11 ms·

Shopify acquires Tailwind

1146 points by EdwinHoksberg 25d ago

recursivedoubts 25d ago
It is an age of consolidation.
LoganDark 25d ago
Ugh. I remember how much Tailwind Labs has struggled for funding and it sucks to see Shopify get them. It also sucks to see they're discontinuing their paid products permanently, effective immediately -- they're not making them free, they're taking them away. You simply can't get them now. I understand why this had to happen but it is sad to see.
- game_the0ry 25d ago
  Why does it suck that shopify got them? They seem to be a good steward of open source, especially with rails.
  - LoganDark 25d ago
    Usually when stuff like this happens, it means that Tailwind's developers are moving to work on Shopify instead, which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode. That's what usually happens when a dependency is picked up by a company with a huge, "more interesting" product -- the dependency starts to depend on the more interesting product for attention, and stops receiving attention on its own merits. It grows only to support the more interesting product. Furthermore, I already have specific experience with Tailwind Labs neglecting their other libraries that aren't Tailwind CSS itself, probably because they were only meant to support their paid products (which now will no longer exist! so maybe those other libraries will just stop getting updates altogether). Headless UI was something I wanted to rely on heavily, but it's not built to be flexible enough and basic issues from 2021 or earlier haven't been resolved or seemingly even reviewed. Now that they have Shopify, I'll be surprised if Tailwind CSS continues to receive any more attention than Headless UI did all those years ago. This acquisition puts Tailwind CSS in exactly that position. (Edited to fix "Spotify" typos...)
    - game_the0ry 25d ago
      > which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode. You are making quite an assumption here. Bootstrap was a twitter os library that is still in development today.
      - LoganDark 22d ago
        I'm saying I've seen this happen before, and I'm making a guess. I'm not assuming anything.
    - hbn 25d ago
      Tailwind is more relevant than ever in web development, it's practically the native language for UIs in the LLM world. I don't see why they'd put Tailwind into maintenance mode when they just purchased a pretty major building block in the modern web stack.
- moralestapia 25d ago
  For some definition of "struggling" that encompasses a situation where you get $3M/year for renaming CSS variables.
- weird-eye-issue 25d ago
  Struggled for funding because their business model collapsed overnight and isn't coming back, this is probably a best case scenario.
bbg2401 25d ago
The most pertinent part for many: > On the commercial side, we'll no longer be trying to grow the business around Tailwind. All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.
- cube00 25d ago
  > All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify. You've got to wonder how long that model can continue if no new customers are allowed in. They've even removed the Plus splash page so clicking Plus on the homepage or going to /plus takes you to a login page with no detail about what it was.
simonw 25d ago
Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3717222957 https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > 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. [...] > 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.
- elicash 25d ago
  I remember that HN discussion, but it seemed to me from the outside that after that post they got Google as a sponsor and I just had assumed the community was rallying together for them a bit. But I guess not. Too bad, they seem like such good people. Not that they're dead or something but I don't think this was their ideal end state for Tailwind.
  - f311a 25d ago
    They got like 10 new sponsors, you can see it on their page. They are one of the top OSS projects in terms of revenue. I can't recall any other OSS project that makes so much money and has nothing to do with infra/cloud. They were making around $1M a year back when they complained about the revenue. A lot of Linux distros can only dream about such an amount of money.
    - simonw 25d ago
      $1M a year isn't a lot of money if you are paying for full-time employees.
      - tempfile 25d ago
        Right, and as a consequence lots of very important software (orders of magnitude more important than tailwind) does not have full-time employees. Good for them if they can manage it, but it's a gravy train.
spiderfarmer 25d ago
Expected move and good to hear. Gives Tailwind some extra maintenance years. But like with all these sugardaddy takeovers, the next expected move is “Tailwind is now independent again“.
yodon 25d ago
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- lekevicius 25d ago
  Luckily, Tailwind is, and likely always will be, a block at the very top. Not a critical piece of infrastructure.
  - Zarkex01 25d ago
    And even then, how would Tailwind "die"?
219283751 25d ago
I thought the narrative by Lütke et. al. was that the clankers could do everything by themselves! Turns out that clankers generate beige static websites that use 100% CPU, so some assistance is needed. We now have proof that the above is true, since Lütke adheres to the principle that any non-clanker usage has to be justified. Let us assume he justified the purchase.
deleted 25d ago
[deleted]
pil0u 25d ago
They are buying the people and the brand. Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business. Selling UI templates in the current era is likely a dead end, even with a brand as strong as Tailwind. I hope Adam and the team are well and good with this decision. Tailwind is regularly debated here for various reasons, using it helped me have a better understanding of CSS, HTML and design, and made me a better software engineer. Thanks for building and sharing Tailwind!
- davidpapermill 25d ago
  I'm not sure it's completely dead. We use Claude for design of document templates a lot, and whilst we've built a fantastic pipeline for doing that well, asking Claude to then design anything outside of our guardrails isn't effective. So I could imagine folks prioritising high quality design of all kinds choosing templates that would guide Claude. I look at a large number of startup websites and it's very clear which ones are using Claude the excessive CAPS headings alone give it away. They look OK but the Claude aesthetic does leave me wondering whether this is a real business or one person using Claude to build a LP.
  - deleted 24d ago
    [deleted]
- dawnerd 25d ago
  It’s far from dead. All of the AI models struggle with creativity and consistency. There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX.
  - spiderice 24d ago
    > There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX Given the past 3 years, I will never understand how people can be so confident making statements like this
    - keybored 24d ago
weird-eye-issue 25d ago
I bought Tailwind UI when it first launched and then ended up using it for a product that had a lot of success several years later and would consult the included components anytime I was going to build something in my app but now with AI I haven't done that in the last couple years at all because the AI just handles it... It's crazy to think how much AI changed this sort of business model
codegeek 25d ago
Happy for Tailwind as this was possible the best outcomes possible for them at this stage. It is clear that most of the frameworks for software are going to struggle significantly because of AI. Especially CSS frameworks. No one cared about writing CSS code by hand before AI and now with AI, no one needs to care about frameworks as well. AI writes it for you so I don't care whether its tailwind or plain css.
Zarkex01 25d ago
Well I guess that's good?
bingemaker 25d ago
I hope Tailwind gets its own space to expand. Shopify has done some great things for Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Hope that spirit continues
petcat 25d ago
I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX. Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.
- sgt 25d ago
  Also a solid combination for LLM assisted apps. Claude Code will just get it. It's good with Tailwind also though.
- kyleee 25d ago
  Even better than that - just use bootstrap 3
- alexcroox 25d ago
  I've been thinking the same about the future of frameworks. Many of the complexities in today's frameworks exist for "developer experience", given that's less and less relevant by the month, it will be interesting to see the tech stacks chosen going forward.
- jjice 25d ago
  Curious what jQuery brings for you these days? My favorite jQuery features got implemented in the vanilla DOM APIs (document.querySelector and fetch being the big one for me). Now I'm curious if I'm missing out.
  - petcat 25d ago
    I prefer the terseness of jQuery's API and things like chaining dom operations with the fluent API. I don't like the native DOM API. Too verbose (I still read and review code)
    - abanana 24d ago
      Makes sense to me. Their motto was "Write less, do more", i.e. its conciseness was a major selling point, but that seems to have been forgotten now that its other selling points have been rendered obsolete. I recall scripts ending up as little as one-third the size of vanilla JS, when rewritten using jQuery (where the website was otherwise using jQuery anyway).
sceptic123 25d ago
Business model always struck me as a little odd when Tailwind, by it's very nature, makes it trivial to copy existing implementations
sikozu 25d ago
Not sure how to feel about this, I hope Shopify will leave the Tailwind team alone for the most part and let them continue what they've been doing.
vehemenz 25d ago
AI and Tailwind-based template systems sort of stole Tailwind's lunch, so I'm glad there was light at the end of the tunnel for Adam and co.
