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Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
- moralestapia 9mo ago[flagged]
- nemomarx 9mo agoWhat 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?
- richwater 9mo agoI 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...
- moralestapia 9mo agoPersonal attacks are against the rules here.
- berbec 9mo agoand you don't think adamwathan deserves the same respect?
- moralestapia 9mo agoThat's not what the rule is about. Give it some thought, if it were like that half of this site wouldn't be allowed to speak about Trump et. al. the way they do. This is the guy you're carrying water for, btw: https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2008646797619864060 https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2008646797619864060 I'll stop the conversation here as it is off-topic from the thread.
- kshri24 9mo agoReally sucks to see this happen! Been using Tailwind for past few years now. All the more reason to go closed source. Except for few really vital components that have national security implications (OS/Kernel, drivers, programming languages), which can be funded and supported by universities, Governments etc, I am of the strong opinion that everything else should go closed source. Enough with this BS. Stop feeding the slop.
- TeMPOraL 9mo agoPeople 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.
- kshri24 9mo agoThere is no one in this World who will do things purely for altruistic purposes. Even if not for money, it would be for something intangible that ingratiates the Self (fame for example). I can't find a single example of a software developer who has put out software purely for some altruistic purpose without any returns on that investment (direct or indirect). Building a sustainable business model was a great way to justify open source. Not anymore.
- TeMPOraL 9mo ago> There is no one in this World who will do things purely for altruistic purposes. Even if not for money, it would be for something intangible that ingratiates the Self (fame for example). And pretty much none of that is threatened by AI. LLMs learning from code, or articles, found online, are at worst neutral to this, and in many ways beneficial. They're only negative if you're using your contribution as bait to hold your audience, in lieu of a more honest approach of openly selling it to them. > Building a sustainable business model was a great way to justify open source. Not anymore. Or poison it. Open Source as a business model was always an anti-competitive hack, similar to "free with ads": drive price down to 0, destroying any other way of making money in this space, including "honest exchange of money for value".
- danirogerc 9mo agoEventually AI agents will have to pay to access libraries.
- kevlened 9mo agoMore details: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/14677#discussioncomment-15435530 https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/1467... https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2008909129591443925 https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2008909129591443925 https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six-months-left https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
- OGEnthusiast 9mo ago[flagged]
- guywithahat 9mo agoI 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
- wesselbindt 9mo agoHere'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.
- usernamed7 9mo agousing tailwind docs is awful. I'd MUCH rather use an LLM than try to grok their documentation. That it was their only way to promote commercial offerings is not my problem, there are many other ways to approach this than encouraging a worse experience for devs.
- FromTheFirstIn 9mo agoWhat other ways can you approach it?
- hebrides 9mo agoWhat about the docs do you find awful? I’ve always found them great: a short explanation and a minimal working example.
- pavel_lishin 9mo agoWhy?
- ZeroConcerns 9mo agoThat's sad to hear, if true, and I'd have gladly paid for Tailwind if they'd had a "OK, so you use our CSS indirectly" program in place. I'm aware of "Tailwind Plus", but that seems to be React-only, and thus the opposite of where I want to be.
- freedomben 9mo agoIt'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.
- ZeroConcerns 9mo agoI just had a more-detailed look, and I'm not sure where I'd find the pure-HTML stuff? From https://tailwindcss.com/plus/templates/pocket#pricing https://tailwindcss.com/plus/templates/pocket#pricing: "Our website templates are built using Next.js, so all of the markup is written using React" And the individual components that make up these templates don't seem to have pricing attached, nor non-React usage examples?
- freedomben 9mo agoOh, yeah the templates are React/Next.js, but the components and things are not (they are what I described above). Templates are great but 95% of the value I get is the components and things
- ZeroConcerns 9mo agoSo, my initial reaction that "Tailwind Plus" only offers apparent value for React users is... entirely valid?
- 9mo ago
- freedomben 9mo agoVery sad to hear, I bought Tailwind UI years ago and although it was a lot more expensive than I wanted, I've appreciated the care and precision and highly recommend buying it (It's now called Tailwind Plus) even still (maybe even especially now). Mad props to Adam for his honesty and transparency. Adam if you're reading, just know that the voices criticizing you are not the only voices out there. Thanks for all you've done to improve web development and I sincerely hope you can figure out a way to navigate the AI world, and all the best wishes. 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.
- dawnerd 9mo agoI 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.
- khy 9mo agoTailwind 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?
- satvikpendem 9mo agoI 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.
- re-thc 9mo agoMUI sells paid components paid monthly. Definitely doable for the paid product.
- 9mo ago
- jolt42 9mo agoAI taking jobs by users avoiding ads. It makes me wonder how widespread this is and what other "not so obvious" job-taking effects it has.
- bjord 9mo agoThat'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.
- srameshc 9mo ago> 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. Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
- huflungdung 9mo ago[dead]
- random_duck 9mo agoAgreed. Also I could not imagine being in his shoes, it must be heartbreaking seeing all his work burn like this.
- blitzar 9mo agoIt 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"?
- elictronic 9mo agoYou should learn to vote for UBI?
- krainboltgreene 9mo agoEveryone suggests UBI like this sort of thing is a massive hurricane and we just gotta take it on the chin. Nah man, this stuff isn't happening anywhere else. We can simply say "No, you don't get to ruin the economy for your personal profit."
- falcor84 9mo agoWell, here you said it; is it over now?
- usernamed7 9mo ago[flagged]
- freedomben 9mo agoHe'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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- femiagbabiaka 9mo agoGreedy? He said revenue was down 80%.
- beart 9mo agoGreed 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.
- ares623 9mo agoThere definitely is greed involved. But the other way around
- tomhow 9mo ago> 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- stephenheron 9mo agoWe bought Tailwind UI and it was very good and I learned a lot of nice tricks from it. Real shame, and I fear it is just the start of the impacts of AI on our industry.
- godzillabrennus 9mo agoIt 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.
- kayo_20211030 9mo agoThis is miserable all 'round. I don't know Adam from, well, Adam, but he seems a decent skin in the podcast. Nor, do I know much about Tailwind. However, I do feel for him, and his team, and his ex-team. Just miserable all 'round.
- multisport 9mo agoDidn't he (half) jokingly ask Anthropic to buy Tailwind a few weeks ago, right when Bun was acquired? Makes a lot more sense now.
- hmokiguess 9mo agosource?
- multisport 9mo agofound it https://x.com/adamwathan/status/1995940378101621194?s=20 https://x.com/adamwathan/status/1995940378101621194?s=20
- hmokiguess 9mo agothx :)
- ramoz 9mo agoHere is a link to their commercial offerings. https://tailwindcss.com/plus?ref=top https://tailwindcss.com/plus?ref=top
- dallen33 9mo agoThere should be a monthly option - I'd pay for that.
- maronato 9mo agoIf the goal is to support them, they do offer a subscription: https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor#insiders 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.
- agentifysh 9mo agoi 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.
- i_have_an_idea 9mo ago> 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.
- omnimus 9mo agoCopyright washing as a service.
- dormento 9mo agoY'know, this is the one time that i thought lawyers wouldn't let it slide. I still don't understand why apparently there aren't _massive_ class-action (or similar) lawsuits worldwide against AI companies. LLMs are full on copyright-removal machines.
- prodigycorp 9mo agoIt's just too ironic and such a shame that LLMs have railroaded the business model of Tailwind when LLMs have made it so much more popular. Does anyone have any backseat driver ideas for how tailwind could make enough money to hire a team to work on the framework?
- dabbz 9mo agoI 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).
