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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#issuecommen

• elicash 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo ago
      $1M a year isn't a lot of money if you are paying for full-time employees.
      • tempfile 1mo 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.
        • simonw 1mo ago
          Given how hard it is to build any form of financially sustainable model around an open source project I think we should actively celebrate anyone who manages to build a model that works, not dismiss it as a "gravy train".
          • tempfile 1mo ago
            I really just think they got lucky, I don't see anything to celebrate. It's like celebrating one of your friends winning the lottery - good for them, but it's not really an indication the system is working well at all.
            • simonw 1mo ago
              9 years of work to "get lucky".
              • tempfile 29d ago
                Again, lots of people put in 9 years of work and never get anywhere with it. The success tailwind has had is not a consequence of the work.
                • simonw 29d ago
                  The success of tailwind would not have happened without the work. Just because others have worked nine years without success doesn't mean you shouldn't get credit when you put that work in and are successful.
      • dlisboa 1mo ago
        They achieved $2 million revenue in the first 5 months of the first Tailwind UI release.[1] They had a very good run for such a project. [1] - https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduct-to-multi-mullion-dollar-business/ https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...
      • esskay 1mo ago
        This was after they laid everyone off, so it was just Adam and Steve left. An they surpassed $2M a year in sponsorships a couple of months after that. They were not struggling for cash at all.
        • Vinnl 1mo ago
          I'm not sure from "they could afford payroll because they laid everyone off" I would conclude that they weren't struggling for cash.
• aurareturn 1mo ago
  I think maybe they should have kept building Tailwinds CSS, release new versions, then charge a subscription to teams for their agents to access latest changes in their documents. In other words, the documents for the latest versions are hidden behind a pay wall.
  • lekevicius 1mo ago
    That's one way to ensure Tailwind v4 remains forever the only version anyone uses. Agents already are not very responsive to framework changes.
    • aurareturn 1mo ago
      That's ok. Teams who pay can use the new versions.
      • ceejayoz 1mo ago
        And the AIs they use would have no inherent training on those new versions.
      • CodingJeebus 1mo ago
        While everyone else migrates to something else because v4 eventually becomes legacy and the only way to get modern features is to use something open and available. Charging for access to new versions only gives you short-term runway at the expense of giving your entire user base a very good reason to leave.
    • toomuchtodo 1mo ago
      If people can't get paid to pay their rent and eat to write and support code, how is it relevant what the consumers of the code freeriding get? If the AI machine requires ongoing fuel to improve, they can pay for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
      • Muromec 1mo ago
• CodingJeebus 1mo ago
  I used to gripe a lot about how Tailwind docs didn't play well with doc aggregators like devdocs.io, or even implement basic browser search engine integration when I was using it regularly. It now makes sense why they wanted to keep their docs scoped to their domain.
• RA_Fisher 1mo ago
  Oof. It’s so sad when businesses with in-demand products suffer from a lack of successful economic mechanism design.
  • binary0010 1mo ago
    They had a very successful economic mechanism design for many years. It's one that thousands of businesses have relied on for decades. Create great free product, create rich tutorials and docs, people look them up and you can sell variety of services from there. Then ai companies stole the data, put a $20 pricetag on it and wiped out all those businesses essentially overnight.
    • autoexec 1mo ago
      If those "variety of services" are worth anything they should remain popular. There are countless ways to advertise them to people. I'm guessing many devs who were regularly browsing their documentation had ad blockers anyway.
      • binary0010 1mo ago
        Typically here's how it worked: Company creates a free core product, possibly open source, etc. Company creates rich help docs and other useful resources. Customers who use their core free product are frequently engaged with the company and it's helpful resources. Said company offers additional services such as coursework, cloud services, analytics, etc. Since customer knows and trusts the core free product, and knows the company is trustworthy, they may be inclined to purchase something. Now, few coders use these learning resources (ai fetches it for them), they do not know anything about the company and they never engage with the company to see their additional offerings. Therefore the company now has to advertise by spending heavily on Google/meta/etc. to a cold audience that doesn't even know who they are, because everyone using their system/sdk/library/etc. doesn't know anything about them because ai just steals all their resources and regurgitates it to the coder.
        • 1mo ago
• threatofrain 1mo ago
  I don't really agree that ML killed their business. I paid for their product early on before it was even done but they never really developed their product. I held out hope to the end of a year and ended up never using my purchase. Compare that to shadcn, which had visible growing pains and yet reached rocketship fame. Shadcn is evidence that developers were hungry for yet another library, and it's also evidence that users were willing to tolerate rough code on the ride to maturity. I don't believe Tailwind's component libraries deserved to win.
  • matthijs 1mo ago
    I agree. I also paid, but the components themselves were hard to use and required quite a bit of work to integrate into our product. For example, most components had a new (slightly different) button and parts of the components didn't have clear boundaries from what I remember. Besides that, quite quickly there were many other free, and arguably better, alternatives available (like flowbite, preline, daisyui, etc) that I ended up using instead.