nullbio 25d ago
As someone who built their entire platform on Tailwind and has been running gpt-6-astra for the last 5 days straight working on the migration away from it because it leaves an irrecoverable pile of slop when your project becomes large enough... Heed my warning. It's not that Tailwind itself is bad. It's good. But agents are notorious for re-inventing the wheel without hard constraints that prevent them from doing it - and when I say hard constraints, I don't just mean an AGENTS.md file or a skill they can ignore. As such, I found that design consistency was near impossible and a constant firefight. It worked at first, but when my project got sufficiently large, it became worse and worse. I initially tried combatting this with a spaghetti-soup of linter rules, but it wasn't very effective to maintain. So I'm biting the bullet and moving on to greener pastures.
- mehagar 25d ago
  What are you switching to?
  - nullbio 25d ago
    I'm probably going to catch heat for this, because people (I did too, I won't lie) have a visceral reaction to the Javascript for styling, but... StyleX. It came on my radar a few months ago when I first started noticing this rot problem. Then recently I saw that it was getting quite hyped and people have been singing its praise for solving this exact problem. So I'm giving it a shot. Can't say for certain whether it will work out well or not yet, but based on the feedback I've been seeing from others, I'm hopeful. i.e. https://dev.to/adioof/stylex-won-css-in-js-because-ai-agents-can-read-it-473a https://dev.to/adioof/stylex-won-css-in-js-because-ai-agents... (not my blog).
    - psygn89 25d ago
      For us we went with CSS modules, it just made more sense for us to stay closer to web fundamentals since our styles are used across different tech stacks. From my experience in the last year, AI is quite good at sticking to your css ground rules and gleaning css patterns from other files all while being underpinned by design tokens (can have linters raise raw values to question also). Gotta use whatever works best for the job!
otherayden 25d ago
Very glad they got their exit. Provided huge value for years
whatthe12899 25d ago
meh fuck shopify
dcchambers 25d ago
Happy for Adam and his team.
deleted 25d ago
[deleted]
fg137 25d ago
Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?
- invalidusernam3 25d ago
  LLMs seem to work well with tailwind which I assume is because there was a lot of tailwind in the training data. As a human I never found tailwind to be particularly easy to work with anyway (mostly because I can't be bothered to learn another CSS framework) so I was constantly checking the docs when manually writing code. But I do like the rigidity it forces, which is probably a good thing for AI coding as well.
  - vehemenz 24d ago
    I don't really get this argument. 90% of Tailwind is shorthand for existing CSS properties. There's really not much to learn if you already know CSS.
    - paulhebert 24d ago
      Except for all those specific shorthands? I used it for months at s previous job and spent a lot of time googling “how do I write X CSS property in Tailwind”
      - vehemenz 24d ago
        I’m not sure what to tell you. With only a few exceptions, the shorthand follows a very predictable pattern if you already know the property names. IDE completions help too.
  - ngokevin 24d ago
    I feel it's better for LLMs. For each class name, the LLM doesn't have to go out and consume CSS files and read all the cascading rules and determine what other classes elsewhere might have an effect. It has everything it needs to determine the styling and layout right in its immediate context
simonw 25d ago
I hope Adam (and other Tailwind team members) got handsomely paid as part of this acquisition. Working on an open source project for 9 years and then getting a sizable bonus in an acquisition that keeps the open source project alive seems like a decent scenario to me. (I don't think there are any investors involved here.)
egorfine 25d ago
Excellent news for the team, and a sad news for the rest of us. But I guess that the cycle of life: products gets purchased and slowly die.
popupeyecare 25d ago
I was a huge fan of Steve Schoger's YouTube Series - Refactoring UI. Taught me so much about design. Congrats on the exit. Hope it was good. Bring back the series! https://www.youtube.com/@SteveSchoger https://www.youtube.com/@SteveSchoger
- testycool 25d ago
  Holy shit I had no idea there was a YouTube series, nor that he had a YT channel. And a recent video is about designing a dashboard with Ai, which is exactly what I been needing from him specifically. I remember reading the book 6 years ago and I loved how easy it was to understand. It's also where I first learned about dense UI and was amazed at a before/after example of one. You can clearly see that uncommon common sense he has about UI/UX. Thanks for mentioning this.
- mijustin 24d ago
  Agreed! I get inspired just by seeing him talk through his approach to design problems.
leftnode 25d ago
I thought Laravel would've been the one to scoop them up, but I'm glad they landed with Shopify. Adam's a solid dude and what him and his team have done to commoditize web design is to be lauded. To think it started as a side project and grew to the scale it did. Very impressive work.
- tylergetsay 25d ago
  How well is Laravel doing nowadays?
  - aarondf 25d ago
    Pretty well https://x.com/taylorotwell/status/2093329899083759634?s=46 https://x.com/taylorotwell/status/2093329899083759634?s=46
    - sikozu 24d ago
      Disclaimer: aarondf is an employee of Laravel. https://x.com/aarondfrancis https://x.com/aarondfrancis
      - aarondf 24d ago
        Yeah! So is Taylor otwell, the primary source to whom I linked.
  - deleted 24d ago
    [deleted]
radicalriddler 25d ago
As a lifetime access purchaser of Tailwind UI and a user of their recent oatmeal template, the news that they’re winding down tailwindui hurts a little. Glad they got their exit, Adam deserves it, but I don’t know why they can’t see the value in preset UI templates. AI sucks at building UI, it sucks a little less when it’s got codebase references to build upon and reference.
idkithought 25d ago
Tailwind Labs != Tailwind In case it wasn’t clear
alexnewman 25d ago
Phew was worried it was tailscale
drbscl 25d ago
Glad they managed to get a way out after their financial difficulties. Hopefully they got a decent exit.
Cameri 25d ago
IIRC Tailwind was toast a few months ago (laying off the few engineers that kept it going), so is this Shopify rescuing the company?
- ActionHank 25d ago
  More like Shopify skinning the company to make a novelty hat.
throwaway613746 25d ago
Another open source project being consumed by capitalist vultures. It's not enough to just fund them as charity is it?
- colesantiago 24d ago
  They are a for profit? why do you think they need to be a charity? And even if they were a charity, the sponsors... well I don't think you would like them either. They were 'captured' before Shopify bought them.
jjcm 25d ago
Really happy for Adam and the rest of the crew - they made a great product for a prior era, and hopefully this is a soft landing for them given their revenue stream dried up. Tailwind at this point is a coding language and a brand with no direct product. It's a great acquisition when you want mind share and developer love, and are OK with there being no revenue involved. Shopify is a solid match for that.
iamgopal 25d ago
I had to create special checker/linter to analyze my code base ( and asked AI to loop it through it as some kind of test ), so as to avoid AI (mis)using tailwind class here and there. that was 2025, AI and linter both improved quite a lot since.
croes 25d ago
I guess they wanted to prevent losing their voting rights if Lütke‘s idea becomes reality
vachina 25d ago
Wondering when Shopify is gonna wind up next. Not a good time to be a (small) software company.
- boringg 25d ago
  How do you define small?
  - biinjo 25d ago
    If you look at the monitor, the Shopify logo fits between the thumb and index finger, I suppose that's the only small thing about Shopify, lol. All joking aside, I don't think most of us consider Shopify as a small company. I personally hope that Tailwind stays around after this acquisition. I was there when Shopify bought Remix and that project is as good as dead in the water now.
    - Onewildgamer 24d ago
      I liked remix so much, very sad it ended up in a graveyard
  - vachina 25d ago
    When your moat is just code.
    - boringg 25d ago
      Well then Shopify isn't small!
- 40four 25d ago
  Shopify is a publicly traded company, and they own a significant share of the whole e-commerce market, they aren’t going anywhere lol :)
francislavoie 25d ago
Worth noting, Tailwind was canadian, and Shopify is also canadian. I like that this was the outcome. The labs business was obviously no longer needed in this era of AI, and I'm glad Tailwind will continue to get proper backing from Shopify to evolve further.
sodapopcan 25d ago
That's too bad, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
grzes 25d ago
tailwindcss is an anti-pattern that breaks fundamental rule of software engeneering - separation of concerns. just learn how to use CSS - it will benefit you in the long run. i suspect they will be "paywalling" more and more features in the future.
- hbn 25d ago
  HTML and CSS are not a separation of concerns in anything I've ever built. They're both representing the layout/design. I don't want them separate. You end up having to keep them synchronized anyway, messing with your HTML is frequently gonna break your CSS. Tailwind is infinitely more pleasant to write than a separate CSS file that has to be kept in sync with the HTML.
  - grzes 25d ago
    dude, have you heard about single file components where you have HTML & CSS in one place? XD
    - Kiro 24d ago
      You're destroying your own argument.
