7 ms·
No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is tech
by ricardobeat 10mo ago
No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.
- birken 10mo agoWhat kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support? That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.
- babypuncher 10mo agoLots of great engineers will work for way less than a FAANG salary as long as it means not having to work for FAANG. $1m/year still won't get you all that much though.
- zeroCalories 10mo agoRealistically if you can work on a small and high profile project like tailwind you're gonna be snatched up by someone willing to pay you at or near FAANG levels
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- mcny 10mo agoThat's good. We can tell people that so they will submit us patches for free. Maybe we could even have a neat website with a leaderboard of sorts where we honor top contributors like some kind of gamification. I think we would really need about five highly opinionated people with good technical and people skills to volunteer as paid maintainers for tailwind or any oss project to succeed.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- SXX 10mo agoLots and lots of people work for much less or for free on whatever they like. Problem is that doing "boring" parts of open source project maintenance is not very exciting for many top tier developers so it should pay at least competetively for experience or people will just burn out. And while you can obviously fund a team of 20 on $1M/year outside of US whatever said team will manage to keep up to the level of quality is another question.
- eek2121 10mo agoFAANG isn't the world. Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers. Most startups are paying $90k-$140k for senior devs, for example (I haven't done the math, but from my own experience, $100-$120k is the general sweet spot). Larger companies pay a bit more, but move beyond that and you are talking management.
- estearum 10mo agoMost “senior devs” are actually bad.
- narmiouh 10mo agoI am really curious about metro areas that are paying 100-120k for senior(in the real sense) devs. Could you please share some metro areas you are familiar with?
- shimman 10mo agoSure. Boston, NYC, Seattle, basically any city in the US you will find senior devs being hired at that price range. You do realize not every company pays well right?
- FridgeSeal 10mo ago120k USD ~= 180k AUD, which is a rate I have _definitely_ seen advertised for Seniors in Sydney + Melbourne.
- selcuka 10mo agoI'm in Brisbane, but salaries are wildly different between US and AU. The exchange rate is not a good approximation. We don't see many US$275K (AU$410K) remote jobs [1] advertised in Australia either. [1] https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-staff-engineer https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...
- zdragnar 10mo ago
- trollbridge 10mo agoThere are plenty of software firms out there (including the one I work for) whose entire budget is less than $1MM, and who have a headcount of developers that's more than 2. Not every software company is busy writing software to target you with ads.
- knowitnone3 10mo agoTailwind is not a FAANG, they are glorified frontend CSS devs
- cardanome 10mo agoOr like 10 senior engineers in mid sized companies in Europe. I wish every engineer were paid FAANG money.
- raincole 10mo agoBlender pays their developers ~ $3M/year. [0] I'm having a very hard time to believe you need one third of that to maintain a library that does "shorter names for standard CSS." Of course I might be underestimating Tailwind a lot. [0] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-Annual-Report-2024.pdf https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... [1] But given the unit is euro in this report, I guess the solution is to not hire developers in the US.
- sebmellen 10mo agoThat is truly incredible and an ode to what can be done with a relatively small budget. You’re right that Tailwind is nowhere near Blender’s complexity… but it’s also trying to be a business and not a foundation.
- tpmoney 10mo agoAccording to that document, they spent ~1.5M eur (1.75 USD) on developer salaries. If we count up all the people in the "Development Team" section (other than the ones paid by grant, which I excluded from the number above), we have 22 full time developer listed. That's ~$80k (USD) / developer for the all in costs, so the actual salary is probably lower than that. US News tells us[1] that the median US developer is getting ~$132k / year. To put that into a bit of perspective, the local gas station by me is paying staff $15 / hour. That's ~30k / year. As a side note, what the heck is with all the griping about costs in this discussion? So what if it's "just a big CSS library". Don't we want people to be paid good salaries? I swear software developers are one of the only groups of people I've ever met who actively complain about being paid too much money. [1]: https://careers.usnews.com/best-jobs/software-developer/salary https://careers.usnews.com/best-jobs/software-developer/sala...
- hennell 10mo agoTailwind (like most things) is way more complex than it first appears. Sure the main thing was originally 'just' mapping `.p-4` to `padding: 1rem`. But it's also about grepping the code to see if `p-4` is used so it only builds needed classes. It also needs to work with things like their responsive and state classes so `md:p-4` or `hover:p-4` add the padding only on medium or larger screens, or when hovered etc. All of which increased to support more and more css features and arbitrary values so `not-supports-[display:grid]:p-[5px]` generates the required code to check if grid is supported and add 5px padding or whatever other values you put in the []. You can question if that's really a sensible idea, but it is undeniably a pretty complex challenge. Not sure it compares to blender, I imagine that has a lot more maths involved - put probably less edge cases and weird displays odd in X browser bugs.
- geodel 10mo agoHuh, FAANG salary comes at FAANG level revenue / profitability generated. That salary is not some kind of human right.
- buzzerbetrayed 10mo agoFailwind? Alewind? Nailwind? Galewind? I’m struggling to figure out which letter in FAANG represents Tailwind. Not sure why they need to be paying FAANG salaries.
- rwyinuse 10mo agoOne million a year would easily buy you 10 experienced full-time engineers in most of Europe.
- ryanSrich 10mo agoThat's barely two low level faang engineers after full load.
- ericmcer 10mo agoHaving worked on design system teams before people can burn a lot of time and money doing overly nuanced stuff. I have been in meetings discussing removing/adding a property on a React component before. That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient to build a css library, but you could 100% have a team of 20 and they would find stuff to do.
- jacquesm 10mo agoThat's how bloat happens.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- runako 10mo ago> 3 motivated developers and a designer Curious how much cash folks think it takes to cover this headcount. I have a feeling people are wildly underestimating the cost of a team this size.
