This is from Adam but I also suspect the same. LLMs has a bias toward tailwind css. I had Claude/GLM multiple times try to add tailwind css classes even though the project doesn't have any tailwind packages/setup.

This is a business model issue rather than tailwind becoming irrelevant.

FWIW I found Practical UI [1] a more actionable book than Refactoring UI. Both are similar but I found it covered the material in a more accessible way.

1. https://www.practical-ui.com/

i've read it and retained nothing. I always wonder what people get out of these hyped things that i'm unable to see.

> No discovery - no business.

I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less.

We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search and being ranked high in their respective industries. It certainly takes more effort to craft a script, film it, edit it to add text overlays, animations and catchy effects, but its showing me its being effective in the leads we're generating.

I'm not sure if this is a sort of generational thing back when my parents were so engrained to use the yellow pages and then that stopped once the internet got into the advertising business - but it feels like a similar transition is taking place again.

As many have already told me, "Ignore AI at your peril"

Underscoring the parent comment and adding to it: watching technologists on a site called Hacker News cheer on the centralization of power is really something.

> as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery

In my limited web dev experience with these tools, they suggest and push Tailwind CSS very often when asked for advice.

The Tailwind company wasn't selling that, though. They were selling premium packages of components, templates, and themes. The demand for that type of material has dropped off significantly now that you can get an LLM to do a moderately good job of making common layouts and components. Then you can adjust them yourself until they're exactly what you want.

> most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery

What about restaurants, transportation, construction, healthcare, or manufacturing?

Will those go out of business too?

As a user and customer, I see that as a good thing.

I thought the same, and yet on the other hand, how could they have done it differently? People don't want to pay a subscription just to write a DSL of CSS. Perhaps they could've done it per project like some companies, but I don't think it'd be as popular as their lifetime model. Ironic.

My current take is that if you start an open-source project now, you should go full AGPL (or similar copyleft license), and require a CLA for contributors.

If your thing ends up actually good you now have a defence against exploitation, and a way to generate income reliably (by selling the code under a different license). afaik, organisations like the FSF even endorse this.

> businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing

This has always been the case. Sometimes they give back by opening one or more of their components. Other times they don't. I don't see it as a problem. It doesn't usually detract from what's already published.

In cases where it would detract, simply use an appropriate license to curb the behavior.

> LLMs are just accelerating this trend.

LLMs might not prove sufficiently capable to meaningfully impact this dynamic.

Alternatively, if they achieve that level then I think they will accomplish the long stated goal of FOSS by enabling anyone to translate constraints from natural language into code. If I could simply list off behaviors of existing software and get a reliable reproduction I think that would largely obsolete worrying about software licenses.

I realize we're nowhere near that point yet, and also that reality is more complex than I'm accounting for there. But my point is that I figure either LLMs disrupt the status quo and we see benefits from it or alternatively that business as usual continues with some shiny new tools.

>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.

As incentivized by temporarily-free licenses.

Referring to TFA (couple of comments on the issue).

https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...

https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...

I think it's https://tailwindcss.com/blog

I think context matters here. People are being kind to someone who just had to lay off most of their team because, despite their project’s popularity and success (maybe even because of it), a massive change in the ecosystem completely destroyed their business model.

I’ve never been a huge fan of using Tailwind personally, but I deeply appreciated that they were making a (mostly) non-enterprise FOSS model work in an interesting way. It’s a shame that it seems that’s likely dead in the water now.

Perhaps if you’d simply read the thread you would have also seen these comments, which don’t name Adam but are addressed to him:

> We can't make it easier to use our product because then fewer people will visit our website" is certainly a business strategy.

> You are telling your customers that getting money from them, is more important than providing a service to help them.

This is madness. Some stories actually have good guys. I don't know Adam directly, but we have plenty of second degree connections. I've benefited immensely from his work, have never heard anyone say a single negative thing about him, and I genuinely believe he's done more to push the web forward with Tailwind than the larger players have done (certainly more than Facebook did with React and Google has done with Angular/AMP/etc).

Reflexively assuming that unanimous positive sentiment towards someone is itself an indication of a problem is exactly the reason people are writing posts as recently as (double checks) _yesterday_ titled "65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and They Outperform" https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/

[dead]

And this is why AI coding will eventually degrade into a mess. Enjoy it while it lasts.

AI eats up users caring about $company which makes library, library degrades because nobody is paying, $company goes insolvent, library goes unmaintained and eventually defunct, AI still tries to use it.

Vibe coding with libraries is a fad that is destined to die.

Vibe coding your own libraries will result in million line codebases nobody understands.