    - ldsd 24d ago
      > separation of concerns > everything in one place
- stasomatic 23d ago
  As if CSS is pinnacle of software engineering. You can't learn it, you have to keep up all the damn time. It was an elegant concept for its time but it ran off rails, hence all the hacks. Can't we move on? FE webdev is duct tape over duct tape with chewing gum here and there. These days, when I fire up the inspector, the output is panic-inducing. There has to be a better way.
jrhey 25d ago
what happens to people who paid for Tailwind Plus?
lofaszvanitt 25d ago
Oh, bejesus. Shopify awards the Stupefiers. Why would anyone need any kind of framework for CSS?! It's the inherent human need to control something, to package water and sell it as magical water. I've never understood the whole idea. Bootstrap: the hard-to-remember, horrible shitshow forced on frontend devs. And people thought there couldn't possibly be anything lower than that. Then Tailwind arrived. Apparently, frontend joes are so below average in brain capacity that they need their shiny thing covered in stickers saying "modern" and "state of the art", otherwise they feel dirty, like they haven't taken a shower in a week. It's like building a framework to simplify the SQL dialect. In reality, there's zero need for it, because SQL is so simple and easy to understand that you'd have to be a moron to use some kind of framework for it. The same applies to CSS. Tailwind is an abomination, a horrible mess, just like all the other pointless CSS 'frameworks'. These aren't frameworks. They're just some semi-psycho control freak's projection of control over something that doesn't need controlling. Let's just say it out loud: Tailwind is being rewarded for turning tons of frontend joes into complete idiots by telling them the tale that their shiny thing is the new standard, when all it ever was was an experiment in the gullibility of inherently moronic people.
- NoDodgeQuestion 24d ago
  dont like "Cascading", inline css better https://vuejs.org/guide/scaling-up/sfc#what-about-separation-of-concerns https://vuejs.org/guide/scaling-up/sfc#what-about-separation...
- n738 24d ago
  Precisely this.
  - vehemenz 24d ago
    Do you have an argument, or are you coasting on the "trust me bro" vibes of the parent?
- vehemenz 24d ago
  These are the same anti-Tailwind arguments that have been circulating forever. If you want to build a case against Tailwind that's actually compelling, you should start by understanding what it is first. Only then can you compare it to other frameworks and methodologies.
Varelion 25d ago
Joining the company with the CEO eho believes only the rich should get a vote?
ecshafer 25d ago
When I was at Shopify we used Tailwind along with our internal component library to great effect. Tailwind is a great css framework, but their business model is doomed by AI. Tobi acquihiring them for making a great product is a good result.
- hackernud3s 24d ago
  You're talking about Polaris? I really don't see how they're compatible or how Tailwind is useful to those liquid templates. The only thing that makes sense to me is headless Shopify, maybe that's the direction Shopify is headed in? But they've been struggling to get any traction there it seems to me.
dotinvictim 25d ago
[dead]
techscruggs 25d ago
I was a hardcore tailwind user and my projects still use it. That said, in the last 6 months, I haven't touched it. I just let my agents style things as they want. ... and they just use plain CSS. I really appreciated tailwind, but it solved problems that fewer people face these days.
rramon 25d ago
The timing is interesting. Stylex (Metas CSS in JS library) is taking off right now because it seems a better fit for AI driven coding in the long run.
- elwell 24d ago
  And it has an explicit LLM Resources endpoint: https://stylexjs.com/docs/llm-resources https://stylexjs.com/docs/llm-resources
- nozzlegear 24d ago
  Apparently they did a long experiment with Stylex at Shopify and found that it was "a wash in every metric": https://xcancel.com/argyleink/status/2095253698431844607 https://xcancel.com/argyleink/status/2095253698431844607
- gfat 24d ago
  Linear adopted stylex as well and published a comprehensive write up https://linear.app/now/styling-linear-for-the-future-stylex https://linear.app/now/styling-linear-for-the-future-stylex
latortuga 25d ago
God I about had a heart attack when I misread this as Tailscale joining Shopify.
- dawnerd 25d ago
  If they get acquired it’d probably be cloudflare.
- redundantly 25d ago
  I also read it as Tailscale at first and couldn't figure out why Shopify would want to buy them.
nish__ 25d ago
I knew this would happen.
mermadicsolutio 25d ago
I think the bigger issue is that AI is attacking the business model, not necessarily the product. Tailwind can still be massively popular, but if an AI agent can look at the docs/examples and generate 80% of what you'd otherwise pay for, that popularity doesn't translate into customers anymore. Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.
- nickjj 25d ago
  > Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products. It has for me at least. I had a solo business for 10 years selling tech video courses (learning Flask, Docker, etc.). It was enough to pay the bills, but for the last few years it has nose dived. For 2026 YTD it has generated $20 / month in revenue but it costs almost triple that to host the courses so I've been losing hundreds of dollars a year, for years. All while watching LLMs cannibalize ~600 free in-depth blog posts and YouTube videos only to re-sell that information to anyone willing to pay. It completely flipped my life upside down to where for 20 years I was able to sustain myself doing contract work + courses to having to take full time work. All of this started when AI became popular. It's all related to a massive loss of traffic to my site which was the entry point to both contract work and the courses. Both sides of the business have been crushed.
  - dtucjucj 24d ago
    [dead]
jp_sc 25d ago
This was definitely an acqui-hire. I'm glad Adam could find an exit like this.
phplovesong 25d ago
Does this mean tailwind plus is basically deprecated, and wont get any new stuff at all? That really sucks for anyone who bought the life time license.
deleted 25d ago
[deleted]
AtNightWeCode 25d ago
Off topic but. I never liked how tailwind looks but that font. Inter Variable. That is a new level of garbage.
dave_sid 24d ago
Shopify should deal with their hijacked accounts first. A high percentage of sponsored Google search sponsored results lead to scams on hijacked sites.
lstodd 24d ago
I remember the time when I did not need any fancy frameworks, webfonts, tons of JS and effin cdns to present my thoughts to the world. This time is now. Your bickering about how to more efficienty bloat a page is... pitiful.
sergiotapia 24d ago
Does tailwind even make sense in the age of agentic engineering? Tailwind was created to mitigate HUMAN problems, and HUMAN risks. Are these same problems experienced by an agentic workflow? I'm not so sure. The calculus is different.
- XenoCyber0 24d ago
  [dead]
GreenWatermelon 24d ago
> Tailwind is a ~~load-bearing~~ very important part of the stack This is beautiful. Art, even. And it speaks to my very soul.
jedberg 24d ago
With how good LLMs are getting at coding, running a DevTools company with both an open source and commercial component is getting harder and harder to do. It's easier every day to just vibe code the commercial part if you have the open source part. The ones that are successful provide other services that are still hard to do, like hosting at scale, or running the open source at scale. Basically, running something at scale is what DevTools companies need to do to survive. Hosting the open source and the data is one type of running at scale, or helping companies run the open source in their own infrastructure is another way to help them run at scale.
- dabinat 24d ago
  People put things out there for free and the AI companies used that data to replace them. I do wonder if the end result of that is that people will stop putting things out there for free. Open-source development was already a pretty thankless job.
pier25 24d ago
[flagged]
- colesantiago 24d ago
  This line of thinking is getting tired, and I don't think anybody cares. Money > Principles 100% every time
  - fnwbr 24d ago
    money > principles is getting tired
    - colesantiago 24d ago
      No. it rules everything. From OSS, to family, health, employees to everything that requires money. This is how I know you've never been in a leadership position which is why you don't understand this. If so, why didn't you and pier25 buy Tailwind Labs to save them from being bought by Shopify and Tobi? (who is apparently being called a Nazi by those who hate him) As they say with this Tailwind situation: Money talks. And you're in no position to execute any principles if your business has gone bust.
      - pier25 24d ago
        > who is apparently being called a Nazi by those who hate him Maybe nazi is not the right word but he has some pretty radical political views such as ending universal suffrage. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/shopify-ceo-endorses-idea-to-give-more-votes-to-wealthy-canadians-9.7286688 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/shopify-ceo-endorses-idea-to-...
guywithahat 24d ago
It makes me happy to see they'll continue to exist in an organization that benefits from their success. I really enjoy Tailwind and I feel terrible for the people in the company who watched their revenue plummet like that with the advent of AI
hoppp 24d ago
I'm happy to hear that because their business model of selling ready available components is pretty much dead due to AI. Shopify gets to control a large portion of the CSS UI market that AI so eagerly generates. Good for them
- kimos 24d ago