- NitpickLawyer 9mo agoDo you mean headlessui? If so it seems to be indexed by context7 [1] so you could use it with their MCP server? [1] - https://context7.com/tailwindlabs/headlessui https://context7.com/tailwindlabs/headlessui
- nemomarx 9mo agoDoes asking for tailwind directly in the prompt not get it looking in that direction? I wonder if you could get a large enough context to include the css directly too
- dabbz 9mo agoI was more hoping to use the Tailwind UI components (or tailwind plus or whatever they're calling it now) with the LLM output. I don't think they offer downloadable components or whatever so the LLM would need a way of knowing which were available to use and be able to pull them in for reference. At least that's my assumption.
- graeme 9mo agoThere might be a business model for Tailwind here. I was looking at buying Tailwind Plus after reading this news, and my first question was how to get AI to use it efficiently.
- sosodev 9mo agoThe 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. While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years? I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've long relied on value adds in the form of managed hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 9mo agoAgreed. I don't know how realistic it is without a major need that would force major player to abide by it, but yea..
- K0nserv 9mo agoHaving 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.
- oefrha 9mo agoI bought Tailwind Plus when it was still Tailwind UI years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it in hobbyist projects and some professional projects. Would have pushed for company license if my current company isn’t exclusively native apps.
- fourside 9mo agoHow does something like Tailwind lead to a company big enough that you can layoff 75% of the engineering team?
- eatonphil 9mo agoLinkedIn says the company was 2-10 employees. 75% laid off wouldn't have been a lot of people. Tough for them though.
- 1123581321 9mo agoThree engineers laid off, one remaining.
- whatamidoingyo 9mo agoI was wondering the same thing.
- kayo_20211030 9mo ago3 of 4. Not a behemoth by any stretch. A bit sad.
- d1sxeyes 9mo agoI 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.
- d1sxeyes 9mo agoListened to the podcast, it was 3 laid off.
- angryany 9mo agohttps://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/14677#discussioncomment-15435530 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
- solarkraft 9mo agoIt’s crazy to me that it was ever a business to begin with. Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.
- sp4cec0wb0y 9mo agoA 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.
- mpeg 9mo agoI 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.
- freedomben 9mo agoI don't disagree, but I think differentiating between Tailwind CSS (which is free) and Tailwind UI. Tailwind UI (Tailwind Plus) is a different story I think. It's extremely useful in its current form, but could benefit from more
- mpeg 9mo agoYeah, I was referring more to the fact that tailwind didn't have that many other ways to monetise compared to other OSS projects. Their paid templates and courses kinda fulfilled their goal in that way, they made the founders wealthy, but is there a sustainable business there?
- mpeg 9mo agoApparently 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-staff-engineer https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st... [1]: https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduct-to-multi-mullion-dollar-business/ https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...
- vips7L 9mo agoThey have a right to decide what their product is. Just because someone sent a PR doesn't mean they have to consider it whatsoever!
- farhanhubble 9mo agoI use Tailwind for connecting dev machines across two continents and as a free user I think it's an amazing product. It breaks my heart to see people losing their jobs because there isn't enough revenue. I can empathize with the founder too because I was kind of in their shoes last year. Had been laid off and nearly exhausted my savings but I was more worried about having to let go of folks I employed.
- gf000 9mo agoYou might have mistaken tailwind and tailscale. I have done so on countless occasions, but this is about the css "framework".
- fud101 9mo agotbh it annoys me when i want to go to my tailscale console but my browser takes me to tailwindcss which I have never used..
- ramoz 9mo agoI think you mean tailscale
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- cleaning 9mo agoYou're thinking of Tailscale.
- avandekleut 9mo agoTailwind is a UI styling and components company. Are you thinking of Tailscale?
- sieabahlpark 9mo ago[dead]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- stevoski 9mo agoAs a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions. I bought Tailwind UI - 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. However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.
- SkyPuncher 9mo agoI think it’s simple that people aren’t using CSS frameworks because the AI creates CSS on its own.
- freedomben 9mo ago> 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.
- stevoski 9mo agoRight, 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.
- WA 9mo agoNot entirely true. They had one product at first. I think it was UI kit. The full app templates that came later were a separate product and they charged again. However, you’re right insofar as they added more templates to the later product for free.
- shimman 9mo agoTheir customer growth wasn't exactly dying down tho, it was massively disrupted. That is a key distinction that should be noted.
- runjake 9mo ago[flagged]
- mjr00 9mo ago> 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.
- winterbloom 9mo agohe wasn't, he was calling the person who responded to the individual who got laid off
- jeremy_k 9mo agoYou 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
- renewiltord 9mo agoCommon problem with HI (Human Intelligence). We call it “hallucinations” or “confabulations”.
- runjake 9mo agoThanks for correcting me. I re-read his reply a few times and came to my same conclusion. Funny story, it turns out the "Control Panel for Twitter" browser extension I use breaks rendering on the current version of X and gave me the impression that Adam was replying directly. Sorry, Adam.
- AstroBen 9mo agoThis has been a long time coming I think. I remember listening to an interview with the creator maybe over a year ago now and him saying revenue is way down, presumably because of AI I do wonder though if the llms.txt could actually be used for their benefit? Why not literally recommend the paid upgrades within it?
- ambicapter 9mo agoI love the poster with the AI-generated avatar admonishing him for not making the software "easy to use" and suggesting that this will hamper his business, completely papering over the fact that LLMs will never be "potential monetization candidates" (ew, wording).
- bkorte 9mo agoWhen I saw this on HN, I instantly felt terrible for Adam & the team. Happy to see that these comments are mostly supportive, they could have easily piled on the pain. Listen to his podcast episode if you want his raw feelings on this - https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six-months-left https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six... Very happy Tailwind Plus and Insiders customer here.
- alangibson 9mo agoAnyone selling software components is going to get cooked by LLMs. People have been talking about that since ChatGPT 3 landed. It's just sad to see it actually playing out.
- chvid 9mo agoI would also say that the tailwind ui library is facing stiff competition from free offerings like shadcn.
- hexbin010 9mo ago> The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products I know nothing about marketing, but why would you rely on one single source? Or interpreted differently (as a statement of fact): allow that situation to occur?
- Ray20 9mo agoI 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.
- jameson 9mo agoAs a avid user of Tailwind and one who purchased Tailwind CSS Plus, it's very sad to hear. OSS without founders having it's own managed software company is always a difficult position. (e.g. database vendors open source but also have their own company providing managed service and support allowing sustainable development). Hope of getting strong support from companies is unsustainable. Curious what should be the business model for a library something like tailwind? They could add a premium features but entry users not allowed to use certain features is a bad experience
- theturtletalks 9mo agoTailwind Plus was always tricky since most people would use it for commercial products and that seemed like a grey area based on their licensing. Then shadcn came along and all the Tailwind Plus alternatives (many times recreating the same UI elements that plus has) and then people just copied and used those components and polished further using AI. Before Tailwind got big, Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design. I even considered printing a personal physical book for my coffee table. If you want to support Adam and don't need Tailwind Plus, this ebook could be a good way. [0]. https://www.refactoringui.com/ https://www.refactoringui.com/
- freedomben 9mo ago(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.
- theturtletalks 9mo agoI 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.
- kamaal 9mo ago>>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.
- lionkor 9mo agoNot 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.