Nothing about either is sustainable, it’s all optics and optics will come crashing down eventually.

It's just interesting because most of the talk is programmers talking about AI taking their job by replacing them not taking their job because it's taking away revenue from the business.

Reminds me of the problem with Google & their rich results which wiped out and continues to wipe out blogs who rely on people actually visiting their site vs. getting the information they seek without leaving Google.

Anything open source will be turned against its authors and against ICs.

We thought it would give us freedom, but all of the advantage will accrue to the hyperscalers.

If we don't build open source infra that is owned by everyone, we'll be owned by industrial giants and left with a thin crust that is barely ours. (This seems like such a far-fetched "Kumbaya, My Lord" type of wishful thinking, that it's a joke that I'm even suggesting this is possible.)

Tech is about to cease being ours.

I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.

> 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.

You can block accounts on GitHub and add a note as to why. Might be simpler and more accessible later on than a random TXT (plus, it probably updates if they change their username).

Note that blocking also means they can’t contribute to your repos. Which you may not care about anyway.

"Sorry, we cannot give you the job because even though you're qualified and passed our interviews, you were such a meano to Adam! That is a no-go at this organization"

Who trusted you with hiring

Nice, nothing like a little personal bias to inject into an interview process. If you can't handle criticism and you're just looking for sycophants, you're probably not the type of employer or hiring manager most people want to work for anyway.

insert "First time?" meme

You can use a product and still be critical, especially when layoffs happen, truth is there are a lot of things we don't know about their finances – tailwind definitely is successful by any metrics, they have corporate sponsors that alone give them a healthy MRR (I count at least $100k/month from the sponsors page alone)

I sympathise that it sucks having to fire people, been there. But it sucks more to get fired.

I am one of those critics, but I never used Tailwind. A layoff of that magnitude is horrific, but if what they are describing as their business model is true, they really really need to rethink it. I wonder what the size of their marketing team is like, and if they were involved in the layoffs. Seems like they need some help there. I found the "downvote" spam in that thread, for reasonable posts, to be quite off-putting, and that led me to my remarks.

[flagged]

I wrote down your handle, so if you are ever hiring, I will be able to skip your toxic place.

I am not 100% sure about that - I usually find AI written CSS to be slightly visually flawed and almost always logically flawed.

The way you write websites that actually work imo, is you understand how your chosen CSS layout engine works roughly, and try to avoid switching between layout modes - traditional to flexbox to grid to flexbox again down the tree can drive the most brillant devs utterly mad .

But seriously, after a certain complexity threshold, it becomes impossible to tell what's going on and why.

And if you don't think about it in advance, it's very easy to reach that threshold, especially if you don't get to write the whole page from scratch, but have to build on the work of others.

AI (and many frontend devs) do write-only CSS - they add classes until the code they write looks right.

But code like that tends to fall apart under multiple resolutions, browsers, screen sizes, devices etc.

I am not a frontend dev, and came pretty late to the frontend party. That said I felt that anything that obscures the raw CSS makes it much harder to deliver UI that works right, as it peppers hidden side effects across your code.

That's why I wasn't too keen on CSS frameworks like Tailwind - I found that when writing frontend code the writing part takes up the minority of the time, it's producing a well thought out layout flow is what is actually the biggest sink of time and effort.

That said, I'm not a frontend dev, and I'm to too good at CSS - but not horrible either - so I defer to the judgement of others who are pros at this, its just my opinion and experience.

If you want a bunch of tailwind class slop, then yes. Otherwise, A lot of context engineering is needed if you want it to write modular tailwind components properly for large projects where consistency is important.

It is "progress" when tech bros displace traditional workers, but it is "heartbreaking" when a tech bro gets displaced by other tech bros.

Whats the 2026 version of "you should learn to code"?

Three. He fired three people.

Just posting the "75%" without context is a bit of an odd choice. He explains why in the podcast, but it still feels like he should have specified immediately to avoid assumptions about scale.

I'm also criticizing you for not hiring the laid-off people at their former salary.

He mentions that tailwind is more popular than ever before but their revenue is down 80% so unless he’s lying about that it makes sense rather than tailwind going out of style.

I think you're overestimating how much people care about quality.

The Tailwind Team's Refactoring UI book was a big eye opener for me. I had no idea how many subtle insights are required to create truly effective UX.

I think people vastly underestimate just how much work goes into determining the correct set of primitives create a design system like Tailwind, let alone a full blown component library like TailwindUI.

While I believe you, its an argument that artists bring forward since the beginning of art, so even many hundred years before the internet on average humankind did not value this work.