  And based on Tailwind’s previous statements about AI impact on them and their business, it’s possible Shopify got a good deal.
kaikayy 24d ago
Actually a good price for it i think, i prefer the design to the tipped ones tbh.
n738 24d ago
Tailwind has always sucked, and I hope this is the beginning of the end for this stupid library. Web designers universally agreed that utility class names are a bad design choice, and then Adam W, who probably never bothered to understand CSS, made quite possibly the most over engineered CSS wrapper of all time. Bad. For. Everyone. Use. CSS. Modules.
BatteryMountain 24d ago
Where we are going, we won't need css.
shevy-java 24d ago
This is awful. R.I.P. Tailwind. Edit: To clarify, I mean being assimilated by Shopify is awful. I understand that the Tailwind devs were neutered by AI skynet slop taking over before - that is also awful. That's actually two awful news we get here in one news entry.
mattgreenrocks 24d ago
Glad they found a home, but the press release doesn’t make it sound like a victory (or I’m pessimistic!). Sad to see ui.sh go away, however. Is there something else like it out there? Especially the brand kit skill.
PaulHoule 24d ago
(1) Shop Pay is one of the services that I’ve seen grow fastest in market share ever. Like in the last six months it seems like almost every independent online store sees my phone number and offers me a text to pay via shop. (2) Tailwind is part of the CSSSlop ecosystem that includes of course the original Bootstrap, SASS, Emotion and many similar things that never really worked from an ecosystem perspective because learning the specifics on one CSSSlop framework never means you don’t have to completely understand CSS. CSSSlop just forces you to learn more things and face more cognitive overload. Now that CSS includes most of what CSSSlop did, you can just use CSS and that’s a good thing. And if AI can answer questions about CSS and save you from trying to find answers in splogs or learning to navigate 50+ spec documents to find definitive answers, isn’t that a good thing?
- cindyllm 24d ago
  [dead]
SamDc73 24d ago
I alwasy thought they would be aquired by Vercel or maybe Anthropic but didn't see this one coming
devy 24d ago
It's about time! Adam has been stressed about revenue and long term viability of a business to support a popular CSS /UI library framework like Tailwind. Shopify was an early customer too. PS: I like how Adam dissing on the famous Claude Speak "load bearing" with a strike-through!. Subtle, but EVERY PUN intended, hah! https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwind-is-joining-shopify#~text=load%20bearing:~:text=Tailwind%20is%20a-,load%2Dbearing,-very%20important%20part https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwind-is-joining-shopify#~te...
fchicken 24d ago
I read this as "Shopify acquires Taiwan"
dakolli 24d ago
People saying design is dead or good UX doesn't matter anymore. 1. Are sloplords. 2. AI companies that sell the idea that AI can replace your designer, are still paying 100k retainers to designers for their landing pages lol. 3. People will probably replace backend engineering before they ever replace design, because they will want to seem more human. 4.Handmade watches, and handmade luxury clothing is one of the biggest markets on earth, almost as large as tech itself. I really don't think that urge for the handmade, made by someone with wonderful tastes is ever going to disappear. Also, no great designer used tailwindcss. This is made by and for slop lords. Which is most of HN, you people have no taste.
ouraf 24d ago
I love tailwind's work, but AI stole their customer base worse than a natural disaster would destroy a factory or other kind of business, At least some of them got an escape plan before going bankrupt
zem 24d ago
reading that shopify supports users designing their own custom shopfronts really helped put the acquisition into context. makes a lot of sense to bet on tailwind for that.
dandano 24d ago
I'm a very happy tailwind plus customer, I paid for their expertise on crafting good templates and best practices. Bit sad that they aren't going to add more but it was inevitable with AI cutting their lunch.
grohan 24d ago
"load-bearing" - lol, nice easter egg. no one likes the AI-isms in writing!
DonLawrence 24d ago
[dead]
internet101010 24d ago
I see "acquire" followed by "Tail" and I get concerned. This is fine though.
- Topology1 24d ago
  is "scale" the ending you are thinking of? Or is there something I don't know about
xyst 24d ago
well at least the founders got a bailout. Sad to see this company bailed out by a racist tho
eboy 24d ago
[dead]
panzi 24d ago
Will this mean they yet again throw away their component library for Shopify apps and make everyone migrate AGAIN?
ngmc 24d ago
Glad to hear the team found a successful exit. Adam bought the tailwindlabs.com domain from me when they started out and he seemed genuinely cool. Hope they keep building tools so many people enjoy using.
ndgold 24d ago
Y tho
kingkandu 24d ago
I have ~4-5 completely non technical friends who've used LLMs to generate their personal websites, complete with appointment scheduling and payment links. We can't be more than a year out for full store generation with 1 click upload to hosting providers. I don't think Shopify needs to exist anymore sadly.
cyrilng 24d ago
Even though people aren't huge fans of Tailwind or Shopify, Tailwind honestly saved my life a few years ago.
VinnyBarreca 24d ago
I am interested to see what comes out of this. We are living through some interesting times to say the least.
potato-peeler 24d ago
Never preferred tailwind. Much simpler to write plain css. It’s easier to create reusable components than what ppl think. CSS hardly has a steep learning curve. Problem with tailwind and many newer css frameworks I see posted even on HN, is they don’t seem to work on older devices, which is a shame. I guess ppl simply test on their latest phones and call it a day. Older ios itself have roughly 7% market share [1], that’s millions of devices that can’t access the web properly. [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118859/mobile-apple-ios-version-share-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118859/mobile-apple-ios...
- lemonberry 24d ago
  Why wouldn't Tailwind work on older devices? It's just a bunch of classes. If you're using a feature the browser doesn't support it's not going to work whether it's vanilla css or tailwindcss. That said, I prefer vanilla CSS. Modern CSS is great.
  - potato-peeler 24d ago
    Here is the tailwind website itself - https://ibb.co/album/kHqGx8 https://ibb.co/album/kHqGx8 This is on iOS 13.6 I have no idea why tailwind needs or does something which makes it utterly unusable. I miss the days when many websites used to offer simple html versions of their apps, like gmail (https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/google-is-killing-gmails-basic-html-view-in-2024/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/google-is-killing-gmails-b...)
- deleted 24d ago
  [deleted]
admiralrohan 24d ago
What will Shopify gain from this deal? Why everyone is buying dev tools. Earlier Anthropic bought BunJs. Can anyone explain the business model here?
- zyf 24d ago
  I think it's to ensure they're in-house projects using the tech keep going smoothly? They also get the talent along with the tech, right?
- satvikpendem 24d ago
  Controlling critical technology your software runs on.
devenquan 24d ago
[flagged]
runtime_lens 24d ago
[dead]
flossly 24d ago
Glad they have a patron now. I use it in my project (because scoped-css is not yet available in browsers and I do not want to deal much with CSS). LLMs write Tailwind easily, so that's good. And I do not have yet another place where cruft builds up (the CSS files) while they changes to them can silently mess up some UI I did not check. So thanks Shopify for taking them under your wings. X-mas wish: that the Servo project gets a proper patron (looking at you, Huawei and Samsung).
nsonha 24d ago
Probably the most damaging idea ever exiated in frontend dev. I'm glad that AI now abstracts all that crappy tailwind code away so I can stop giving a shit.
fsuts 24d ago
But why? What’s the commercial argument for shopify buying a css library. What’s the synergy and business benefits. Is it just the hire of the tailwind devs with some fanfare?
roshanabdullah1 24d ago
I guess they aim to integrate tailwind into their shopify design code. AI understands most of tailwind css and it can generate good design using tailwind. this is a good step
thih9 24d ago
Off topic, I read this as "Shopify acquires Thailand". Many strange things have happened in recent years but at least that still remains absurd.
- ntcho 24d ago
  I read “Spotify acquires Tailwind” and was slightly terrified for a split second
redanddead 24d ago
Weird acq but okay Mr Lutke is kinda weird lately in Canada. Wonder why the tailwind guys are getting involved with him
- aobdev 24d ago
  This is hardly surprising after the recent string of venture-backed developer tooling acquisitions: Bun -> Anthropic, VoidZero (vite) -> Cloudflare, Astral (uv, ruff) -> OpenAI The only thing that remains to be seen is how these affect those tools going forward (and who's next)
  - redanddead 20d ago
    True, I hadn’t considered that
Hoasi 24d ago
And here I am, still using Tachyons.css (Tailwind's precursor in many respects)
EtienneDeLyon 24d ago
[dead]
danybgoode1 23d ago
Basic question, is there something wrong with advertising your paid services via /llms.txt ? Whatever the hook is, we are all building with agents now. Obviously I have no data on conversion rates or overall efficiency whatsoever, but would imagine lots of marketers are on this already no?
aecorredor 23d ago
Moves from react native to native because of AI but acquires Tailwind. Makes sense.
reassess_blind 22d ago
Any word on how much they paid? Tailwind’s revenue was declining sharply due to AI as far as I recall.
p32929 20d ago
[flagged]

