This is good, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty that we talked about yesterday. You can sponsor Tailwind for as little as $6,000/year. 29 companies were already sponsoring Tailwind including 16 companies at the $60,000/year level. Maybe Google AI Studio has decided to shell out a lot more, but it could also be a relatively small sponsorship compared to the $1.1M in sponsorships that Tailwind is already getting. Google has deep pockets and could easily just say "f-it, we're betting on AI coding and this tool helps us make UIs and $2M/year is nothing compared to what we're spending on AI." It's also possible that the AI Studio team has a small discretionary budget and is giving Tailwind $6,000/year.
It's good, but it's important to read this as "they're offering some money" and not "Tailwind CSS now doesn't have financial issues because they have a major sponsor." This could just be a 1-5% change in Tailwind's budget. We don't know.
And that's not to take away from their sponsorship, but on the heels of the discussion yesterday it's important to note that Tailwind was already being sponsored by many companies and still struggling. This is a good thing, but it's hard to know if this moves the needle a bunch on Tailwind's problems. Maybe it'll be the start of more companies offering Tailwind money and that'd be great.
No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.
Let's say you're paying your devs $100k / year. All in costs on those devs are probably $150k or so. That means your $1m / year will fund 6 full time developers with a little left over. This podcast from the CEO[1] says their engineering team was 4 people and the remaining staff is the 3 owners, the 1 remaining engineer, and one part time customer support person. So assuming every full time person was costing $150k in salary and other costs, you're already over $1m / year before you pay for any other expenses.
$1M / year is a lot of runway when it's just you. It's a lot less runway once you're paying other people's livelihoods too.
The question isn't "what is the lowest cost that a CSS library could be maintained for"
The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model?
Think of the immense value that Tailwind is bringing to all the companies and developers using it. Surely there should be a way for the creators to capture a small slice of that in our economic system.
> the most popular UI system (especially for AI models)
Like others earlier in the thread I'm symphatetic to this company/project, but your code/project being referenced often in AI output in itself doesn't imply that the thing needs to be a business.
bash, curl, awk, Python code with numpy imports, C++, all sorts of code is constantly being generated by AI, doesn't mean curl or numpy should be its own company, or that the AI Labs need to fund them.
As other fave written, making $1M+ already feels like a lot, maybe this shouldn't be a company, just 1-2 people who have a great time supporting this thing. I wonder if curl or awk have that kind of funding even..
If you can find a way to do it better or cheaper you’re welcome to try. No one else has. Don’t think it’s a small problem. The number of user agents and platforms supported by Tailwind would melt plenty of larger organizations.
This doesn't really answer my question and is quite a flippant response. I didn't claim I could do better, I'm asking why they need so many resources to do what they do.
lol People don't realize that Tailwind democratized styling for a lot of people who didn't want to or didn't know how to write CSS. We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs. LLMs, by their nature, work better with Tailwind since it needs a much smaller context to make the right decision.
> We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs.
A lot of us have never stopped writing hand-crafted CSS. Also, in my experience, Gemini 3 Pro is an absolute monster at writing layouts and styling in pure CSS with very basic descriptions of what I want (tested it while I was experimenting with vibe coding in some sleepless night LOL).
There are still a lot of developers who loathe using Tailwind and avoid touching it like the plague. Handwritten CSS still offers more opportunities for optimization and keeps your markup much cleaner than spamming utility classes everywhere (I understand the appeal of rapidly iterating with it, though).
Agents are not yet very good at figuring out how things look on the screen.
Or at least in my experience this is where they need most human guidance. They can take screenshots and study those, but I’m not sure how well they can spot when things are a bit off.
Nah, Tailwind is way more important for LLMs than vanilla CSS.
Models work in contexts. If my context is "my entire app's styling", then it's going to be really difficult to write styles in line unless it's already pretty perfect.
Tailwind doesn't have that problem. It's local. I can define a single theme and KNOW FOR A FACT how something will look before it even touches my code. That's the beauty of utility-like libraries.
I stopped working in marketing and advertising (which DID need custom styles), and went to strictly app dev where my needs completely changed.
