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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 sh

• vyyy 25d ago
  [flagged]
• listless 25d 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 25d 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 25d 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.
  • stickfigure 25d ago
    Nonsense. There have been perfectly good free date picker widgets available for every era of web development, going back to clunky server-rendered html templates.
    • sodapopcan 25d ago
      Seriously. I always wonder who makes these comments, then I remember I'm old and there are people who don't remember every era of the web. Although, it's still incredibly weird to essentially claim that Tailwind solved date pickers.
      • abanana 25d ago
        Indeed, I don't know what to make of such a bizarrely nonsensical assertion. Age and lack of experience doesn't really explain it, because all the poster needed to have done was make the simplest sort of web search. It's so wrong, it's... not even wrong.
      • paradox460 25d ago
        You have to remember the biggest appeal of tailwind is that it throws away the entire cascade of css. The people that reach for it are choosing it because it offers less functionality, and is therefore simpler to reason about. I hesitate to say they don't understand css, I'm sure some of them do, but in my experience the devs that reach for it are the same who deride css and make statements such as "I have better things to do than learn css"
        • ryanbrunner 25d ago
          I think there's plenty of developers that are perfectly competent with CSS who still reach for Tailwind. You're right that Tailwind throws away the cascade, or at least enables developers not to have to think about it (under the hood, Tailwind 4 uses pretty modern cascading features like layers), but people aren't reaching it because of a lack of understanding, they're reaching for it because as front-ends get increasingly componentized, the cascade becomes less and less of a benefit and more of an obstacle to be worked around, and something that gets that obstacle out of the way becomes more attractive.
• atonse 25d ago
  I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better. I happily paid for Tailwind UI because it was worth it. I paid for ui.sh and got plenty of my $130 (or whatever) value. The market spoke in a good way initially, and now it's sending a different message. They've just got to do the next thing, which is find an AI-resistant steward of the project now.
  • joleyj 25d ago
    I think that “lots of money” needs to be put in perspective when thinking about software that’s used by developers. When you compare the size of the market for these kinds of tools compared to a truly massive market for something like an office suite, it looks pretty puny. Developers are also very fickle and the one constant is change. Sometimes it seems like change for changes sake alone. I’m not saying that any businesses easy just that it seems to me after seeing a lot of companies come and go, but this is one of the more difficult markets to capitalize on.
    • PaulHoule 25d ago
      It’s hard to name a more pathological market than office suites. You have Microsoft which is lackadaisical about the subject, like maybe they think Office is a place to stuff with thoroughly unwanted AI features. The rest of the market is German zealots who spend all day with bash and emacs who lobby legislatures to subject public servants to off-brand office suites and then the public sector unions go on strike to get Microsoft Office back. Bundling is one reason who can’t have nice things. Like in my opinion Excel is a lot worse than the others but if customers are thinking about a “suite” they are still going to buy Office to get Word and PowerPoint and can’t save money by switching to a different CSV wrangler or financial analysis tool.
      • shermantanktop 25d ago
• yoavm 25d ago
  It sounds like your criticism is about their product, not about their business model. The business model of having a popular product with great documentation, which leads free users to additional paid services, seems like a very valid business model. Even the criticism you have for their product is along the lines of "the product only worked because they identified a problem in the market; If someone else identified it, this product wouldn't even be needed!". Which is, well, true, but also true for almost any other successful product.
• btown 25d ago
  Tailwind’s business model was entirely legitimate, pre-AI. Humans can only hold so many ideas in their heads, and panes in their IDEs. Shorthand class names let them stay in their render hierarchy while drawing from a logical and consistent design library, without going to another file for styling… or (the hardest thing in CS) choosing good semantic class names! Of course, enterprises eventually hit a wall in the covered functionality, need customizations and library management, and an official consulting team is there to help - no different than any open source model throughout history. That they were more vulnerable than most to agentic coding doesn’t make it a bad idea.
  • wise_young_man 25d ago
    [dead]
• baxtr 25d ago
  According to this logic most businesses should not exists because things should work properly.