1146 points by EdwinHoksberg 25d ago

It is an age of consolidation.

Ugh. I remember how much Tailwind Labs has struggled for funding and it sucks to see Shopify get them. It also sucks to see they're discontinuing their paid products permanently, effective immediately -- they're not making them free, they're taking them away. You simply can't get them now. I understand why this had to happen but it is sad to see.

game_the0ry 25d ago
Why does it suck that shopify got them? They seem to be a good steward of open source, especially with rails.
- LoganDark 25d ago
  Usually when stuff like this happens, it means that Tailwind's developers are moving to work on Shopify instead, which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode. That's what usually happens when a dependency is picked up by a company with a huge, "more interesting" product -- the dependency starts to depend on the more interesting product for attention, and stops receiving attention on its own merits. It grows only to support the more interesting product. Furthermore, I already have specific experience with Tailwind Labs neglecting their other libraries that aren't Tailwind CSS itself, probably because they were only meant to support their paid products (which now will no longer exist! so maybe those other libraries will just stop getting updates altogether). Headless UI was something I wanted to rely on heavily, but it's not built to be flexible enough and basic issues from 2021 or earlier haven't been resolved or seemingly even reviewed. Now that they have Shopify, I'll be surprised if Tailwind CSS continues to receive any more attention than Headless UI did all those years ago. This acquisition puts Tailwind CSS in exactly that position. (Edited to fix "Spotify" typos...)
  - game_the0ry 25d ago
    > which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode. You are making quite an assumption here. Bootstrap was a twitter os library that is still in development today.
    - LoganDark 22d ago
      I'm saying I've seen this happen before, and I'm making a guess. I'm not assuming anything.
  - hbn 25d ago
    Tailwind is more relevant than ever in web development, it's practically the native language for UIs in the LLM world. I don't see why they'd put Tailwind into maintenance mode when they just purchased a pretty major building block in the modern web stack.
moralestapia 25d ago
For some definition of "struggling" that encompasses a situation where you get $3M/year for renaming CSS variables.
weird-eye-issue 25d ago
Struggled for funding because their business model collapsed overnight and isn't coming back, this is probably a best case scenario.

bbg2401 25d ago

The most pertinent part for many: > On the commercial side, we'll no longer be trying to grow the business around Tailwind. All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify.

cube00 25d ago
> All existing customers will of course maintain their access to products like Tailwind Plus and ui.sh, but we're closing sign ups for new customers to focus on Tailwind CSS at Shopify. You've got to wonder how long that model can continue if no new customers are allowed in. They've even removed the Plus splash page so clicking Plus on the homepage or going to /plus takes you to a login page with no detail about what it was.

simonw 25d ago

Here's some context on the impact AI had on the Tailwind Labs business model from January: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3717222957 https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is... > 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. [...] > 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.

elicash 25d ago
I remember that HN discussion, but it seemed to me from the outside that after that post they got Google as a sponsor and I just had assumed the community was rallying together for them a bit. But I guess not. Too bad, they seem like such good people. Not that they're dead or something but I don't think this was their ideal end state for Tailwind.
- f311a 25d ago
  They got like 10 new sponsors, you can see it on their page. They are one of the top OSS projects in terms of revenue. I can't recall any other OSS project that makes so much money and has nothing to do with infra/cloud. They were making around $1M a year back when they complained about the revenue. A lot of Linux distros can only dream about such an amount of money.
  - simonw 25d ago
    $1M a year isn't a lot of money if you are paying for full-time employees.
    - tempfile 25d ago
      Right, and as a consequence lots of very important software (orders of magnitude more important than tailwind) does not have full-time employees. Good for them if they can manage it, but it's a gravy train.

spiderfarmer 25d ago

Expected move and good to hear. Gives Tailwind some extra maintenance years. But like with all these sugardaddy takeovers, the next expected move is “Tailwind is now independent again“.

yodon 25d ago

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/

lekevicius 25d ago
Luckily, Tailwind is, and likely always will be, a block at the very top. Not a critical piece of infrastructure.
- Zarkex01 25d ago
  And even then, how would Tailwind "die"?

219283751 25d ago

I thought the narrative by Lütke et. al. was that the clankers could do everything by themselves! Turns out that clankers generate beige static websites that use 100% CPU, so some assistance is needed. We now have proof that the above is true, since Lütke adheres to the principle that any non-clanker usage has to be justified. Let us assume he justified the purchase.

deleted 25d ago

[deleted]

pil0u 25d ago

They are buying the people and the brand. Even Adam admitted that AI impacted dramatically their business. Selling UI templates in the current era is likely a dead end, even with a brand as strong as Tailwind. I hope Adam and the team are well and good with this decision. Tailwind is regularly debated here for various reasons, using it helped me have a better understanding of CSS, HTML and design, and made me a better software engineer. Thanks for building and sharing Tailwind!

davidpapermill 25d ago
I'm not sure it's completely dead. We use Claude for design of document templates a lot, and whilst we've built a fantastic pipeline for doing that well, asking Claude to then design anything outside of our guardrails isn't effective. So I could imagine folks prioritising high quality design of all kinds choosing templates that would guide Claude. I look at a large number of startup websites and it's very clear which ones are using Claude the excessive CAPS headings alone give it away. They look OK but the Claude aesthetic does leave me wondering whether this is a real business or one person using Claude to build a LP.
- deleted 24d ago
  [deleted]
dawnerd 25d ago
It’s far from dead. All of the AI models struggle with creativity and consistency. There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX.
- spiderice 24d ago
  > There’s always going to be a market for well designed UX Given the past 3 years, I will never understand how people can be so confident making statements like this
  - keybored 24d ago

weird-eye-issue 25d ago

I bought Tailwind UI when it first launched and then ended up using it for a product that had a lot of success several years later and would consult the included components anytime I was going to build something in my app but now with AI I haven't done that in the last couple years at all because the AI just handles it... It's crazy to think how much AI changed this sort of business model

codegeek 25d ago

Happy for Tailwind as this was possible the best outcomes possible for them at this stage. It is clear that most of the frameworks for software are going to struggle significantly because of AI. Especially CSS frameworks. No one cared about writing CSS code by hand before AI and now with AI, no one needs to care about frameworks as well. AI writes it for you so I don't care whether its tailwind or plain css.

Zarkex01 25d ago

Well I guess that's good?

bingemaker 25d ago

I hope Tailwind gets its own space to expand. Shopify has done some great things for Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Hope that spirit continues

petcat 25d ago

I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX. Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.

sgt 25d ago
Also a solid combination for LLM assisted apps. Claude Code will just get it. It's good with Tailwind also though.
kyleee 25d ago
Even better than that - just use bootstrap 3
alexcroox 25d ago
I've been thinking the same about the future of frameworks. Many of the complexities in today's frameworks exist for "developer experience", given that's less and less relevant by the month, it will be interesting to see the tech stacks chosen going forward.
jjice 25d ago
Curious what jQuery brings for you these days? My favorite jQuery features got implemented in the vanilla DOM APIs (document.querySelector and fetch being the big one for me). Now I'm curious if I'm missing out.
- petcat 25d ago
  I prefer the terseness of jQuery's API and things like chaining dom operations with the fluent API. I don't like the native DOM API. Too verbose (I still read and review code)
  - abanana 24d ago
    Makes sense to me. Their motto was "Write less, do more", i.e. its conciseness was a major selling point, but that seems to have been forgotten now that its other selling points have been rendered obsolete. I recall scripts ending up as little as one-third the size of vanilla JS, when rewritten using jQuery (where the website was otherwise using jQuery anyway).

sceptic123 25d ago

Business model always struck me as a little odd when Tailwind, by it's very nature, makes it trivial to copy existing implementations

sikozu 25d ago

Not sure how to feel about this, I hope Shopify will leave the Tailwind team alone for the most part and let them continue what they've been doing.

vehemenz 25d ago

AI and Tailwind-based template systems sort of stole Tailwind's lunch, so I'm glad there was light at the end of the tunnel for Adam and co.

nullbio 25d ago

As someone who built their entire platform on Tailwind and has been running gpt-6-astra for the last 5 days straight working on the migration away from it because it leaves an irrecoverable pile of slop when your project becomes large enough... Heed my warning. It's not that Tailwind itself is bad. It's good. But agents are notorious for re-inventing the wheel without hard constraints that prevent them from doing it - and when I say hard constraints, I don't just mean an AGENTS.md file or a skill they can ignore. As such, I found that design consistency was near impossible and a constant firefight. It worked at first, but when my project got sufficiently large, it became worse and worse. I initially tried combatting this with a spaghetti-soup of linter rules, but it wasn't very effective to maintain. So I'm biting the bullet and moving on to greener pastures.