> design system ... discount how hard something like that is to build.

This is probably a good thing. The web would be much better off with fewer design systems.

It's not that hard to build a design system with decent accessibility. Just use shadcn ui components instead of rolling your own.

Ironically, some of the same people that are ready to pay $200.-/month Claude subscriptions.

Bought a license, not a trial. Freudian slip.

I think you can see this when you look at the downvotes on that GitHub issue on any comment which suggests gating AI access behind a paywall.

I don’t think the scraping party cares about the license, if the JavaScript code is linked online they’ll just take it. Source: see the art industry

I think AI has come as the industry was somewhat maturing and most frameworks/software had previous incarnations that mostly did the same thing or could be done adhoc anyway. The need for libraries as the models get better probably declines as well.

Not all open source but a lot of it is fundamentally for humans to consume. If AI can, at its extreme (still remains to be seen), just magic up the software then the value of libraries and a lot of open source software will decline. In some ways its a fundamentally different paradigm of computing, and we don't yet understand what that looks like.

As AI gets better OSS contributes to it; but in its source code feeding the training data not as a direct framework dependency. If the LLM's continue to get better I can see the whole concept of frameworks being less and less necessary.

They already pay people to generate training data.

Exactly the business model wasn't strong enough, just upselling templates for hundreds of dollars which AI can churn in few tokens was easy to disrupt.

I think all kinds of libraries are becoming redundant. Unless the library solves significant technical problems its likely AI will generate whatever you need. Even tailwind itself is kind of unnecessary, I've used it a lot, but recently been just using AI to generate raw css on side projects, I feel it works pretty well. Tailwind is really a developer convivence, it made things pretty fast to style, but now I don't really think it has anywhere near the advantages it did. If you aren't writing tailwindcss but generating it, almost all the advantage is gone. Only thing it kind of provides is a set of defaults / standards

I've known of the paid components for years and never thought of buying them. It's so easy to build things with Tailwind that it never crossed my mind.

Fwiw I don’t even think shadcn is good, but our app is built on top of those components already, so we can’t change it without changing everything, so we’re stuck with it.

I've considered no longer uploading work I do to GitHub.

I think we just need better platforms for enterprise procurement.

The issue is that currently you either publish as free & open-source and get tons of traction and usage but little funding, or you publish as paid and get no traction.

The blocker for paid software isn't actually the money itself (this is solvable by just pricing it reasonably), it's all the red tape that someone has to go through to get their company to purchase a license to begin with.

Maybe a marketplace that preemptively does audits, provides insurance, code escrow, licensing, etc ahead of time, that vendors can put their software on it proactively and companies can have accounts where their employees can just open an "app store" and just buy/license software directly? Similar to the AWS marketplace but for libraries.

It already exists. Tailwind has had GitHub sponsorships enabled for years but only 5 people have ever given them money that way.

Agreed. If Tailwind could give you a paid subscription to a service that plugs into your agent and will recommend component compositions, styles, etc. (basically how those web app generators companies work but targeted at experienced devs) they have a chance to survive the transition.

Tailwind can be made less intuitive?

> There are so many other ways they could be reaching potential customers

Like what, exactly, now that most people interact with tailwind purely via AI agents?

I started work on a front end project React/Astro/Tailwind project for the first time in about a year, building out with CLI agents, and one things that's changed compared to a year ago is that I have the entire UI basically working and I haven't even looked at the tailwind classes. I just say yes that's fine but can you improve the width for the sidebar on mobile (obviously paraphrasing here, I write the requirements for the agent carefully) and within a couple of iterations it's working. I keep expecting to have to jump in to manually fix things but so far I haven't needed to.

I worked in FE for years and I know tailwind and CSS quite deeply. But the entire extent of what I've needed to know for this project so far can be summed up as "it's some kind of styling tool". I never had to look at the docs, I never went to their website, or or Twitter or anywhere else that might have worked for marketing.

I did make an informed decision in choosing this stack, but it's equally likely that the AI could have recommended it to me, and the AI entirely set up the project scaffolding and config for me.

So where in this could they possibly have marketed paid components to me? And even if they did, why would I have paid for them when Shadcn is free and was added automatically by the AI?

They maintained professional etiquette in their marketing and I don't blame them. If you annoy people, they will not recommend you.

I've watched open source projects get lambasted because their developers dared to make a buck. Being conservative with their marketing is what is expected of them even if it isn't fair.

What marketing staff?

> they need to fire their marketing staff

Sounds like they did just that. Ereyesterday.