- satvikpendem 9mo agoSadly, selling pre-made components and templates was never a sound business model, especially in the wake of AI. One thing I learned being on HN for so long and launching my own products is that a product is not a business. Don't conflate the two, at your peril. Lots of people make great products but actually turning that into a business is fundamentally a different skill. It seems like Tailwind grew too fast, having 2 million ARR a few years ago and almost 10 employees (200k each is probably the all-in cost anyway for an employee if they're full time with benefits, so I suppose there was barely any profit), whereas they'd probably have been fine with running a Patreon like Evan You did for Vue, and cutting down the number of devs drastically, which I suppose is what they're doing now.
- thundergolfer 9mo agoIt 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.
- satvikpendem 9mo agoI 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.
- thundergolfer 9mo ago"selling premade software assets" is a business, and it's the business both Tailwind and Envato were in. Both businesses got hit hard by AI. Check out Envato's homepage now. It's unrecognizable from what it was in 2017, and completely genAI oriented.
- satvikpendem 9mo agoI think you're just repeating the same point I'm making. The point is they're not good businesses, hence why Envato pivoted and Tailwind soon might need to as well.
- ctippett 9mo agoYou can really feel the stress in Adam's comments. It must play absolute hell with your mental health, it's anxiogenic from the sidelines just thinking about it. Stay healthy and safe mate.
- 3rodents 9mo agoThe biggest miss from Tailwind is ignoring the rest of the ecosystem. Rightly or wrongly, everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components. Tailwind hasn't. Tailwind has excellent components available through Plus which are worth paying for but they're not available where people are, which pushes people towards other libraries built on top of Tailwind. I have paid for Tailwind Plus and I like their Catalyst UI and I have used it on a project but it's a pain to use compared to alternatives, so, I don't bother. I'd go as far as to guess that their revenue isn't down due to AI but because of their lifetime access model combined with shadcn's registry system being much easier to use. Prediction: Tailwind acquired by Vercel.
- normie3000 9mo ago> everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components This may be an exaggeration.
- mexicocitinluez 9mo agoIt is. At least in the React space where there are a ton of libraries like Mantine or React Aria which I use.
- Culonavirus 9mo agoDaisyUI also seems to be popular.
- jascha_eng 9mo agoI 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.
- wnevets 9mo ago> everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components. This is the first time I've seen anyone ever mention it.
- 9mo ago
- bilekas 9mo agoI can't get over the Author of the CR addi g his responses on TikTok.. What have we come to?
- katdork 9mo agothat'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 https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx) used within TailwindCSS :p
- akuchling 9mo agoStray 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.
- falloutx 9mo agoThis seems like a huge red flag, there is no need to add any more dependencies to an already fully featured repo
- b34r 9mo ago[flagged]
- drivesafely 9mo agoFilm 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.
- reducesuffering 9mo ago
- simonw 9mo agoKey comment is this one: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3717222957 https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > [...] 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. [...] > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
- meken 9mo agoThanks 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.
- baxtr 9mo agoThat 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.
- ibejoeb 9mo ago>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.
- teaearlgraycold 9mo ago
- almostlikemagic 9mo agoreally sorry to hear this, been a big fan of tailwind. hopefully they can turn it around. good luck to adam and the team.
- samiv 9mo agoAfter we've completed the knowledge transfer from the public domain, across all potential sources of information, from books to open source code to private data banks and LLMs then what comes next? Destroying the said works so that nobody else can access them ? Privatize knowledge, hoard all the data, limit access, sell ads?
- simlevesque 9mo ago[flagged]
- nullorempty 9mo agohm, families need to eat.
- simlevesque 9mo agoThen why is HTTP, CSS and HTML free ? It's creators need to eat too. Should they start charging for it ?
- gizzlon 9mo agoeeeh.. those are standards, not products.
- 00deadbeef 9mo agoTailwind CSS is free and funded by extras like Tailwind Plus. HTML and CSS are free to use but the W3C is funded by membership fees.
- hashhar 9mo agoWhich of those are evolving at the rate of frameworks? BTW I'm of the opinion that frontend tooling developers should actually try to contribute things to HTML and CSS instead of building "component libraries" on top of them. If the native controls were good and if the browsers allowed using "uniformly styled" versions of them then there would be no good reason for such libraries to exist.
- robinhood 9mo agoYour comments in this thread are terrible, all of them. You are part of the reason why working on open source projects is so hard for people who obviously want to do good in this world. Check Adam's work: his work has been a net positive for the OSS community. Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.
- thrownaway561 9mo agoHonestly I think that they should be putting Tailwinds Plus and consulting services first. Sucks that AI is making the web itself obsolete now.
- sreekanth850 9mo agoVery sad. Any OSS project that depend fully on consulting will be on high risk. Platforms like deepwiki shrinks the knowledge gap massively.
- blibble 9mo agothere's no knowledge on deepwiki only slop
- sreekanth850 9mo agoThat is old thinking. Deepwiki is so much helpful. I use ABP framework and never had to ask the developer anything.
- gkoberger 9mo agoI love Tailwind, and I am really sorry Adam and co are going through this. They've built a great product, and it's brought joy back building again for me. It's really hard to run a company, especially when your product is mostly OSS... Tailwind has helped thousands of companies save (or make) millions of dollars, and AI almost by default uses it to generate beautiful websites. This is such a hard position to be in... to watch your product take off, but your financials plummet. It really sucks how affected the team is after all the good work they've done.
- wg0 9mo agoWhile I'm a shameless freeloader with mostly backend skills - Adam has my utmost respect for out of the box innovation. I did buy some of this books. Not the Tailwind UI though. Adam, you gotta pay bills too. I understand that. And I respect that. The day a product of mine starts making money, I'll come knocking your door. Thank you.
- figassis 9mo agoToday, I wanted to add tailwind to a new project and realized I had purchased it back in 2022. So I went to the website and realized it had moved to tailwind plus. That’s how distracted I’ve been. To my surprise my access worked and I could still download the full UI kit. I know they promised lifetime, but I did not expect updates forever. This looks like the first issue to fix. I would have no issues paying 20% of purchase price for an updated version, that gave me access to 12 months of free updates. Also, what about paid access to skills or MCP server for design systems and components? I know these may be things he already considered, so don’t want to presume I have an answer. But as a customer, totally willing to support a good product that has supported me.
- falloutx 9mo agoLovable 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.
- gervwyk 9mo agoGreat 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.
- satvikpendem 9mo agoIf you give something away for free, don't complain when people take it for free. Make it AGPL instead then.
- 9mo ago
- nickjj 9mo agoI'm happy to see this, not because I wish Adam failure. I am a Tailwind user myself and use it in all of my projects. Generally am a fan of Adam and respect his business. The happy (in a bad way) part is seeing very successful projects like Tailwind get financially fucked by AI. It means it's not just me. I am a small tech course creator who was able to make a living for 10 years but over the last 3 years it has tanked to where I make practically zero. Almost all due to less traffic hitting my blog which was the source of paid course purchases. I literally had to shift my entire life around after 25 years of being a successful contractor because of this. I hope the world understands how impactful (both good and bad ways) having an unchecked AI scrape the world's content and funnel everything directly through their monetized platform while content creators get nothing in return is.
- okokwhatever 9mo agoHey! you just discovered media piracy dude! Congrats!
- nickjj 9mo agoThat's an interesting way to think about it. I discovered media piracy long ago, but it was very acute before AI because only a small amount of folks pirated this type of content. I ignored them and put 0% energy into it because I wanted to focus on the happy path of people not pirating the content. If you think of AI as pirating media, it's providing that media to everyone in a context specific form so yes it is a pretty interesting analogy. Not quite a 1 to 1 match but the end outcome is the same and that's all that matters here.
- camdenreslink 9mo agoOut 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?