- troupo 10mo agoAt 100k per person per month it's 400k per month (the actual cost is higher. 100k in salary is easily 150k with all the taxes included). Times that by 12...
- bpiroman 10mo ago100% agree. If an open source project needs money to run, then isn't that defeating the purpose of being open source? Open source is a gift economy. If the owner can monetise it on the side then that is just a bonus.
- pcthrowaway 10mo agoWhy should the license model of the source code prevent developers from making a living? Why should companies which release their software under proprietary licenses also be the only ones able to profit from it? As Stallman said: Think free as in free speech, not free beer.
- jackconsidine 10mo agoInteresting. In Spanish there is libre ("free" speech) and gratis ("free" beer). Now that I think of it, libre is part of the name of many linux packages (Libre Office). Never made that connection before.
- groby_b 10mo agoOpen Source never was "a gift economy". It is a sharing economy, and that requires mutual participation.
- musicjerm 10mo agoYes, open source career dev here, pls subscribe to my onlyFans
- WesolyKubeczek 10mo agoIf you are entertaining enough, and could livestream coding while at least topless, I think you could make some pretty buck. Just remember, when clothed, it can go on youtube, and when your nipples are visible, it’s definitely OF.
- knowitnone3 10mo agomoney from sponsorships AND money from the PRO version. must be nice
- shit_game 10mo agoI'd imagine that infrastructure costs are rather significant for Tailwind, and that there are non-neglibible organizational costs as well.
- coder543 10mo agoEvery app that uses tailwind builds a custom CSS bundle. Tailwind Labs does not host those; whoever is making the app has to figure out their own hosting. So I’m not seeing the significant infrastructure costs? Even if Tailwind were a shared hosted system like the common bootstrap CDNs of old… CDNs are dirt cheap for a small text file, even if it were loaded billions of times a month. Some back of the napkin math suggests that it would cost about $300 per billion downloads for the current bootstrap.min.css file (gzip compressed, naturally) at North American network prices on one CDN I’ve used before. Or just $150 per billion globally if you're willing to use fewer PoPs. With browser caching, even split per domain, a billion downloads covers a very large number of users for a very large number of page loads.
- Maxious 10mo agoinfrastructure costs are already covered > Vercel sponsors all of our hosting for all of our sites (which is expensive with our traffic!) for free and has for years https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2009298745398018468 https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2009298745398018468
- maxloh 10mo agoOne could compare the main branch against its state from one year ago to find out if the core product justifies this scale. I would say that, more likely than not, it isn't. https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/compare/main%40%7B1year%7D...main https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/compare/main%40%...
- hu3 10mo agoTIL they use Bun: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/commit/1e949af9a140c6204157018b20c7004008c92124 https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/commit/1e949af9a...
- tpmoney 10mo agoLet's say you're paying your devs $100k / year. All in costs on those devs are probably $150k or so. That means your $1m / year will fund 6 full time developers with a little left over. This podcast from the CEO[1] says their engineering team was 4 people and the remaining staff is the 3 owners, the 1 remaining engineer, and one part time customer support person. So assuming every full time person was costing $150k in salary and other costs, you're already over $1m / year before you pay for any other expenses. $1M / year is a lot of runway when it's just you. It's a lot less runway once you're paying other people's livelihoods too. [1]: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six-months-left https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
- leetrout 10mo agoThey were posting a job for $250k last year.
- MobiusHorizons 10mo agoSponsorships are a supplemental income stream, though, right? They have paid services in addition as I understand it. So covering several full time developers seems pretty good sponsorship wise, when the maintenance should be fairly simple at this point given the maturity of the offering and the tech stack. It’s not like they have to keep up with security vulnerabilities or a mobile version update churn.
- tweetle_beetle 10mo agoThey just sell lifetime licenses to extra content at a fixed (relatively small) fee. > Because every project is different and the way independently authored pieces of code interact can be complex and time-consuming to understand, we do not offer technical support or consulting. https://tailwindcss.com/plus https://tailwindcss.com/plus
- AlecSchueler 10mo agoThe question is still why you need multiple devs worth 150-250kpa to maintain a CSS library.
- greatgib 10mo agoWe are probably in a situation like the one of Firefox or wikipedia. A (side) business is created to support the oss project, to make it commercially sustainable /profitable, and then it becomes the commercial offer the liability sunk-in the money, using the fame of the oss to feed the beast. Puting the oss project at risk in the end. Whereas people would happily give money or pay for supporting the oss project, they are kind of forced to feed the commercial project that might not really wanted to keep the beast alive. As other I don't really have the details, but I think that in most of the world, 1 million of recurring revenue should be quite enough to support a sane evolution of what the project is doing.
- gt0 10mo agoI thought this too. At the end of the day, it's CSS, this isn't a large project needing a ton of resources.
- easymuffin 10mo agoAgree and compared to the Zig Software Foundation (more complex work and lower salaries/costs) https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/ https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/ , the amount of money required to run Tailwind CSS seems quite high (or Zig quite low, depending how you view it). IMHO it’s too high and mostly profits from popularity and right framework at the right time for LLMs, but as others mentioned shadcn probably also contributed to people using shadcn components causing less TW UI sales and less visits to their docs page. The CSS framework seems mostly done and supports most browser CSS features, so I’m wondering if it still requires that many devs? Also wondering what they are going to do now with all the new partnership money flowing in. I’d prefer the OSS money flow to be more balanced, but yeah I guess the market decides.
- mrgoldenbrown 10mo agoCSS the standard is still getting updated, browsers are still updating and making their own slightly different interpretations of the standard, so a CSS library can't be "complete" except for a moment in time.