mehagar 25d ago
What are you switching to?
- nullbio 25d ago
  I'm probably going to catch heat for this, because people (I did too, I won't lie) have a visceral reaction to the Javascript for styling, but... StyleX. It came on my radar a few months ago when I first started noticing this rot problem. Then recently I saw that it was getting quite hyped and people have been singing its praise for solving this exact problem. So I'm giving it a shot. Can't say for certain whether it will work out well or not yet, but based on the feedback I've been seeing from others, I'm hopeful. i.e. https://dev.to/adioof/stylex-won-css-in-js-because-ai-agents-can-read-it-473a https://dev.to/adioof/stylex-won-css-in-js-because-ai-agents... (not my blog).
  - psygn89 25d ago
    For us we went with CSS modules, it just made more sense for us to stay closer to web fundamentals since our styles are used across different tech stacks. From my experience in the last year, AI is quite good at sticking to your css ground rules and gleaning css patterns from other files all while being underpinned by design tokens (can have linters raise raw values to question also). Gotta use whatever works best for the job!

otherayden 25d ago

Very glad they got their exit. Provided huge value for years

whatthe12899 25d ago

meh fuck shopify

dcchambers 25d ago

Happy for Adam and his team.

deleted 25d ago

[deleted]

fg137 25d ago

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

invalidusernam3 25d ago
LLMs seem to work well with tailwind which I assume is because there was a lot of tailwind in the training data. As a human I never found tailwind to be particularly easy to work with anyway (mostly because I can't be bothered to learn another CSS framework) so I was constantly checking the docs when manually writing code. But I do like the rigidity it forces, which is probably a good thing for AI coding as well.
- vehemenz 24d ago
  I don't really get this argument. 90% of Tailwind is shorthand for existing CSS properties. There's really not much to learn if you already know CSS.
  - paulhebert 24d ago
    Except for all those specific shorthands? I used it for months at s previous job and spent a lot of time googling “how do I write X CSS property in Tailwind”
    - vehemenz 24d ago
      I’m not sure what to tell you. With only a few exceptions, the shorthand follows a very predictable pattern if you already know the property names. IDE completions help too.
- ngokevin 24d ago
  I feel it's better for LLMs. For each class name, the LLM doesn't have to go out and consume CSS files and read all the cascading rules and determine what other classes elsewhere might have an effect. It has everything it needs to determine the styling and layout right in its immediate context

simonw 25d ago

I hope Adam (and other Tailwind team members) got handsomely paid as part of this acquisition. Working on an open source project for 9 years and then getting a sizable bonus in an acquisition that keeps the open source project alive seems like a decent scenario to me. (I don't think there are any investors involved here.)

egorfine 25d ago

Excellent news for the team, and a sad news for the rest of us. But I guess that the cycle of life: products gets purchased and slowly die.

popupeyecare 25d ago

I was a huge fan of Steve Schoger's YouTube Series - Refactoring UI. Taught me so much about design. Congrats on the exit. Hope it was good. Bring back the series! https://www.youtube.com/@SteveSchoger https://www.youtube.com/@SteveSchoger

testycool 25d ago
Holy shit I had no idea there was a YouTube series, nor that he had a YT channel. And a recent video is about designing a dashboard with Ai, which is exactly what I been needing from him specifically. I remember reading the book 6 years ago and I loved how easy it was to understand. It's also where I first learned about dense UI and was amazed at a before/after example of one. You can clearly see that uncommon common sense he has about UI/UX. Thanks for mentioning this.
mijustin 24d ago
Agreed! I get inspired just by seeing him talk through his approach to design problems.

leftnode 25d ago

I thought Laravel would've been the one to scoop them up, but I'm glad they landed with Shopify. Adam's a solid dude and what him and his team have done to commoditize web design is to be lauded. To think it started as a side project and grew to the scale it did. Very impressive work.

tylergetsay 25d ago
How well is Laravel doing nowadays?
- aarondf 25d ago
  Pretty well https://x.com/taylorotwell/status/2093329899083759634?s=46 https://x.com/taylorotwell/status/2093329899083759634?s=46
  - sikozu 24d ago
    Disclaimer: aarondf is an employee of Laravel. https://x.com/aarondfrancis https://x.com/aarondfrancis
    - aarondf 24d ago
      Yeah! So is Taylor otwell, the primary source to whom I linked.
- deleted 24d ago
  [deleted]

radicalriddler 25d ago

As a lifetime access purchaser of Tailwind UI and a user of their recent oatmeal template, the news that they’re winding down tailwindui hurts a little. Glad they got their exit, Adam deserves it, but I don’t know why they can’t see the value in preset UI templates. AI sucks at building UI, it sucks a little less when it’s got codebase references to build upon and reference.

idkithought 25d ago

Tailwind Labs != Tailwind In case it wasn’t clear

alexnewman 25d ago

Phew was worried it was tailscale

drbscl 25d ago

Glad they managed to get a way out after their financial difficulties. Hopefully they got a decent exit.

Cameri 25d ago

IIRC Tailwind was toast a few months ago (laying off the few engineers that kept it going), so is this Shopify rescuing the company?

ActionHank 25d ago
More like Shopify skinning the company to make a novelty hat.

throwaway613746 25d ago

Another open source project being consumed by capitalist vultures. It's not enough to just fund them as charity is it?

colesantiago 24d ago
They are a for profit? why do you think they need to be a charity? And even if they were a charity, the sponsors... well I don't think you would like them either. They were 'captured' before Shopify bought them.

jjcm 25d ago

Really happy for Adam and the rest of the crew - they made a great product for a prior era, and hopefully this is a soft landing for them given their revenue stream dried up. Tailwind at this point is a coding language and a brand with no direct product. It's a great acquisition when you want mind share and developer love, and are OK with there being no revenue involved. Shopify is a solid match for that.

iamgopal 25d ago

I had to create special checker/linter to analyze my code base ( and asked AI to loop it through it as some kind of test ), so as to avoid AI (mis)using tailwind class here and there. that was 2025, AI and linter both improved quite a lot since.

croes 25d ago

I guess they wanted to prevent losing their voting rights if Lütke‘s idea becomes reality

vachina 25d ago

Wondering when Shopify is gonna wind up next. Not a good time to be a (small) software company.

boringg 25d ago
How do you define small?
- biinjo 25d ago
  If you look at the monitor, the Shopify logo fits between the thumb and index finger, I suppose that's the only small thing about Shopify, lol. All joking aside, I don't think most of us consider Shopify as a small company. I personally hope that Tailwind stays around after this acquisition. I was there when Shopify bought Remix and that project is as good as dead in the water now.
  - Onewildgamer 24d ago
    I liked remix so much, very sad it ended up in a graveyard
- vachina 25d ago
  When your moat is just code.
  - boringg 25d ago
    Well then Shopify isn't small!
40four 25d ago
Shopify is a publicly traded company, and they own a significant share of the whole e-commerce market, they aren’t going anywhere lol :)

francislavoie 25d ago

Worth noting, Tailwind was canadian, and Shopify is also canadian. I like that this was the outcome. The labs business was obviously no longer needed in this era of AI, and I'm glad Tailwind will continue to get proper backing from Shopify to evolve further.

sodapopcan 25d ago

That's too bad, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

grzes 25d ago

tailwindcss is an anti-pattern that breaks fundamental rule of software engeneering - separation of concerns. just learn how to use CSS - it will benefit you in the long run. i suspect they will be "paywalling" more and more features in the future.

hbn 25d ago
HTML and CSS are not a separation of concerns in anything I've ever built. They're both representing the layout/design. I don't want them separate. You end up having to keep them synchronized anyway, messing with your HTML is frequently gonna break your CSS. Tailwind is infinitely more pleasant to write than a separate CSS file that has to be kept in sync with the HTML.
- grzes 25d ago
  dude, have you heard about single file components where you have HTML & CSS in one place? XD
  - Kiro 24d ago
    You're destroying your own argument.
  - ldsd 24d ago
    > separation of concerns > everything in one place
stasomatic 23d ago
As if CSS is pinnacle of software engineering. You can't learn it, you have to keep up all the damn time. It was an elegant concept for its time but it ran off rails, hence all the hacks. Can't we move on? FE webdev is duct tape over duct tape with chewing gum here and there. These days, when I fire up the inspector, the output is panic-inducing. There has to be a better way.

jrhey 25d ago

what happens to people who paid for Tailwind Plus?

lofaszvanitt 25d ago

Oh, bejesus. Shopify awards the Stupefiers. Why would anyone need any kind of framework for CSS?! It's the inherent human need to control something, to package water and sell it as magical water. I've never understood the whole idea. Bootstrap: the hard-to-remember, horrible shitshow forced on frontend devs. And people thought there couldn't possibly be anything lower than that. Then Tailwind arrived. Apparently, frontend joes are so below average in brain capacity that they need their shiny thing covered in stickers saying "modern" and "state of the art", otherwise they feel dirty, like they haven't taken a shower in a week. It's like building a framework to simplify the SQL dialect. In reality, there's zero need for it, because SQL is so simple and easy to understand that you'd have to be a moron to use some kind of framework for it. The same applies to CSS. Tailwind is an abomination, a horrible mess, just like all the other pointless CSS 'frameworks'. These aren't frameworks. They're just some semi-psycho control freak's projection of control over something that doesn't need controlling. Let's just say it out loud: Tailwind is being rewarded for turning tons of frontend joes into complete idiots by telling them the tale that their shiny thing is the new standard, when all it ever was was an experiment in the gullibility of inherently moronic people.

