8 ms·
Let'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
by tpmoney 9mo ago
Let'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 9mo agoThey were posting a job for $250k last year.
- MobiusHorizons 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo agoThe question is still why you need multiple devs worth 150-250kpa to maintain a CSS library.
- sonofhans 9mo agoIf you can find a way to do it better or cheaper you’re welcome to try. No one else has. Don’t think it’s a small problem. The number of user agents and platforms supported by Tailwind would melt plenty of larger organizations.
- exceptione 9mo agoMaybe we accidentally found a more meaningful chance for having a discussion about LLMs. As CSS is limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable and declarative, this should be a home run for LLMs.
- IsTom 9mo ago> limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable Are we talking about the same CSS?
- mexicocitinluez 9mo agolol People don't realize that Tailwind democratized styling for a lot of people who didn't want to or didn't know how to write CSS. We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs. LLMs, by their nature, work better with Tailwind since it needs a much smaller context to make the right decision.
- doodlesdev 9mo ago> We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs. A lot of us have never stopped writing hand-crafted CSS. Also, in my experience, Gemini 3 Pro is an absolute monster at writing layouts and styling in pure CSS with very basic descriptions of what I want (tested it while I was experimenting with vibe coding in some sleepless night LOL). There are still a lot of developers who loathe using Tailwind and avoid touching it like the plague. Handwritten CSS still offers more opportunities for optimization and keeps your markup much cleaner than spamming utility classes everywhere (I understand the appeal of rapidly iterating with it, though).
- agloe_dreams 9mo agoThe answer really is that they were spending an amount of that money on devs who were working on tailwindUI / Plus - their paid product.
- solarkraft 9mo agoThat’s an incredible amount of labor. What were they spending it on?