- damsta 9mo agoCompanies like Vercel, Lovable, and Stackblitz should pay salaries to each of these engineers. Their business succeeded only because Tailwind exists.
- nickmonad 9mo agoI 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.
- koakuma-chan 9mo agoCompanies like Vercel, Lovable, and Stackblitz should dissolve because their existence is a net negative for humanity.
- Jonathanvw 9mo agoWhy is there existence a net negative for humanity?
- koakuma-chan 9mo agoSame reason as tobacco companies.
- suyash 9mo agoWelcome to the internet, most of it is build by unknown OSS developers, how many people will you go ask these companies to pay for?
- CafeRacer 9mo agoJust charge a bucks for every deployment or something. Most of will easily pay a dollar. Tailwind should not be free, its good.
- immibis 9mo agoCan someone explain to me the advantage of writing class="bg-blue" instead of style="background-color: blue;" and why anyone ever thought they could make meaningful money from enabling the former?
- nickmonad 9mo agoNarrowing 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.
- insin 9mo agoThe 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.
- immibis 9mo agoI don't see a significant difference between your two examples.
- devalexwells 9mo agoFor 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 https://wlls.dev/blog/on-tailwind
- another_twist 9mo agoWhere's the 75% layoff number from ? This thread is about making docs llm friendly.
- sumedh 9mo agoScroll down
- arccy 9mo agoif you actually read the thread: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3717222957 https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
- another_twist 9mo agoMissed this bit, thank you.
- mucha 9mo agoAdam added a comment to that thread with the 75% number and more context.
- magician2229 9mo agoI 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-months-left https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
- tylerchilds 9mo agoI’ll be honest. I’m a contributor to this. I’ve been CSS since the mid 2000s and I have a lot of it memorized by heart. My team uses tailwind, therefore I use tailwind But I don’t want to reconfigure my mental model to think in esoteric shorthand, when I already have vanilla web tech memorized. So I just write some code to match the design and then I let an llm transform it into what my team expects. I’m sharing in the hopes that the tailwind team can figure out a middle ground because I think a service that can take any valid styled content and output the same result in tailwind would be a niche small language model that solves the use case for why I don’t go to the docs.
- koakuma-chan 9mo agoEvery 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.
- tylerchilds 9mo agoYeah, 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.
- jsk2600 9mo ago>Just sharing that the root cause is most developers don’t want to pick up an additional syntax when they already have the fundamentals IF they already have the fundamentals. What I see is that more and more developers don't know CSS at all or very little; they only use Tailwind and haven’t worked with CSS extensively before.
- 9mo ago
- schlap 9mo agoTailwind UI could be the missing piece for AI generated frontend to have consistency, but it seems that shadcn took that place in the last 3-5 years.
- katdork 9mo agoalthough I've mentioned this in a subcomment, I want to highlight that the PR itself also seems to be an excuse to get the library he made to be used by TailwindCSS (https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx)
- b34r 9mo agoNope. 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- system2 9mo agoWhy would a CSS library turn into a company? How do they even make money while there are hundreds of alternatives? Bootstrap is more than enough for 99.99% of the projects, and it is free.
- devalexwells 9mo agoHow 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/ https://motion.dev/
- SoftTalker 9mo agoIt solved a problem, people will pay for that. Now LLMs have removed the problem, so there's declining interest in solutions.
- throwaway2026-2 9mo agoI feel like you don't need engineers anymore. Bad news for all of us, but its just a fact of life.
- system2 9mo agoMaybe 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.
- timeon 9mo agoYou need engineers but they have to pay for tokens now. Paying subscription just to have ability to do the job.
- saos 9mo ago> our revenue is down close to 80%. Damn
- legitster 9mo agoIt'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. Would it work to have a new free-use license that explicitly excludes LLMs? Make them pay royalties - you'd have to use something like public license keys. But if Spotify pays a trivial license payment for every stream - Claude could contribute something when it recommends a project.
- quaintdev 9mo agoIf they tailwind, it sets a precedent for others. They can't pay everyone.
- dafelst 9mo agoSo you're saying that just because they can't pay everyone, they should pay no one?
- quaintdev 9mo agoYeah I know how that sounds but it's the most logical explanation.
- philipwhiuk 9mo agoAlternatively, they don't have a viable business model? This isn't rocket science. If your business can't exist within the law, it doesn't get to exist.
- humanlity 9mo agoIn my mind, there are two types of businesses in the world: one is not particularly challenging but rather trivial, and the other is very high-tech. Today, LLMs make the first type of business much harder.
- hexbin010 9mo agoNo way the author of the PR created a TikTok to moan and mentioned it in 2 separate comments and accused Tailwind devs of "throwing a tantrum" ahaha. Oh my days, how cringeworthy.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- deadbabe 9mo agoThe 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. For Tailwind, time’s up. If the engineering team could not be directed to build new products that bring in revenue, then there is no need for them anymore, the opportunity has been exhausted for its maximum yield. Are you going to squeeze blood from a stone?
- porker 9mo ago> 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.
- cultofmetatron 9mo agoreally surprised tailwind didn't get ahead of this by providing some sort of mcp interface and custom agent for designing design systems and autogenerating ui code directly based on the user's project. if it worked out of the box or with a few clicks via en extension, it would be a killer feature.
- tannhaeuser 9mo ago> 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. Not a Tailwind user but I really appreciate the honesty. Is the brutal impact of AI as a cause established though? It appears creation of new web sites is down, but that doesn't mean the business has gone to LLMs like suggested; it could as well mean that there are simply no sites being created at all. Especially as > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. and > the docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products ie. data is lacking.
- albroland 9mo agoI 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.
- robinhood 9mo agoIt was probably inevitable. Building a commercial offering (mostly templates) around code which could be considered as "commodity" is extremely hard to do. I'm glad Adam and his team have had a lot of success already with this, but for sure it was not sustainable on the long run. If you are reading this, thanks Adam for having created Tailwind. It's not for everyone, but it's for some people, and that's good enough for me. We need options, and you were a solid one of them.
- mattgreenrocks 9mo agoSomething’s wrong when a key piece of foundational web tech is staring down unsustainability. Tailwind is almost ubiquitous these days. It needs to continue to exist. Small businesses being eaten by AI is a net negative, because they’re in a unique position whereby they need to actually have to listen to customers vs just optimizing for a rando middle manger’s promotion in BigTech.
- threetonesun 9mo agoYou 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.
- arnvald 9mo agoThe difference is that jQuery was replaced by other libraries, while Tailwind grows in popularity, but due to AI its creator doesn’t benefit from this popularity as much as before
- threetonesun 9mo agojQuery was essentially replaced by JavaScript (and browser compatibility) getting better, but it continued to exist and grow because it was the de facto way to DOM manipulation, especially if you had to copy and paste off of Stack Overflow, or roll out a framework based UI. Tailwind being the default choice for AI UIs is not that different, it can continue to grow in usage but the fundamental need for Tailwind has passed.
- yCombLinks 9mo agoThe difference is jquery went away because better things replaced it (in javascript). If the fundamental need for tailwind has passed why is it's usage growing? It's more that the problem solved by the paid portion of tailwind is now solved by AI.
- ukprogrammer 9mo agoThis is what you get when you sell a lifetime product Tailwind UI is a phenomenal product, but, there's a simple mathematical reason you cannot sell code like in this way to create a sustainable business
- didip 9mo agoHow does Tailwind make money?
- paradite 9mo agoI was downvoted to oblivion for posting this comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439059 But I'm merely telling the truth. The fact that people don't like it doesn't change the fact that software engineers are largely replaceable with AI now. We are seeing the second order effects now that people using AI are not buying software products anymore, leading to layoff of software engineers.