NoDodgeQuestion 24d ago
dont like "Cascading", inline css better https://vuejs.org/guide/scaling-up/sfc#what-about-separation-of-concerns https://vuejs.org/guide/scaling-up/sfc#what-about-separation...
n738 24d ago
Precisely this.
- vehemenz 24d ago
  Do you have an argument, or are you coasting on the "trust me bro" vibes of the parent?
vehemenz 24d ago
These are the same anti-Tailwind arguments that have been circulating forever. If you want to build a case against Tailwind that's actually compelling, you should start by understanding what it is first. Only then can you compare it to other frameworks and methodologies.

Varelion 25d ago

Joining the company with the CEO eho believes only the rich should get a vote?

ecshafer 25d ago

When I was at Shopify we used Tailwind along with our internal component library to great effect. Tailwind is a great css framework, but their business model is doomed by AI. Tobi acquihiring them for making a great product is a good result.

hackernud3s 24d ago
You're talking about Polaris? I really don't see how they're compatible or how Tailwind is useful to those liquid templates. The only thing that makes sense to me is headless Shopify, maybe that's the direction Shopify is headed in? But they've been struggling to get any traction there it seems to me.

dotinvictim 25d ago

[dead]

techscruggs 25d ago

I was a hardcore tailwind user and my projects still use it. That said, in the last 6 months, I haven't touched it. I just let my agents style things as they want. ... and they just use plain CSS. I really appreciated tailwind, but it solved problems that fewer people face these days.

rramon 25d ago

The timing is interesting. Stylex (Metas CSS in JS library) is taking off right now because it seems a better fit for AI driven coding in the long run.

elwell 24d ago
And it has an explicit LLM Resources endpoint: https://stylexjs.com/docs/llm-resources https://stylexjs.com/docs/llm-resources
nozzlegear 24d ago
Apparently they did a long experiment with Stylex at Shopify and found that it was "a wash in every metric": https://xcancel.com/argyleink/status/2095253698431844607 https://xcancel.com/argyleink/status/2095253698431844607
gfat 24d ago
Linear adopted stylex as well and published a comprehensive write up https://linear.app/now/styling-linear-for-the-future-stylex https://linear.app/now/styling-linear-for-the-future-stylex

latortuga 25d ago

God I about had a heart attack when I misread this as Tailscale joining Shopify.

dawnerd 25d ago
If they get acquired it’d probably be cloudflare.
redundantly 25d ago
I also read it as Tailscale at first and couldn't figure out why Shopify would want to buy them.

nish__ 25d ago

I knew this would happen.

mermadicsolutio 25d ago

I think the bigger issue is that AI is attacking the business model, not necessarily the product. Tailwind can still be massively popular, but if an AI agent can look at the docs/examples and generate 80% of what you'd otherwise pay for, that popularity doesn't translate into customers anymore. Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products.

nickjj 25d ago
> Feels like we'll see this happen to a lot of "we already figured this out for you" developer products. It has for me at least. I had a solo business for 10 years selling tech video courses (learning Flask, Docker, etc.). It was enough to pay the bills, but for the last few years it has nose dived. For 2026 YTD it has generated $20 / month in revenue but it costs almost triple that to host the courses so I've been losing hundreds of dollars a year, for years. All while watching LLMs cannibalize ~600 free in-depth blog posts and YouTube videos only to re-sell that information to anyone willing to pay. It completely flipped my life upside down to where for 20 years I was able to sustain myself doing contract work + courses to having to take full time work. All of this started when AI became popular. It's all related to a massive loss of traffic to my site which was the entry point to both contract work and the courses. Both sides of the business have been crushed.
- dtucjucj 24d ago
  [dead]

jp_sc 25d ago

This was definitely an acqui-hire. I'm glad Adam could find an exit like this.

phplovesong 25d ago

Does this mean tailwind plus is basically deprecated, and wont get any new stuff at all? That really sucks for anyone who bought the life time license.

deleted 25d ago

[deleted]

AtNightWeCode 25d ago

Off topic but. I never liked how tailwind looks but that font. Inter Variable. That is a new level of garbage.

dave_sid 24d ago

Shopify should deal with their hijacked accounts first. A high percentage of sponsored Google search sponsored results lead to scams on hijacked sites.

lstodd 24d ago

I remember the time when I did not need any fancy frameworks, webfonts, tons of JS and effin cdns to present my thoughts to the world. This time is now. Your bickering about how to more efficienty bloat a page is... pitiful.

sergiotapia 24d ago

Does tailwind even make sense in the age of agentic engineering? Tailwind was created to mitigate HUMAN problems, and HUMAN risks. Are these same problems experienced by an agentic workflow? I'm not so sure. The calculus is different.

XenoCyber0 24d ago
[dead]

GreenWatermelon 24d ago

> Tailwind is a ~~load-bearing~~ very important part of the stack This is beautiful. Art, even. And it speaks to my very soul.

jedberg 24d ago

With how good LLMs are getting at coding, running a DevTools company with both an open source and commercial component is getting harder and harder to do. It's easier every day to just vibe code the commercial part if you have the open source part. The ones that are successful provide other services that are still hard to do, like hosting at scale, or running the open source at scale. Basically, running something at scale is what DevTools companies need to do to survive. Hosting the open source and the data is one type of running at scale, or helping companies run the open source in their own infrastructure is another way to help them run at scale.

dabinat 24d ago
People put things out there for free and the AI companies used that data to replace them. I do wonder if the end result of that is that people will stop putting things out there for free. Open-source development was already a pretty thankless job.

pier25 24d ago

[flagged]

colesantiago 24d ago
This line of thinking is getting tired, and I don't think anybody cares. Money > Principles 100% every time
- fnwbr 24d ago
  money > principles is getting tired
  - colesantiago 24d ago
    No. it rules everything. From OSS, to family, health, employees to everything that requires money. This is how I know you've never been in a leadership position which is why you don't understand this. If so, why didn't you and pier25 buy Tailwind Labs to save them from being bought by Shopify and Tobi? (who is apparently being called a Nazi by those who hate him) As they say with this Tailwind situation: Money talks. And you're in no position to execute any principles if your business has gone bust.
    - pier25 24d ago
      > who is apparently being called a Nazi by those who hate him Maybe nazi is not the right word but he has some pretty radical political views such as ending universal suffrage. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/shopify-ceo-endorses-idea-to-give-more-votes-to-wealthy-canadians-9.7286688 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/shopify-ceo-endorses-idea-to-...

guywithahat 24d ago

It makes me happy to see they'll continue to exist in an organization that benefits from their success. I really enjoy Tailwind and I feel terrible for the people in the company who watched their revenue plummet like that with the advent of AI

hoppp 24d ago

I'm happy to hear that because their business model of selling ready available components is pretty much dead due to AI. Shopify gets to control a large portion of the CSS UI market that AI so eagerly generates. Good for them

kimos 24d ago
And based on Tailwind’s previous statements about AI impact on them and their business, it’s possible Shopify got a good deal.

kaikayy 24d ago

Actually a good price for it i think, i prefer the design to the tipped ones tbh.

n738 24d ago

Tailwind has always sucked, and I hope this is the beginning of the end for this stupid library. Web designers universally agreed that utility class names are a bad design choice, and then Adam W, who probably never bothered to understand CSS, made quite possibly the most over engineered CSS wrapper of all time. Bad. For. Everyone. Use. CSS. Modules.