It was more than a library of prewritten css, though, they did quite a bit of engineering work on tooling (speeding up the code scans and dynamically creating custom classes, etc). I respect the team's productivity.
This is more a question about the business model of open source, which has always had some challenges. I don't think you can support OSS with premium templates, training, and support once the knowledge is baked into LLMs.
Yes but Tailwind Plus has a flawed business model, AI was not really the reason nobody bought it, it's that it's a lifetime purchase and that shadcn + LLMs has eaten their cake left right and central.
If LLMs didn't exist but shadcn still did, do you think people would pay and use Tailwind+ or shadcn?
Tailwind UI is tool companies buy to save dev time mostly on internal/back office tools. It's usually bought per project. The math is pretty easy - if it saves you few hours of devtime you buy TailwindUI. Shadcn and bazillion other similar things are certainly competition but TailwindUI is very broad and of high quality so why not pick the nicest version.
The problem is that Tailwind is extremely portable (thats why it's so popular) and since LLMs have been fed all TailwindUI code... people using LLMs don't even have to know that TailwindUI exists they just get some Tailwind styled components. They would probably look pretty confused if you told them you used to buy these templates.
It's the difference between one-off revenue and recurring revenue. If you're making new components, making new changes for the new version, adding new css and browser support it's hard to keep going with only income from new customers.
Sponsorships are a supplemental income stream, though, right? They have paid services in addition as I understand it. So covering several full time developers seems pretty good sponsorship wise, when the maintenance should be fairly simple at this point given the maturity of the offering and the tech stack. It’s not like they have to keep up with security vulnerabilities or a mobile version update churn.
They just sell lifetime licenses to extra content at a fixed (relatively small) fee.
> Because every project is different and the way independently authored pieces of code interact can be complex and time-consuming to understand, we do not offer technical support or consulting.
Having worked on design system teams before people can burn a lot of time and money doing overly nuanced stuff. I have been in meetings discussing removing/adding a property on a React component before.
That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient to build a css library, but you could 100% have a team of 20 and they would find stuff to do.
Kudos to them afaik they were trying to pay their people well. I think they were paying more than 100k/year. I remember they had open position for double that.
> That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient
That's how they worked (they had 4 employees and recently fired 3 of them). Four employees is still a huge cost, for a CSS library with lifetime subscription plans.
Agree and compared to the Zig Software Foundation (more complex work and lower salaries/costs) https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/ , the amount of money required to run Tailwind CSS seems quite high (or Zig quite low, depending how you view it). IMHO it’s too high and mostly profits from popularity and right framework at the right time for LLMs, but as others mentioned shadcn probably also contributed to people using shadcn components causing less TW UI sales and less visits to their docs page. The CSS framework seems mostly done and supports most browser CSS features, so I’m wondering if it still requires that many devs? Also wondering what they are going to do now with all the new partnership money flowing in. I’d prefer the OSS money flow to be more balanced, but yeah I guess the market decides.
One could compare the main branch against its state from one year ago to find out if the core product justifies this scale. I would say that, more likely than not, it isn't.
Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers. Most startups are paying $90k-$140k for senior devs, for example (I haven't done the math, but from my own experience, $100-$120k is the general sweet spot). Larger companies pay a bit more, but move beyond that and you are talking management.
> Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers
As someone who has hired hundreds of SWEs over the last 12 years from 20+ states, I have to disagree.
$150k is on the lower end for base for a Sr. SWE, and well below the total comp someone would expect. You can make the argument that $150k base is reasonable, but even Sr. SWE in the middle of the country are looking for closer to $180k -$200k OTE.
I'd argue a design system used by like half the world at this point should hire the best front end engineers at a high salary and that's ok. There are people doing jack shit making more.
I am really curious about metro areas that are paying 100-120k for senior(in the real sense) devs. Could you please share some metro areas you are familiar with?
I'm in Brisbane, but salaries are wildly different between US and AU. The exchange rate is not a good approximation. We don't see many US$275K (AU$410K) remote jobs [1] advertised in Australia either.