I never said Tailwind the company wasn't a business, when I said "a product is not a business" I meant that as advice to creators in general, not in specific to Tailwind; of course it is, it made millions in revenue. What I meant was that even though businesses may exist, having a long-term, durable business model is not always viable.

It’s still pretty profitable, more than $100k a month

I wonder how they're doing too then, as we don't have public stats about them (Telerik was acquired by a public company Progress Software but they do not break down revenue by Telerik specifically). Ultimately, this business of selling components is not sound in the age of AI.

Another thing to consider, it seems JS devs use more AI for work than .NET devs for example, which might be in more old-school companies and industries. I can't verify this but there seems to be a correlation between companies who use hip new CSS and JS frameworks, and their AI usage, thus accelerating Tailwind Corp's cannibalization by AI, as most vibe coders are building web apps from what I've seen and Tailwind and React are very well represented in the training set.

PrimeTek components (PrimeReact, PrimeNG) are MIT licensed open source.

They also have a CSS utility library (like Tailwind).

you have 2 comments in total and a super popular name :-(

And that's totally fine what Lovable is doing. Tailwind offers an MIT-licensed library that anyone is free to use without paying for it. Tailwind's paid offering is optional, and many businesses won't need it. Just as non-paying users of OSS are not entitled to anything from the maintainers, maintainers are not entitled to revenue from users who are complying with the license terms of their free offering.

As an open source developer myself, it concerns me that so much of what we do us under- and un-funded, but that's the licensing model Tailwind chose. If you want something different, then release it under the AGPL (or something else that businesses aren't comfortable using, or cannot use), and charge for commercial licensing for any use of your product. Yes, you'll have fewer users, but that may be the trade off you need to make in order to build a sustainable business.

Great point here, the only thing that feels greedy to me is that these larger companies do not contribute back to the foundational libraries that they are building on, even to a minor extent for ecosystem improvements. Perhaps greedy is a strong word.

i’ve always felt that oss licenses needs to include responsible use terms or something. some orgs dont mind paying for value contributed but you need to provide a structure to do so, even if that is on a voluntary basis.

If anyone from Lovable etc sees these comments, great opportunity for sponsorship where it can make a difference upstream.

Some companies have done this well, at a stage Retool use to sponsor a number of open source libs which greatly helped them with exposure to devs. Surely a better way to spend ad revenue imo.

If you give something away for free, don't complain when people take it for free. Make it AGPL instead then.

I believe the new UI libraries hit hard more than the AI impact. AI is not always that accurate so eventually if you want to deep dive in, you still have to turn around to the doc. But the new libraries though, they give the market another good choice, especially when shadcn came out, it's so huge that I personally even feels there's no need to go for the raw Tailwind experience, and what's worse is that shadcn is still evolving fast.

I believe the only way to let Tailwind survive is changing the business model.

they were never positioned as a unicorn, the question becomes can you be a small business/SMB in software/tech

That’s an excellent point, thanks for linking.

My takeaway from this thread is: his theory’s great until you discover that your customers are wiling pay *so* much more.

On a more positive note, I’ve been blown away by the (largely, one conspicuous troll-like annoyance aside) positive thoughts in the comments. Maybe it’s not too late?

I like the approach of paying for major upgrades.. So you get free updates on your current version for as long as you want, but when the next major update comes out, you either stick with your current version at no cost (and ideally still get maintenance and security patches) but if you want the next major version, there's an upgrade cost.

That feels fair to me.

Right, but you can do a one-off purchase to get the product as it existed at the time. Instead they offered all future improvements in the price.

This is not sustainable once your customer growth dies down, as it eventually did.

I guess this is what makes marketing so tricky; I myself would’ve bought a $10/mo subscription so much sooner given the chance, which by now - and happily, incidentally - would’ve brought in way more dosh than my one-off payment.

Oh $DEITY you just reminded me of summer of code.

Stray thought: adding a library the PR submitter controls would be a good starting point for an XZ/SSH-style supply chain attack: badger & threaten the maintainers to add the dependency, and then sneak something into a future library update.

How about in GitHub comments like everyone else? You're just self-promoting

Film whatever you want but please please please don't film or use your phone while driving. It's incredibly dangerous and inconsiderate to all those you endanger.

DaisyUI also seems to be popular.

It is.

At least in the React space where there are a ton of libraries like Mantine or React Aria which I use.

I tried ShadCN then quickly ported everything over to Mantine. A bit of config magic later, I can quickly whip out functional UIs faster than I can think of features.

Good analogy but it feels a bit different, in a sense that the LLMs index all your content and then you don't benefit from any of that outcome. You essentially had no saying to the process of indexing, whether it's MIT licensed or else.