• cush 25d ago
  > the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS What does this even mean? There’s nothing wrong with a company taking something complex and making it simple, and they absolutely deserve to be paid for making millions of developers lives easier
• llm_nerd 25d ago
  This sort of critique could be made about almost any industry or individual business. The whole premise of almost any industry is lubricating some friction between the idealized and the reality. Having said that, sure they were utterly doomed. For that matter, Shopify is utterly doomed as well. Businesses like that will continue to exist, but in no universe is it a $230B space.
• solarkraft 25d ago
  I agree that a CSS library is not really worth a big business. But nobody has woken up: AI makes writing tailwind classes more convenient than ever and that’s what people seem to do.
  • epolanski 25d ago
    Wait till you find out AI writes even better css without the tailwind crap.
    • sevenseacat 25d ago
      It really doesn't.
• jillesvangurp 25d ago
  It's not really a moral argument that there shouldn't be a business model but more an opinion that you might now consider verified as a correct one that the business model just wasn't there. I agree that there probably never was one. Selling to developers just is very hard. The reality of course is that this competes in a space full of other people's OSS attempts at solving the same problem. That just puts an upper limit on what you can charge and who is going to even consider paying at all. And whatever that is, it was nowhere close to what they needed it to be. AI made the whole proposition less valuable. I actually like tailwind as a solution. But it was always a short cut for people who didn't want to reinvent all the low level CSS hackery on every project they did. It's why I like and used it as well. But I stopped doing these things manually at this point. AI coding tools will happily spit out the raw CSS as well. And the irony of course is that because of tailwind's popularity, generating it was easy as well.
• sparklingmango 25d ago
  > Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency Yeah, that's why most businesses form.
• jt2190 25d ago
  Your analysis is fundamentally flawed because you’re conflating the Tailwind’s business model, which is based on the actual realities of the market, and your ideal for how frontends should be developed. There are millions of Single Page, and other “complex” web apps. You not liking it does not invalidate anything.
• bdcravens 25d ago
  I think many of the purchases of Tailwind UI were basically donations with extra steps. Many, myself included, wanted to support their work. The prebuilt components were nice, but you can find open source components and/or commercial ones on places like ThemeForest for about $20.
• monooso 25d ago
  Most of my clients over the years have been very successful businesses in industries and niches that I never imagined could support a multi-million dollar enterprise. A lot of the time I was surprised that the entire business model was even a thing. My point is that just because you find the success of Tailwind Labs surprising does not mean that it "shouldn't" be a multi-million dollar business. Neither you nor I get to decide that.
• fitsumbelay 25d ago
  I come to similar conclusions when scanning dev newsletters and I fail to skip over an ad link. Based on the value proposition presented in the one-liner I wonder they exist then wonder whether I really understand "tech industry" as it currently is ...
• deleted 25d ago
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• xbar 25d ago
  I disagree. Ready-made UI components and templates have been million-dollar businesses for a lot of companies for a long, long time. Finding space in a development ecosystem to provide a set of purpose-built tools is a common and healthy software business pattern.
• jmull 25d ago
  Nah. Tailwind provides an actual simplifying layer for the (over-)complicated practice of front-end web development. By being well-though-out, well-designed, and very well documented, it actually made web app styling easier/simpler (without hiding or otherwise making it hard to drop into CSS as needed). And it slotted right into the place most web apps have for a CSS/class mechanism. The paid templates extend the approach to components. The business model is that the credibility they establish with the free high-quality CSS/class system makes people willing to pay for the templates, which then goes over well because the templates are good and useful, saving a lot of development time. BTW, their templates solves a different problem than native components -- I suspect you're dismissive of their business model due to not actually understanding it. Of course, it's all moot now. AI can generate the components now at the same time it's doing everything else, so no reason to pay for their templates. (Plus, tailwindcss probably doesn't build the credibility as much anymore either because devs aren't using it (their AI might be, but without the direct contact it doesn't have a chance to build that open-the-wallet credibility.)
  • what 25d ago
    > AI can generate the components now at the same time it's doing everything else, so no reason to pay for their templates So the AI can do a better job than the average front end web developer? Maybe you should take it a step further from “no reason to pay for templates”…
    • cannonpalms 25d ago
      It seems to me that this is the way the market is heading. Strange bleeding edge perf or sprawling complexity feels like the last niche of front end engineers. The rest will move further down the stack or be replaced.