- mrcwinn 9mo agoI wonder if this is all due to AI, or whether shadcn/ui's popularity (and blocks, and themes, and registry of paid component libraries) has also impacted them. That's my personal go to, and not Tailwind UI paid, and that's not because of LLMs.
- asattarmd 9mo ago> 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. Then step aside as the maintainer of the project then and better yet, make something like Tailwind-foundation etc. which is truly open source. Go spend your time building your business, but you can't become the bottleneck and not do anything for something that has become so foundational for Web Dev.
- marginalx 9mo agoI 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.
- lifetimerubyist 9mo agoHe 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.
- geenat 9mo agoI recently had a similar junk PR on my 1,700 star repository: https://github.com/gnat/surreal/pull/56 https://github.com/gnat/surreal/pull/56 I'm fairly convinced these are bot / LLM generated; the content is nonsensical garbage. PS: If an LLM needs a whole seperate fork to understand your content, the LLM is failing at it's job. PS PS: I want to highlight that the PR itself also seems to be an excuse to get the library quantizor made pulled in as a new dependency. Nasty.
- aiiizzz 9mo agoSounds shady.
- b34r 9mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- dogleash 9mo ago>What a horrible thing to do. So sorry I wasted my own personal time on this. People like you drive others out of open source. Pot, meet kettle.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- lifetimerubyist 9mo ago[flagged]
- b34r 9mo ago[flagged]
- lifetimerubyist 9mo agoThe “community” doesn’t decide what goes into the project, TailwindLabs does. Tailwind is not a community developed project. It’s a project that sometimes accepts outside contributors when they feel like it and the are under no obligation to do so. You did work that nobody from the project asked for and you’re throwing a fit because they have different priorities and said they don’t want it. They don’t owe you anything. It seems you have fundamental misunderstanding of how open source works and now you’re throwing a fit because you’re an entitled brat. Take the L. Learn a lesson. Grow and be better.
- nsmog767 9mo agonot the most important point here, but llms.txt won't have any impact on anything anyway.
- geenat 9mo agoI'm fairly convinced these are bot / LLM generated PR's in the first place; the content is nonsensical garbage.
- b34r 9mo agoNo, I spent many hours of my personal time on it.
- llmslave2 9mo agoYou spent many hours of your personal time trying to enable AI companies to better steal OSS work? Dude get a better hobby or something lol
- b34r 9mo agoWhat? That's not what this does at all. Educate yourself. It has nothing to do with the commercial side of his business, it's just the already public docs in cleaned up pure text form.
- waynesonfire 9mo agoMaybe you don't need a massive engineer team developing Tailwind and "monetizing it" You, Tailwind, don't get to collect ALL the rent. You were made "successful" because you created something that was OPEN SOURCE and the community chose to adopt your technology because of that. You wouldn't even exist had you not had the foundation, made the implicit statement that, I am willing to share rent by open-sourcing. You wouldn't even have ONE engineer!! You're now crying because you over-sold your success and improperly scaled your business. Your fault. IF all you need is two engineers that's fine. That's your piece of the rent. Other business are hiring far more than the 75% you laid off and building and creating value on top this open source technology. No jobs lost, just your ego and the empty promises you made to investors.
- moralestapia 9mo ago[flagged]
- MrFurious 9mo agoMy surprise is that the tailwind creator could have a engineering team based in a css framework that basically was used for people that didn't knew real css. Is normal that this people now use other products more effective how AI for this task.
- normie3000 9mo agoI 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.
- okokwhatever 9mo agoHow many of us understood the scale of the problem when music creators were ranting because the piracy was destroying their business? We'll have to adapt mates. Sadly (i dont say this happily) this is a new reality we cant decide on.
- andrewmcwatters 9mo agoThat sucks. I’m not a big fan of Tailwind, but at least it helps non-designers make somewhat decent user-interfaces. It’s hard to run a software business.
- fuddle 9mo agoThey have the UI Blocks, Templates and UI Kit in https://tailwindcss.com/plus https://tailwindcss.com/plus. I think they are in a good position to build an AI website builder similar to lovable.dev if they wanted to.
- motbus3 9mo agoThis GitHub conversation is disgraceful. Lots of complaints and no support to the devs. The company I work for is going through the same. It is not a product for dev though. We ceased support for many countries now because people see no reason for paying, but after it was gone they said they would pay. If you wait too much for supporting good folks those projects will be gone and only greedy corps will exist
- ChrisMarshallNY 9mo agoThis is the actual comment that it's mentioned: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3717222957 https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... However, the whole conversation is worth reading (but it's sort of heartbreaking). Sounds like fairly decent folks, all around.
- cynicalsecurity 9mo agoPretending like this is some Google-level apocalypse when it's a garage band downsizing? Spare me.
- re-thc 9mo agoAs an early Tailwind Plus / Tailwind UI customer I don’t think it has anything to do with AI. The product and technicals are there but from a business and user perspective Tailwind the paid product was trash and still is. It tried to do everything and lacked direction. There were originally snippets but it’s not reusable in a proper sense based on components like a design system. Each snippet may have overlaps but you can’t get it together properly. Next there was catalyst, a react component library but it was barebones and doesn’t tie into the snippets. And then there were templates, which again is another direction. It would have been better if it was thought out. Design system. Component library. Snippets built on a solid base.
- arewethereyeta 9mo agoCreate a license that prevents AI companies that generate html based on tailwind from doing it without being in a commercial package. Let them know of the license change and give them 3 months to adjust. Keep tailwind accessible and allow that llm instruction to make it's way into the codebase so it gets picked up by multiple "AI" businesses that output code. This is your new business model. Open source was not ready for this type of businesses that don't give a dam about rights or copyrights.
- teruakohatu 9mo agoIt’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.
- acabal 9mo agoTaking their sponsors page at face value and doing the math, they're bringing in close to $100k/month with corporate sponsorships alone... how much money could maintaining a framework possibly cost?
- everfrustrated 9mo agoThey had 8 employees
- sergiotapia 9mo agoBefore you shame the creator over this, read the thread thoroughly. I don't know what the solution here is tbh. Frankly, I haven't visited the tailwind page in over six months as well. The AI just does things. Clearly the upsell path for the company is not sustainable. What would the solution be?
- mmcnl 9mo agoWow, this is a grim reality check: AI hyperscalers taking in billions of revenue, while at the same time putting honest business like Tailwind out of work, without any form of compensation. What happened to "you wouldn't steal a car" etc.? It's only illegal if you're not a trillion dollar company? I have trouble expressing how terrible unjust it feels that AI companies are stealing money from the common people. I have no other way to put it. Also: this will definitely limit the use of AI. People will stop publishing valuable content for free on the internet, if AI scrapers will steal and monetize it.
- agentifysh 9mo agothis 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.
- imiric 9mo ago> 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.
- 9mo ago
- codeptualize 9mo agoNever been a fan of tailwind, but this is kinda sad. Given it's popularity what a sad situation that they aren't getting able to get properly funded. I think the solution is one of the big companies with lots of money to acquire tailwind. Specifically Vercel. They use it, their v0 thing uses tailwind allover, they have bought a bunch of open source companies in the past, and they should have deep enough pockets. Last year they acquired tremor blocks, which is a UI library, that uses tailwind! Makes perfect sense, lets get it done.
- tin7in 9mo agoI bought the Refactoring UI book years ago and it taught me so much about simplicity and good design!