I'd say that this is a very interesting situation, I would not blame it on the founder. Nobody saw this coming ...

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

Good point, I made the mistake of skimming and missed that part.

> It's always 1000 line SCSS files and nobody knows what is going on there

It's been 15-20 years since I last saw that.

There are tons of solutions on how to easily organize CSS code these days that don't involve TW.

> and nobody knows what is going on there.

For what its worth, I had the same experience with Tailwind. I regularly see classes that don't have an meaningful outcome.

I don't think the problem is Tailwind or CSS (well, I guess Tailwind is CSS with extra steps but you get the idea) syntax (or any of the CSS preprocessors), but the fact that styling in browsers has accumulated a lot of cruft, and people who haven't "grown up" with it over the years don't fully understand it (I am more competent than most with it and there's still times I screw up).

One thing that's kinda nice about Tailwind is that it made copy-pasting components easier. So people can get something decent without fully understanding what's happening

Yeah, I’m not advocating for css or against tailwind

Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals

The main problem is the premise of tailwind

Every single web design on earth is a compound opinion on like a few hundred popular properties and values

They put all that in one style sheet

Which became the one style sheet on earth

Which made it possible to summon all those styles directly from within our apps

Tailwind is like the chess of utilities. There’s only so many opening and closing moves that running a business on it is incredibly difficult, given supply and demand.

If the goal is to support them, they do offer a subscription: https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor#insiders

While the content is different, it’s much cheaper than Tailwind Plus. If you use AI, it may even be more useful than Plus because of the great agent rules and discord community.

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

Because it's most likely in the training data. I.e., it stole it for you.

how do you know it recreated perfectly. Is it equally customizable? Is it equally accessible? And your LLM models cost money too. If you use the API keys, you can quickly see the cost.

I should’ve clarified. My apps are all open source so it didn’t feel right putting their UI for free out there. It does happen in some projects but it felt easier just to design components myself.

Not only are you wrong (LLMs are horrible at reproducing anything that isn't fairly ABUNDANT in the training data), but it's also quite sad.

AI can write a whole book on anything. You can take anything, even make up a phenomenon, and have an AI write a whole factual-sounding book on it.

How that isn't clearly an indicator to you that it produces loads and loads of BS, I'm really not sure.

That was an internet meme. The real ad said "You wouldn't steal a car".

> Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel

Not true. Models don't make owners money sitting there doing nothing - they only get paid when people find value in what AI is producing for them. The business model of AI companies is actually almost uniquely honest compared to rest of software industry: they rent you a tool that produces value for you. No enshittification, no dark patterns, no taking your data hostage, no turning into a service what should've been a product. Just straightforward exchange of money for value.

So no, it doesn't such for everyone except them. It only sucks for existing businesses that find themselves in competition with LLMs. Which, true, is most of software industry, but it's still just something that happens when major technological breakthrough is achieved. Electricity and Internet and internal combustion engines did the same thing to many past industries, too.

It doesn't matter what Tailwind your opinion is. It matters that they built something which definitely has market validation that people were willing to pay for. AI took their lunch AND their lunch money.

You're clearly not a fan of Tailwind, and that's fair enough.

However, stating that Adam Wathan (AW) "basically forced [Tailwind] onto the world" is nonsense. People chose to adopt it because it solved a problem.

In case you're not familiar with the origins of Tailwind, AW was building a SaaS live on stream, and everyone kept asking about the little utility CSS framework he'd built for himself (rather than the short-lived SaaS).

That's how it all started. Not through a big SEO campaign, or the mysterious ability to force others to choose a CSS framework against their will, but because people saw it, and wanted to use it.

> this whole "ai is theft" argument is just pure cope. tailwind was always just a thin abstraction over css standards

Both of those can be true.

> 2020 they had $2m+ ARR

You've got an extra "R" in there. In 2020 their only revenue from was non-recurring lifetime software purchases. Like SaaS if you had a 100% churn rate.

On his morning walk/podcast thing about the topic he said 75% of the team = 3 developers

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

I think a problem is that tailwind has no moat compared to most of those. If it never received any further updates today it would still be effectively feature-complete, save for the occasional new css features.

> How would you possibly enforce this?

The legal system.

If you see a bunch of Tailwind markup on websites without a license key, you can enforce your license. The LLMs can write the code for you, but they either have to negotiate their own license or instruct users to get their own.

The comparable I am familiar with is Font Awesome. Even if you want a free plan, you still have to create an account and get a key.

So you're saying that just because they can't pay everyone, they should pay no one?