    • jmull 24d ago
      Tailwind templates give you a quick way to get good, functional, customizable components. LLMs give you a quicker way to get good-enough, functional customizable components. You have to pay for LLMs too, but you aren’t getting the LLM just for the components, and component generation is included. Looking ahead, maybe LLM subscription prices will eventually have to go way up to justify the huge valuations AI companies have. So maybe this could change, but it won’t be until anyone making a living from template has had to move on, so we aren’t going back to when that was a thing.
• barapa 25d ago
  It shouldn't exist bc it addresses a massive inefficiency? What do you think markets are for
• tshaddox 25d ago
  > Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be. Depends what you mean. I think it’s totally reasonable for a small team with a great reputation to offer a well-made component library and make millions of dollars from it. But I would never expect that to be a reliable source of recurring income, and certainly not enough to support a team of well-paid engineers, designers, marketers, etc. indefinitely. To be honest, I wonder if AI is even the right thing to blame here, or just a timing coincidence. Is it not the case that they simply sold their UI library to roughly everyone who was in the market for a high-cost component library?
• froggertoaster 25d ago
  Sort of a weak and dismissive take. Tailwind saw a problem in the market, addressed it, and made money for a while. Why shouldn't that business model exist? It exists across SO MANY other industries. People pay for aspirin, not vitamins, and Tailwind is aspirin.
• onion2k 25d ago
  Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be. Arguably many websites and apps desperately need a good component library because it's very clear the UI sucks without one. Lots of people spending a few thousand dollars on their UX is not unreasonable at all, so the best-in-class library (whether that's Tailwind is a separate point) should be able to make a lot of money. You could easily level the same argument at any library: "This thing is simple so it shouldn't be worth millions." That's just the wrong way to look at how selling works. If you make something that solves a lot of people's pain point (Tailwind) you're going to make a lot of money until someone else sells something that makes it even easier (AI). That is a tale as old as time, and the fundamental basis of how startups disrupt incumbents in an industry.
  • what 25d ago
    The pain point tailwind supposedly solves is that people who are supposed to be front end web developers don’t understand CSS.
    • 14u2c 25d ago
      That’s like saying a carpenter doesn’t understand woodworking because they sometimes buy pre milled lumber. Or that landscaper a doesn’t understand mowing because they don’t trim each blade of grass individually.
      • antonvs 24d ago
        Tailwind exists because no mortal is able to successfully center a div using CSS.
    • onion2k 25d ago
      I don't agree with the other commenter. The point you make is a fair one. However, I think the real information in your comment is that there are people making websites and web apps who aren't frontend developers. They're likely fullstack who are much more backend focused, and who do the frontend more out of necessesity than enjoyment. Tailwind enables those people who aren't experts in frontend to make things for the web without the necessary expertise to write CSS themselves. That's why it's valuable - the point of Tailwind is that it solve the pain point (not knowing CSS) with money instead of time. But now people can solve it with AI instead. This is a poor analogy, but maybe we should consider CSS as a lower level language than Tailwind, similar to JVM bytecode to Java. There are plenty of people who will tell you that a real Java developer understands the bytecode, but that doesn't stop people writing code in Java without knowing the lower level.
• steve_adams_86 25d ago
  > Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be. But what if people were already selling them, and tailwind showed up, did it better, and people went directly to them to buy what they were offering? Why shouldn't that exist? The folks over at Tailwind offered curated, hand-built components that were readily adapted and tuned to your own needs. They did an excellent job making it so you could pick and choose what you wanted, then theme all of it from your tailwind settings with ease. It was excellent. Sure, similar things existed for less or at no cost. I was content to pay for this, though. It made my work meaningfully simpler at times. It paid for itself. > 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. I don't agree. The pain it addressed on my team was more so that very few people I worked with understood CSS, but tailwind was easy enough for them to work with (particularly in a React context). It was a useful tool in a context where a lot of the people didn't fully understand the tool. They could just pick and choose components and they'd slot into the app well enough. It addressed real pain there. They surfed a wave for sure, but I think it was mostly that a non-trivial number of people working on the frontend don't understand HTML and CSS very well. That's not their fault at all.
  • echelon 25d ago
    Humanity evolves. We wouldn't need doctors if we had a box you could walk into that cured all ailments. We won't need software engineers once you can crudely specify requirements and have a machine turn them into rigid requirements with a solid data model, flexibility to extend, infrastructure to run, and monitoring and recovery to maintain reliability. A lot of things change when technology evolves.