- snihalani 9mo agoMy takeaway from this: If LLM can eat your lunch, you should remove your cash cow from crawler avenues and gatekeep it to humans only
- dostick 9mo ago75% it’s 3/4, and plural “we have let go” means 6 people was let go. Or three if that’s a royal “we”.
- o_m 9mo agoIt says 75% of the engineer team. There might be other roles not affected.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- hmokiguess 9mo agoI bought their Plus thing a while back and not I can't find myself a reason to use it. If I was considering that purchase in today's landscape, I would surely not buy it. At $299 USD I can have a decent model do the job of writing custom tailored components for me and iterate extensively on them. Hard sell with a "UI Kit" versus a "UI Brain". If I were Adam I would drop to $29.99 and accept the status quo, but not make it lifetime access to try and not piss off existing owners, and I would pivot to building a Frontend AI Agent and a Tailwind Labs Model.
- antonymoose 9mo agoIm 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).
- hmokiguess 9mo agoI recommend buying it, but I would not be surprised if you still end up using some LLM augmented workflow to do the plumbing and integration when using it. It’s not really a one-click install type of thing that you get from it if you get my analogy. Also, if your customer doesn’t care for fancy UI, then more even the case to let the AI design it for you and pick something like DaisyUI or shadcn and their MCPs with Tailwind.
- pikdum 9mo agoOnly an anecdote, but I was working on a side project with another dev who wanted to use Tailwind Plus components. It wasn't immediately obvious whether this was allowed under his personal license or if we'd have to get a team license instead, though. We decided to go with a FOSS component library instead to avoid any potential issues down the road. After re-reading the license page now, I'm still not sure.
- ohnoesjmr 9mo agoI 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?
- retrocog 9mo agoLicensing hasn't caught up yet. It probably wouldn't be the worst idea to have a simple content copyright license protocol or standard that works for LLMs? Something simple and obvious, like sticking a license file that has certain expected fields in /.well-known. I wouldn't be surprised if this is already being discussed because it would easily allow agents to check for special license requirements that only apply to them, directing them how to share content while remaining in compliance.
- trinix912 9mo agoThat'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.
- retrocog 9mo agoThat's absolutely true, so it would have to be a standard like others that comes with consequences for non-compliance (like filtering non-compliant clients). I don't claim to have the implementation, but I do see a need for one.
- ElijahLynn 9mo agoSpecific link to actual comment: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3717222957 https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... I think that the OP should update link to this comment
- wetpaws 9mo ago[dead]
- mjwhansen 9mo agoNothing but love to Adam and the Tailwind team (including now-former team members) today. They’ve made huge contributions to web development and it just sucks, sucks, sucks that things have turned out this way. I know he’ll find a way forward, though.
- ozim 9mo agoIf I were mtsears4 - after such reply I would dig a deep hole, hide there and cry for a week. Dude thought he is smart but ended up being an entitled brat.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- thedangler 9mo agoTailwind is nice and all be it’s crazy verbose, I still am a fan of bootstrap. In the days of AI and tokens. Tailwind classes and styling cure through tokens. lol
- willio58 9mo agoWow. This is wild. I have a mix of empathy for the guy and also a feeling like he has no idea what he's doing running a business. > Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. So his idea is to make Tailwind less modern than competitors by throwing a wrench in this tool that makes it easier to write tailwind with AI, simply because he thinks the only way Tailwind can make money is if actual human beings come to read the docs site? If that's the case, your income is based on products that's are not high enough value to potential customers, or you're marketing it poorly, or both. > 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. 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.". He's saying "AI is going to be the end of profits for tailwind and instead of coming up with an alternative income stream I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with tailwind. And also stop complaining about it." It sucks to fire people, but that doesn't mean you have to spread the flames out to open source contributors trying to make tailwind better for everyone. Look for new income streams, ideally ones that can be sold to people that control the money in companies (that isn't often the devs that are in your docs).
- ncallaway 9mo ago> 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
- 9mo ago
- andruby 9mo agoIt seems like every (coding) AI model out there is generating html with TailwindCSS styling. @adam: this is just an idea. Have you tried reaching out to OpenAI, Anthropic et al to become sponsors of tailwind? Could that be a viable revenue path? Maybe you could offer LLM friendly docs to them, or access to something valuable for them? Or maybe they’re just happy to sponsor. Tailwind and its popularity make LLM’s more valuable, so I’m sure the model makers want Tailwind to thrive. Any other monetization ideas to help Adam?
- mexicocitinluez 9mo agoBolt is what turned me onto it (same with React Aria).
- 1970-01-01 9mo ago>making it easier for LLMs to read our docs just means less traffic to our docs which means less people learning about our paid products and the business being even less sustainable. This tells me the problem wasn't AI but the overall business wasn't healthy. Docs don't drive sales.
- Jcampuzano2 9mo agoDoesn'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.
- swagasaurus-rex 9mo agoBefore 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
- scoot 9mo ago> google helped kickstart the world wide web Where on earth did you get that idea? The web existed long before Google - Google just found a unique way to monetise other people’s content
- kamaal 9mo agoIts almost like he is asking users to take a stand between using LLMs and using Tailwind. LLMs, or Tailwind. Pick one!
- johnpaulkiser 9mo agoTailwind should have bought shadcn and started pushing a better subscription model. Shadcn & vercel ate tailwind's lunch imo.
- vhiremath4 9mo agoI will be honest. I love open source. But something that really annoys me about the open source community is that the developers take this holier-than-thou approach to backing up maintainers in circumstances like this, but obviously they are not paying with their own money. They are just complaining, and it feels a lot like virtue signaling at worst and pure naivety at best. It feels extremely disengenous at this point, and it's annoying. What do we actually know? 1. People are inherently selfish. If you give me this shit for free, I'm gonna use it for free. Obviously everyone is doing this. Spare me the "but I go to this conference or that conference". 2. Code is cheap. Why would I ever pay for something that is not gated behind a service with API limits and costs? 3. Coding as we know it is getting commoditized. That's correct. We are all going to lose our jobs as we know it today. Clearly that's the future. Wake up! But when making these points, open source devs (and honestly a lot of people on hacker news) whine and complain. I don't really know why I'm leaving this comment - I just feel like I'm at an annoyance breaking point. This guy is obviously struggling to pivot and all the grandstanding and virtue signaling just feels like additional noise and wanting to feel good with very little action.
- throw234234234 9mo agoBecause 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.
- StrauXX 9mo agoThe PR author posted a TikTok link [1] the thread later explaining their position. Their behaviour seems very unprofessional to me. Mayve the just want to increase engagement to their accounts. Tailwind definetly made the right call here. [1] https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThLjg284/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThLjg284/
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- pixelsort 9mo agoI never appreciated tailwind until AI models revealed it as such a token-efficient way transport styles between models and other use-cases. AI aruably hurts demand for their premium offering the same way it hurts demand for junior devs.
- molaaoonao 9mo agoThat’s rough. Respects to the honesty.
- cjk 9mo agoI'm a Tailwind Plus customer in spite of not being the world's biggest Tailwind fan. Even though it really grinds my gears how unreadable markup can be when littered with Tailwind classes, I appreciate the quality and variety of the templates and components available in Tailwind Plus and the constant (free!) updates. So this is a bummer to hear. Many thanks to Adam and the team.
- hakanensari 9mo agoI bought Tailwind UI, now Plus a couple of years ago. I've also dabbled with a Claude skill that scrapes a "UI block" source from the site and transforms it into a Rails view component. Maybe there's a way to make Plus and LLMs work together rather than compete?