• danvayn 1mo ago
  There is some slight irony in them continuing to make these statements for me. Mostly because Tailwind is still incredibly around (and worth investing in, hence Shopify acquiring them) and AI isn’t anything close to offering a drop in solution. That is to say, AI will implement tailwind when building as there isn’t a good alternative, and otherwise just references these docs for the user so that they don’t have to visit the website, so it’s not like it’s being used less. If you think about it, the site docs garnering traffic (beyond potential tailwind labs conversions) is more of an indicator of a code or design smell than anything. That’s just my 2 cents as a guy who used to look up their docs constantly to confirm a pattern I was implementing, as tailwind classes were never really as self-evident as tailwind labs liked to believe they were IMO. Like it just doesn’t make total sense to me to compare library documentation traffic hits to traffic hits that happen in other industries here, or with other products or companies. They aren’t even a traditional SaaS company, not that there really Is one either. Their service or income flow is defined by things like offering Enterprise support or a component library at a premium — things that aren’t simply dictated by or shown through documentation traffic trends; things that were encroached upon by plenty of other things besides AI.
  • argentinian 1mo ago
    Yes. Maybe their business model was never sustainable and now they are unfairly blaming IA as a scapegoat to justify layoffs.
    • camdenreslink 1mo ago
      I think their business model was sustainable, but depended on SEO. AI made it so people would either use the LLM generated tailwind syntax, or the "AI Overview" at the top of the Google search results and never land on the official tailwind documentation site. Less visits on the official docs meant less people would see the paid offerings, which means less people would buy. It's possible they could have explored other marketing channels (youtube?), but it seems like the death of SEO for this sort of content lead to the main issues.
    • wredcoll 1mo ago
• ghm2199 1mo ago
  Noob question, I recall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791 mentioned how the kernel source code and diffs were being crawled excessively. All else being equal, won't all the AI crawling agents mean traffic to docs should at least be stable(presuming changes happen all the time)?
  • ghm2199 1mo ago
    And also the fact that agents are solving anubis level 5 challenges Tailwind would not be able to figure out how much traffic is from people vs bots. So that would mean the traffic should be up...
  • samtheprogram 1mo ago
    Tailwind is so pervasive it's 100% in pretraining _and_ RLHF. I've done several Tailwind projects and rarely did models from various providers need to reference Tailwind documentation.
  • simonw 1mo ago
    A crawler visiting your docs won't help a human decide to pay for your commercial service advertised on those docs.
• dlisboa 1mo ago
  I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long. Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If it wasn't AI and just a human awakening to that fact, realizing that the complexity of modern frontends and Tailwind are not an absolute necessity, they'd have lost business just the same. There are dozens of different ways of writing frontends that have nothing to do with Tailwind. Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.
  • vyyy 1mo ago
    [flagged]
  • listless 1mo ago
    I don’t agree. Building a date picker used to be next to impossible. Overnight it was trivial. That’s some serious disruption.
    • danvayn 1mo ago
      That was certainly not overnight. The biggest disruption they personally did was offering a better alternative to Bootstrap. More customization, JIT compilation that allowed for custom class interpretation without any added CSS, proper flex consideration, removing unused library classes in the production compilation step, etc. Beyond this, you should really be thanking things like Shadcn for the “date picker disruption”. It is a component library which arguably could’ve existed without Tailwind ever existing.
      • rgbrgb 1mo ago
        why shadcn and not bootstrap? shadcn is like a cool weird approach to a ui kit but bootstrap got us a date picker iirc.
    • 1mo ago
• Waterluvian 1mo ago
  The shape of business moats are changing. There's probably a lot of businesses that are suddenly non-viable as currently designed. Being a bit silly with the analogy: it's like we've discovered gunpowder and now entire classes of fortification are deficient.
  • tessierashpool 1mo ago
    What you said re moats might be true but can't actually be concluded from the Tailwind story. Traffic to the funnel dropped by more than half. That easily explains their problems, and says nothing about moats. Tailwind had a solid funnel and a good product. Now they only have a good product. That's enough to kill a business. If (or more likely when) Google loses money because LLMs are replacing search, that's a story about moats.
    • Waterluvian 1mo ago
      I was imagining their moat was having a monopoly on where you go to get documentation for the free product, and that's how they sell the for-profit product. If that monopoly is lost (people get the answers they need without going to the store), the moat is gone.
• bradly 1mo ago
  As a Tailwind Plus customer I found it very hard to use their templates. I'm not and was not a React developer, so maybe I wasn't the target customer, but as a solo builder the products were too opinionated and too specific to make want to reach for them. I felt like I had to "learn" the template. They used different technologies for different templates and some even use a 3rd party CMS service that I had no interest in using. Their JavaScript components were non-native, so if I wanted to use any of the interactivity I had to write from scratch. I think they had an opportunity to grow with AI and with the amount of code that is now being written.
• KronisLV 1mo ago
  > The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. In lieu of everything else, I'd say that in circumstances like that it's time to adapt to the state of the world and be the jerks that advertise in CLI.
• elwell 1mo ago
  StyleX, on the other hand, has an explicit LLM Resources endpoint: https://stylexjs.com/docs/llm-resources https://stylexjs.com/docs/llm-resources
• keybored 1mo ago
  Yeah I remember the “I fired 75%” getting glossed as how could AI do this to my staff.
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• danielvaughn 1mo ago
  I've always loved Tailwind, but at this point I'm not exactly sure why Shopify acquired them.
• ernsheong 1mo ago
  Wow, citing we need to figure out how to pay out bills and rejecting PR based on that is such a douche move. The fact is Tailwind core is an MIT-licensed open source project.
  • pyrale 1mo ago
    > The fact is Tailwind core is an MIT-licensed open source project. That entitles you to fork the project, not to expect the maintainer to do what you want.