There are plenty of software firms out there (including the one I work for) whose entire budget is less than $1MM, and who have a headcount of developers that's more than 2.
Not every software company is busy writing software to target you with ads.
I'm having a very hard time to believe you need one third of that to
maintain a library that does "shorter names for standard CSS." Of course I might be underestimating Tailwind a lot.
Tailwind (like most things) is way more complex than it first appears.
Sure the main thing was originally 'just' mapping `.p-4` to `padding: 1rem`. But it's also about grepping the code to see if `p-4` is used so it only builds needed classes. It also needs to work with things like their responsive and state classes so `md:p-4` or `hover:p-4` add the padding only on medium or larger screens, or when hovered etc.
All of which increased to support more and more css features and arbitrary values so `not-supports-[display:grid]:p-[5px]` generates the required code to check if grid is supported and add 5px padding or whatever other values you put in the [].
You can question if that's really a sensible idea, but it is undeniably a pretty complex challenge. Not sure it compares to blender, I imagine that has a lot more maths involved - put probably less edge cases and weird displays odd in X browser bugs.
That is truly incredible and an ode to what can be done with a relatively small budget. You’re right that Tailwind is nowhere near Blender’s complexity… but it’s also trying to be a business and not a foundation.
According to that document, they spent ~1.5M eur (1.75 USD) on developer salaries. If we count up all the people in the "Development Team" section (other than the ones paid by grant, which I excluded from the number above), we have 22 full time developer listed. That's ~$80k (USD) / developer for the all in costs, so the actual salary is probably lower than that. US News tells us[1] that the median US developer is getting ~$132k / year. To put that into a bit of perspective, the local gas station by me is paying staff $15 / hour. That's ~30k / year.
As a side note, what the heck is with all the griping about costs in this discussion? So what if it's "just a big CSS library". Don't we want people to be paid good salaries? I swear software developers are one of the only groups of people I've ever met who actively complain about being paid too much money.
Lots of great engineers will work for way less than a FAANG salary as long as it means not having to work for FAANG. $1m/year still won't get you all that much though.
Lots and lots of people work for much less or for free on whatever they like.
Problem is that doing "boring" parts of open source project maintenance is not very exciting for many top tier developers so it should pay at least competetively for experience or people will just burn out.
And while you can obviously fund a team of 20 on $1M/year outside of US whatever said team will manage to keep up to the level of quality is another question.
Realistically if you can work on a small and high profile project like tailwind you're gonna be snatched up by someone willing to pay you at or near FAANG levels
That's good. We can tell people that so they will submit us patches for free.
Maybe we could even have a neat website with a leaderboard of sorts where we honor top contributors like some kind of gamification.
I think we would really need about five highly opinionated people with good technical and people skills to volunteer as paid maintainers for tailwind or any oss project to succeed.
We are probably in a situation like the one of Firefox or wikipedia.
A (side) business is created to support the oss project, to make it commercially sustainable /profitable, and then it becomes the commercial offer the liability sunk-in the money, using the fame of the oss to feed the beast. Puting the oss project at risk in the end.
Whereas people would happily give money or pay for supporting the oss project, they are kind of forced to feed the commercial project that might not really wanted to keep the beast alive.
As other I don't really have the details, but I think that in most of the world, 1 million of recurring revenue should be quite enough to support a sane evolution of what the project is doing.
Every app that uses tailwind builds a custom CSS bundle. Tailwind Labs does not host those; whoever is making the app has to figure out their own hosting. So I’m not seeing the significant infrastructure costs?
Even if Tailwind were a shared hosted system like the common bootstrap CDNs of old… CDNs are dirt cheap for a small text file, even if it were loaded billions of times a month.
Some back of the napkin math suggests that it would cost about $300 per billion downloads for the current bootstrap.min.css file (gzip compressed, naturally) at North American network prices on one CDN I’ve used before. Or just $150 per billion globally if you're willing to use fewer PoPs. With browser caching, even split per domain, a billion downloads covers a very large number of users for a very large number of page loads.
100% agree.