- ibejoeb 9mo agoMultiple tiktok self-promotions in github comments is nuts
- racl101 9mo agoWe should have Telethons for all the companies on whose products we build our products but whose livelihood depends on the goodwill of others lest can't keep the lights on OR they get sold to some soulless corp and turned to crap.
- bitbasher 9mo agoEver feel like creating and nurturing an opensource project? Some of those responses make me second guess doing anything with opensource.
- another_twist 9mo agoThe issue seems to be that LLMs already consumed large parts of the templatized code somewhere. Not directly from TW but from some other project. Codex / Claude are also exceptionally good at whipping out a UI quickly even when given flimsy requirements. Its hard running this business and competing against a several billion dollar machine. Wonder how Material UI is doing as they have a similar business model.
- pico303 9mo agoWhen I started working on one of my side projects a year or so ago, I realized I didn't have time to figure out how to style each and every component, so I paid for Tailwind Plus. It was pricey, and I definitely had to think about it for a few days, but I'm so glad I did. It saved me way more time than the dollar value of the product, and it has continued to get better. If you are using Tailwind, I highly recommend Tailwind Plus. You'll learn so much about what Tailwind can do using that library, and it is so easy to adapt into your own offerings. It is 100% worth it. Hearing that they're struggling, I may have to also bite the bullet and pick up Refactoring UI. Note: I am in no way connected to the Tailwind folks other than through my credit card.
- ivanjermakov 9mo ago75% is how many people?
- lawrencechen 9mo agoThey were perfectly positioned to build a Lovable/Bolt/Replit back in the day... might not be too late now either. They could sell training data too. Though, UIs are relatively solved. But great UIs and criticizing UIs aren't. Learned a lot from Refactoring UI, and I know (from trying) that it's impossible to make a code review bot based on out of the box sota models today. Vision capabilities are lacking here, and I can see demand for more data here. And Adam's taste likely fits well here.
- monkaiju 9mo ago>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. Wow that is just, really tragic... AI continues to just decimate this industry. Everyday I'm happy that I am, and have been since about day 3, an AI-hater.
- DMiradakis 9mo agoI absolutely love Tailwind CSS, big fan of Adam, too, just watching his journey over the past several years. I'm a bootstrapped solopreneur, too, doing an open core business for my dotnet job orchestrator Didact. It's so difficult running a business, I feel for him and his engineers he had to let go. Maybe they can build some sort of app to go along with Tailwind. Heck, even if they made the base library itself paid one day, I'd probably pay for it. Using Tailwind is just that good for me.
- twolf910616 9mo agoThe web is too open. Sad day to read these comments.
- cute_boi 9mo agoI feel very sad. The way AI is delivering, I suspect 90% will laid off within 2-3 years. I don't know myself what should I do in future.
- runako 9mo agoSincerely hope the Tailwind team can navigate this rough patch. Frontend output from LLMs is (in my experience) subpar when compared to human-built components. However, I am not primarily a frontend dev. I would definitely pay for something that let me easily build frontends using vetted components, in ways they were designed to work together. This seems like something that would sit solidly in the bailiwick of framework designers like Tailwind Labs. But it seems they primarily target frontend developers, so their focus is elsewhere.
- paxys 9mo agoWhile I'm sure AI is partially to blame, I feel like the real problem is that (1) they don't have a sensible business model and (2) they have saturated their market. There are relatively few individuals and organizations out there with products that are worth spending vendor money on, especially for something like a CSS library. Companies that do have this need are ready to spend BIG. Tailwind charges a one-time fee in the hundreds of dollars range and pledges lifetime support. When they say revenue is down 80%, it's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence. And looking at their site there is nothing else to spend money on. So how are they planning to sustain their revenue?
- dbbk 9mo agoThey were selling HTML templates. Not even anything else, literally just HTML with Tailwind classes. That wasn't a sustainable business even before AI.
- hdra 9mo agoi 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.
- shunia_huang 9mo agoI 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.
- gaigalas 9mo agoI don't like tailwind. However, I don't wish that to anyone. Despite any of my preferences, it was real work that deserved a chance. It cannot be denied that AI slurping their content contributed to less paying customers. IMHO, this is content draught starting to appear. To an extreme, it should lead to no one having any real incentive (possible business, possible recognition, etc) to do new and original stuff. I don't see a way of changing this. I think jobs will be fine, but content of all kinds (especially code) won't.
- charlie0 9mo agoShoutout to Adam Wathan and team. I rarely shell out any money, but Tailwind was an exception. They actually made front end development fun for me and added tons of value with their UI kit etc. Even though I rarely use it, I bought the lifetime to support their mission. Hope they can continue supporting the framework. It was the best thing to happen to front end in a long time imo.
- b34r 9mo agoIt's important to remember this is just the commercial arm. The OSS side has as many maintainers as Adam allows and the community is quite active with PRs and volunteer work. Tailwind the project will be ok. Someone will fork it if stales thanks to its popularity. That being said, many more companies should sponsor considering its ubiquitous adoption.
- xorgun 9mo ago[dead]
- Abishek_Muthian 9mo agoQuoting Adam, > And making it easier for LLMs to read our docs just means less traffic to our docs which means less people learning about our paid products and the business being even less sustainable. > 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. NYT and other Billion dollar media house can sue the AI companies for copyright violations and get into cozy deals. But the individuals and small companies are left in lurch. Instead of ganging up on developers for not making their product LLM friendly, they should force the AI companies to ensure that a part of their $20 or $200 goes to the sources of the data used in the LLM responses. Something like Ad words, where people whose content is used by LLMs can register as a publisher and get compensated. Oh it wouldn't be sustainable AI companies? Whose fault is that?
- letmetweakit 9mo agoIt’s tragic that a good product, with a lot of users is not able to generate decent revenue.
- pojzon 9mo agoLLMs are mostly trained on jsweb stuff. Are very good for it. The need for web developers will GREATLY decrease. Thats how it is.
- novoreorx 9mo ago> 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. Man, you can really feel the anxiety and desperation in Adam's reply. Part of me wants to say "look what evil VC money does to devs", but that's only a harsh critism of a bystander. Monetization is a normal path that the successful OSS projects would take. Tailwind went big on the startup route, took a bunch of VC cash a couple of years back, but despite the massive impact on the dev world, they clearly didn't hit the revenue numbers investors expected. Now the valuation bubble popped, and they're forced into massive layoffs. Though to be fair, maintaining a CSS library probably doesn't require that many people anyway. I really feel for Adam here. He didn't really do anything wrong. Eagering to build a startup after your project blows up is a totally natural ambition. But funding brings risks. Taking other people's money makes you go from being the owner to just another employee real quick. And once you hop on that VC train, you don't really call the shots anymore. Sometimes you can't stop raising or scaling as your own will. If you find a solid business model, that's great. But if not, well, honestly, a 75% layoff is getting off lightly. At least they still have a chance to keep on. But he obviously didn't foresee this coming. He’s getting torn between being an OSS maintainer and a CEO who have to be responsible for stackholders and employees. That internal conflict must be brutal. It’s pretty obvious he didn't reject the PR for technical reasons. It's just because the reality hit him hard, and he has to respond to it, even if it goes against his mind as a developer. Really hope Tailwind pulls through this. Also, this is a lesson worth noting for the rest of us. As indie devs, if you ever get the chance to take VC money, you really gotta think hard about whether you're truly ready for the strings that come attached.