BatteryMountain 24d ago

Where we are going, we won't need css.

shevy-java 24d ago

This is awful. R.I.P. Tailwind. Edit: To clarify, I mean being assimilated by Shopify is awful. I understand that the Tailwind devs were neutered by AI skynet slop taking over before - that is also awful. That's actually two awful news we get here in one news entry.

mattgreenrocks 24d ago

Glad they found a home, but the press release doesn’t make it sound like a victory (or I’m pessimistic!). Sad to see ui.sh go away, however. Is there something else like it out there? Especially the brand kit skill.

PaulHoule 24d ago

(1) Shop Pay is one of the services that I’ve seen grow fastest in market share ever. Like in the last six months it seems like almost every independent online store sees my phone number and offers me a text to pay via shop. (2) Tailwind is part of the CSSSlop ecosystem that includes of course the original Bootstrap, SASS, Emotion and many similar things that never really worked from an ecosystem perspective because learning the specifics on one CSSSlop framework never means you don’t have to completely understand CSS. CSSSlop just forces you to learn more things and face more cognitive overload. Now that CSS includes most of what CSSSlop did, you can just use CSS and that’s a good thing. And if AI can answer questions about CSS and save you from trying to find answers in splogs or learning to navigate 50+ spec documents to find definitive answers, isn’t that a good thing?

cindyllm 24d ago
[dead]

SamDc73 24d ago

I alwasy thought they would be aquired by Vercel or maybe Anthropic but didn't see this one coming

devy 24d ago

It's about time! Adam has been stressed about revenue and long term viability of a business to support a popular CSS /UI library framework like Tailwind. Shopify was an early customer too. PS: I like how Adam dissing on the famous Claude Speak "load bearing" with a strike-through!. Subtle, but EVERY PUN intended, hah! https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwind-is-joining-shopify#~text=load%20bearing:~:text=Tailwind%20is%20a-,load%2Dbearing,-very%20important%20part https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwind-is-joining-shopify#~te...

fchicken 24d ago

I read this as "Shopify acquires Taiwan"

dakolli 24d ago

People saying design is dead or good UX doesn't matter anymore. 1. Are sloplords. 2. AI companies that sell the idea that AI can replace your designer, are still paying 100k retainers to designers for their landing pages lol. 3. People will probably replace backend engineering before they ever replace design, because they will want to seem more human. 4.Handmade watches, and handmade luxury clothing is one of the biggest markets on earth, almost as large as tech itself. I really don't think that urge for the handmade, made by someone with wonderful tastes is ever going to disappear. Also, no great designer used tailwindcss. This is made by and for slop lords. Which is most of HN, you people have no taste.

ouraf 24d ago

I love tailwind's work, but AI stole their customer base worse than a natural disaster would destroy a factory or other kind of business, At least some of them got an escape plan before going bankrupt

zem 24d ago

reading that shopify supports users designing their own custom shopfronts really helped put the acquisition into context. makes a lot of sense to bet on tailwind for that.

dandano 24d ago

I'm a very happy tailwind plus customer, I paid for their expertise on crafting good templates and best practices. Bit sad that they aren't going to add more but it was inevitable with AI cutting their lunch.

grohan 24d ago

"load-bearing" - lol, nice easter egg. no one likes the AI-isms in writing!

DonLawrence 24d ago

[dead]

internet101010 24d ago

I see "acquire" followed by "Tail" and I get concerned. This is fine though.

Topology1 24d ago
is "scale" the ending you are thinking of? Or is there something I don't know about

xyst 24d ago

well at least the founders got a bailout. Sad to see this company bailed out by a racist tho

eboy 24d ago

[dead]

panzi 24d ago

Will this mean they yet again throw away their component library for Shopify apps and make everyone migrate AGAIN?

ngmc 24d ago

Glad to hear the team found a successful exit. Adam bought the tailwindlabs.com domain from me when they started out and he seemed genuinely cool. Hope they keep building tools so many people enjoy using.

ndgold 24d ago

Y tho

kingkandu 24d ago

I have ~4-5 completely non technical friends who've used LLMs to generate their personal websites, complete with appointment scheduling and payment links. We can't be more than a year out for full store generation with 1 click upload to hosting providers. I don't think Shopify needs to exist anymore sadly.

cyrilng 24d ago

Even though people aren't huge fans of Tailwind or Shopify, Tailwind honestly saved my life a few years ago.

VinnyBarreca 24d ago

I am interested to see what comes out of this. We are living through some interesting times to say the least.

potato-peeler 24d ago

Never preferred tailwind. Much simpler to write plain css. It’s easier to create reusable components than what ppl think. CSS hardly has a steep learning curve. Problem with tailwind and many newer css frameworks I see posted even on HN, is they don’t seem to work on older devices, which is a shame. I guess ppl simply test on their latest phones and call it a day. Older ios itself have roughly 7% market share [1], that’s millions of devices that can’t access the web properly. [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118859/mobile-apple-ios-version-share-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1118859/mobile-apple-ios...

lemonberry 24d ago
Why wouldn't Tailwind work on older devices? It's just a bunch of classes. If you're using a feature the browser doesn't support it's not going to work whether it's vanilla css or tailwindcss. That said, I prefer vanilla CSS. Modern CSS is great.
- potato-peeler 24d ago
  Here is the tailwind website itself - https://ibb.co/album/kHqGx8 https://ibb.co/album/kHqGx8 This is on iOS 13.6 I have no idea why tailwind needs or does something which makes it utterly unusable. I miss the days when many websites used to offer simple html versions of their apps, like gmail (https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/google-is-killing-gmails-basic-html-view-in-2024/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/google-is-killing-gmails-b...)
deleted 24d ago
[deleted]

admiralrohan 24d ago

What will Shopify gain from this deal? Why everyone is buying dev tools. Earlier Anthropic bought BunJs. Can anyone explain the business model here?

zyf 24d ago
I think it's to ensure they're in-house projects using the tech keep going smoothly? They also get the talent along with the tech, right?
satvikpendem 24d ago
Controlling critical technology your software runs on.

devenquan 24d ago

[flagged]

runtime_lens 24d ago

[dead]

flossly 24d ago

Glad they have a patron now. I use it in my project (because scoped-css is not yet available in browsers and I do not want to deal much with CSS). LLMs write Tailwind easily, so that's good. And I do not have yet another place where cruft builds up (the CSS files) while they changes to them can silently mess up some UI I did not check. So thanks Shopify for taking them under your wings. X-mas wish: that the Servo project gets a proper patron (looking at you, Huawei and Samsung).

nsonha 24d ago

Probably the most damaging idea ever exiated in frontend dev. I'm glad that AI now abstracts all that crappy tailwind code away so I can stop giving a shit.

fsuts 24d ago

But why? What’s the commercial argument for shopify buying a css library. What’s the synergy and business benefits. Is it just the hire of the tailwind devs with some fanfare?

roshanabdullah1 24d ago

I guess they aim to integrate tailwind into their shopify design code. AI understands most of tailwind css and it can generate good design using tailwind. this is a good step

thih9 24d ago

Off topic, I read this as "Shopify acquires Thailand". Many strange things have happened in recent years but at least that still remains absurd.

ntcho 24d ago
I read “Spotify acquires Tailwind” and was slightly terrified for a split second

redanddead 24d ago

Weird acq but okay Mr Lutke is kinda weird lately in Canada. Wonder why the tailwind guys are getting involved with him

aobdev 24d ago
This is hardly surprising after the recent string of venture-backed developer tooling acquisitions: Bun -> Anthropic, VoidZero (vite) -> Cloudflare, Astral (uv, ruff) -> OpenAI The only thing that remains to be seen is how these affect those tools going forward (and who's next)
- redanddead 20d ago
  True, I hadn’t considered that

Hoasi 24d ago

And here I am, still using Tachyons.css (Tailwind's precursor in many respects)

EtienneDeLyon 24d ago

[dead]

danybgoode1 23d ago

Basic question, is there something wrong with advertising your paid services via /llms.txt ? Whatever the hook is, we are all building with agents now. Obviously I have no data on conversion rates or overall efficiency whatsoever, but would imagine lots of marketers are on this already no?

aecorredor 23d ago

Moves from react native to native because of AI but acquires Tailwind. Makes sense.

reassess_blind 22d ago

Any word on how much they paid? Tailwind’s revenue was declining sharply due to AI as far as I recall.

p32929 20d ago

[flagged]