    • 4dd3 25d ago
      lol what a load of nonsense. im not swe by trade, in fact I would love it if what you said was true because I could consolidate various kinds of businesses into one holistic infrastructure and demolish all the competitors. Aint happening tho!
    • slopinthebag 25d ago
• xixixao 25d ago
  This is such a poor comment. It starts talking about the business model, but it’s just a “Tailwind shouldn’t exist at all” argument. Clearly it’s a useful tool if it’s used by so many people and companies.
  • nonethewiser 25d ago
    >Clearly it’s a useful tool if it’s used by so many people and companies. Yeah but its not. Hence the huge layoffs. If they don’t want to find another software development job maybe they could work at a New Jersey gas station. New Jersey protects their gas station attendants.
    • achierius 25d ago
      But Tailwind is still being used? It's just being used by AI now.
      • nonethewiser 25d ago
        The paid product.
    • xixixao 25d ago
      Tailwind is free. The company’s paid offerings are clearly not useful enough in the world of AI. That’s the crux.
    • yCombLinks 24d ago
      When the layoffs happened they said tailwind usage was way up. Just the paid products weren't getting used.
• murukesh_s 25d ago
  >Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be. Neither creating a VSCode wrapper and putting an LLM with tools and valued billion dollars (cursor). But thats the demand and supply.. As long as AI was not there Tailwind would have continued it success journey - until a new tiny(at least initially)/shiny/minimal framework comes along
• _heimdall 25d ago
  I don't see any reason the business model shouldn't exist, though yes their scale was a challenge IMO. Selling off the shelf, tested components and themes isn't a bad business. I'd firmly put it in the lifestyle business category, I just wouldn't expect it to sustain multiple high paid engineers on fulltime salary and benefits.
  • bedroom_jabroni 25d ago
    A relatively popular WordPress theme on ThemeForest could bring in $30k on a good month in the market's prime. Nowadays the number is much more humble.
• nonethewiser 25d ago
  They made money by selling components. It was never a good business model. Im fine with saying AI killed it — its not a bad look for AI.
• dzonga 25d ago
  I agree. things like tailwind etc should come out as by-products of products making money. react was not facebook's product. rails was not 37signal's product. Kubernetes was not google's product. blaming AI is not facing the reality of how tech products / open source is financed in our industry.
• tcmart14 25d ago
  Telerik has been around awhile and makes $60 million a year and their business model is selling essentially UI components at the heart of it for Microsoft UI frameworks. There is also SyncFusion and DevExpress. Its crazy, but there is clearly money to be had in this.
• deaton 25d ago
  Finding a massive inefficiency and then finding a way to solve it and make money doing it is basically how the entire economy works.
• ajkjk 25d ago
  strongly agree except that "million-dollar business" is such a low bar these days that I might argue a larger number is needed for the point to stand. People are reacting foolishly to the word shouldn't here. It's not a "moral" shouldn't; it doesn't meant anything like "shame on them for existing". It's a technical criticism: the only reason this business was ever viable is that the rest of the ecosystem is in such a sorry state that it became worth spending money on this thing that should have been trivial. A similar claim would be: Jquery shouldn't have existed, because browsers could have done a not-terrible job in the first place to the point that its existence was necessary. They didn't, so it did exist, but it shouldn't have had to.
• vendiddy 25d ago
  Maybe you're overthinking this? Tailwind saved me time and the pain of writing CSS so I paid for it.
• burnte 25d ago
  > I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It doesn't anymore. There are tens of thousands of businesses that have only been able to exist for a short time due to gaps in the market and technology. Video rental, started with video tapes, died with DVDs and didn't really make it into the bluray era. Owning DVDs came down to $20, no reason to drive across town and rent one for $6. But then Redbox was able to slip into that gap, putting lots of discs in a vending machine, those are cheap and they went everywhere! It was a buck a night! But then streaming killed that DEAD. Had tapes been cheap from the get go Blockbuster never would have existed, but studios decided to ignore that revenue for ages.
• mexicocitinluez 24d ago
  > 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. No, it wasn't. It's a CSS utility library. I've been writing CSS for 15 years. I didn't choose Tailwind because I couldn't come to terms with CSS or native components.