- tomaskafka 9mo agoA really interesting moment: - The value they created (mindshare, shared “standards” for naming properties, and design atoms) and what they charged for (templates that AI can replace) are two different things — and AI has shortened the time it takes for this discrepancy to show up. - Isn’t almost all of Tailwind’s value actually in that shared semantics (“mt-2” = a small top margin) — not only in users’ heads, but now also in LLM training data? Isn’t it more of a standards organization (like ISO) than a product company (yes, sure, standards are also a product/service)? - They criticize AI for extracting value, but I wonder if Tailwind's business model is also value extraction from the standards they established. - And isn’t it almost a miracle that a token library and the idea of “let’s name five margin sizes” (which they weren’t even the first to do - I started with Basscss) could sustain an ~7-person company for so long? I tried this LLM prompt for deep research: "Tailwind is laying off people. I consider their business much more of a standards body (like ISO) — their main value is the mindshare and shared semantics and design atoms. What business models could they adopt from standard bodies’ business models?" However, after reviewing the suggestions, I believe tailwind movement is probably not large/important enough to make money in a similar way (sell certification, membership with governance privileges, training ..). Two interesting ideas: "Keep human docs free, but put machine-optimized “spec corpora” behind licensing (because AI is the channel disrupting them)." "Stop relying on docs-as-marketing if AI is eating that funnel, and instead monetize the privileges and assurance around the standard (governance, certification, conformance, canonical distribution)." (Don't get me wrong, I love using Tailwind, but I believe they need to see their business realistically.)
- sfc32 9mo agoIs 75% 3/4 engineers, 30/40 or something else?
- jcattle 9mo ago> Going to lock this one as it's spiraling a bit. Well that was an understatement. That issue devolved completely.
- gnegggh 9mo agoRefactoring UI is a great book that i've had a ton of value from. Tailwind plus also, and i've been so surprised/impressed to see that my one time purchase kept granting me new stuff. Thanks a lot to Adam and the Tailwind team.
- timr 9mo agoI never personally wanted Tailwind as a product, but really feel for them when I see comments like this one [1]: > Here's a friendly tip for the Tailwind team that you should already know, but I will repeat anyways: If your goal is monetizing your software, then making your software as easy to use for people's workflows, is paramount. I made the horrible life mistake of starting a company around developer tools, and I would never, ever repeat the experience because of “friendly” stuff like this. I don’t know why software developers are so entitled, but it’s a serious culture problem. [1] https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3716612843 https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
- grokys 9mo agoI 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.
- timr 9mo agoYep. I almost edited my comment to include that one as well! "Insane", indeed. As you note, the tire-kickers were the worst -- people who forked the Linux kernel (with no additional commits) trying to process the entire repo on a free plan, for example, then complaining (loudly) when cut off.
- la_oveja 9mo agolooking at their partner list, which is 5000$ a month, and theres 16 partners, thats minimun 80k$ a month. just an insight.
- wltr 9mo agoDo you think they’d survive?
- la_oveja 9mo agoi have no idea, even less in usa, but with 80k a month income you could def pay for a dev team and infra in some countries.
- utf_8x 9mo agoIt 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-staff-engineer https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...
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- maxbaines 9mo agoI nearly always use Tailwind, had no idea there was even a Plus offering. Checking the site I see it now but it’s a subtle link. Also wonder if shad/cn had something to do with the reduced usage of plus.
- robertjpayne 9mo agoshadcn/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.
- ravins 9mo agoSad to hear such from creator of tailwind
- ides_dev 9mo agoAdam goes into depth on this in an episode of his podcast: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six-months-left https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
- jgoodhcg 9mo agoI didn’t know he started a new podcast!
- noobermin 9mo agoThere is an industry wide biting the hand that feeds them going on. It would be nice for people to realise that's what's happening.
- MangoCoffee 9mo agoIf your business can easily be replaced or lose revenue because of AI, it doesn't sound like a good business model to begin with
- qinchencq 9mo agoSo, is it AI or a problematic business model that caused this?
- deevus 9mo agoSad to hear. I have a Tailwind Plus license (when it was previously Tailwind UI). They are fantastic components and to be honest they keep me writing React even though I would rather not. Catalyst UI is too good.
- zapnuk 9mo agoSeems like their whole business model was based on the fact that tailwind was difficult to use, and now with llm we have a simple way to use it in a good-enough way. They, and other companies, should rather depend on corporate users. Don't let multi-billion revenue companies use your tech for free. Seems like many companies leaned it a bit late, we always have the same news every fewe years (docker, mongodb, terraform, elastic).
- hbn 9mo ago> 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.
- zapnuk 9mo agoNah. Plenty people struggles with the use of tailwind or at least were interested in shortcuts. Thats the whole what tailwind plus offers. In some ways tailwind is like matplotlib/pandas/numpy. Increadibly powerfull but some methods/classes are difficult to remember to you keep googleing the same things. Doesn't matter anyways wether their customers are people who search for shortcuts or people who search for "the best designs". Their problem was and is that tailwind is used by many of the most profitable companies in the world for free. Thats so unbelievable stupid. You have corporations paying millions for MS 365 subscriptions, confluence, and other software and basically nothing for a totally optional ui library. If the use of tailwind saves 10 engineering hours per month then it's worth it to pay a few hundred $ for a licence. Given that their team isn't big they don't even need that many customers. Add a bit consulting for a decent hourly rate and they should be golden. The more I think about it the more I blame the CEO for poor decisions.
- thisismydesign 9mo agoNow would be a good time for AI companies to sponsor open source
- websku 9mo agoI've seen that the team had 4 members. 3 being laid off.
- geenat 9mo agoTailwind was far ahead of its time in having an OSS business model overall friendly to users while still being able to fund development (Note: OSS projects like Minio, ScyllaDB and CockroachDB do a far more insidious "open core only", or "crazy licensing fees after x processes/users" , etc). It was great to see OSS succeed financially without ads or punishing users. "Information should be free", sure, but lets not kid ourselves, these massive new AI companies are making themselves new gatekeepers with new artificial moats for themselves. Information is not federated / distributed anymore. We need "GPL for AI" that restricts AI scrapers from performing content theft/repackaging.
- throwacct 9mo agoI think it's too late for that. For new projects? Of course.
- lovlar 9mo agoWhat about exploring new, AI-native ways to monetize? For example, creators behind libraries like Tailwind could sell Claude skills or MCP server solutions. If I could pay $20 to make my AI agents significantly better at writing state-of-the-art Tailwind code — while knowing that my purchase directly supports the Tailwind community and its long-term sustainability — I would happily do so.
- bhoggard 9mo agoI bought Tailwind UI/Plus just for my side projects several years ago because it was so useful. I'm very sad to see this.
- bakigul 9mo agoIf the business model had evolved together with artificial intelligence, we wouldn’t be talking about a 75% layoff today we might be talking about a 75% hiring spree instead.
- xnx 9mo agoGoogle now sponsors Tailwind: "I am happy to share that we (the @GoogleAIStudio team) are now a sponsor of the @tailwindcss project! Honored to support and find ways to do more together to help the ecosystem of builders." https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2009339263251566902 https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2009339263251566902
- bschmidt240 9mo ago[dead]
- hiccuphippo 9mo agoSo are they laying off 75% (3 people) because using AI 1 person can do the work of 4?
- lilerjee 9mo agoIt's time to think about seriously "Could we create a license to make AI companies pay for your content?" or "Create a technology to ban AI bots effectively", please refer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45729809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45729809
- pixelpulsate 9mo agoThis pretty much accurately covers what's really happening: "Tailwind CSS Lays off 75% of Engineers Due to Brutal AI - or... 3 People Fired Because CEO Sucks..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc-WZRIWc38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc-WZRIWc38