If an open source project needs money to run, then isn't that defeating the purpose of being open source?
Open source is a gift economy. If the owner can monetise it on the side then that is just a bonus.
Why should the license model of the source code prevent developers from making a living? Why should companies which release their software under proprietary licenses also be the only ones able to profit from it?
As Stallman said: Think free as in free speech, not free beer.
Interesting. In Spanish there is libre ("free" speech) and gratis ("free" beer). Now that I think of it, libre is part of the name of many linux packages (Libre Office). Never made that connection before.
If the description for each tier is correct then it seems like Google AI Studio is an Ambassador only ($2,500 per month). This tier includes your company logo on the homepage. The Partner tier ($5,000 per month) includes placing your logo at the top of the sponsor list and Google AI Studio is at the end of the sponsor list.
Edit
Looking at the tailwind.css repo[1] they are a Partner. Not sure why they are at the end of the sponsor list in that case. Though now I look at the bottom of the sponsors page I see they repeat the Sponsors again at the bottom and directly indicate each companies support tier.
...which is not even a developer's salary. Pathetic from a company that makes billions and has surpassed even Apple in terms of market cap (yes, I know market cap means very little, especially in a bubble, but still...)
As part of FAANG, they should be donating like 10x that amount at least.
Disclosure: I am relying on your word, and do not know if there are more tiers above partner or not.
It seems to be in Google's interest to keep Tailwind CSS afloat.
Tailwind CSS is alive -> New / existing projects keep using Tailwind CSS -> more code for Gemini to train upon -> better and fancier UIs being created through Gemini -> popularity and usage of Gemini doesn't go down
Of course this applies to any other LLM provider too but I guess Google saw this opportunity first.
I think it'd be better for AI and web dev if AIs generated real CSS instead.
The supposed difficulty of tracking from elements to classes to rulesets is something that AIs can easily handle, and being able to change a ruleset once and have the update apply to all use sites is really good for AI-driven changes.
Plus, humans and AIs won't have to wait for Tailwind to adopt new CSS features as they are added. If the AI can read MDN, it can use the feature.
I’ve had zero problems getting Claude to generate CSS.
I generally ask for the following, from scratch for each project:
- A theme file full of variables (if you squint this actually looks a bit like Tailwind)
- A file containing global styles, mostly semantic, rather than just piles of classes
- Specific, per component styles (I often use Svelte so this is easy as they live in the component files and are automatically scoped to the component)
IMO there’s even less need for Tailwind with AI than there was before.
When I see people talking about how good AI is with Tailwind it just feels like they’re lazily copying each other without even trying to avoid unnecessary complexity.
I really don’t understand this idea that seems to be prevalent to let the LLM generate everything from scratch instead of using existing battle tested frameworks. Be it for css or backend code.
Good modular design of software and separation of concern are still important for debugging and lifecycle. For (instructing) the llm it will also be easier if it uses frameworks as the resulting code of the project itself will remain smaller, reducing the context for both llm and human.
AFAICT, Tailwind is largely (not entirely) a different, shorter syntax for writing inline styles. (E.g., "class: 'bg-white'" = "style: 'background-color: white'".)
If you've rejected structural CSS to begin with, I sort of get the point that it saves a lot of typing; otherwise I don't see how it helps all that much over SASS or just modern plain CSS.
Tailwind is a dirty hack, normally you are supposed to declare a class, which you apply to items of the same concept. This is the cause for CSS to exist.
Front devs got lazy, and started writing for each element, position: absolute; left:3px, top:6px, color:red;...
You could write
<font color="red">Hello</font> this would be similar "cleanliness"
Supply chain risk is real. Granted in CSS it’s probably less of a concern than in code, but it cannot be denied. LLMs make the proposition of supply chain reduction not irrational at the very least.
I'm not a fan of Tailwind, but I can see that it's probably reasonable for code gen to be able to write / extend projects that use Tailwind, since it's in pretty widespread use. For a new project, maybe it could ask if you want to use Tailwind or just keep things vanilla?
Tailwind is almost too simple to bother using an LLM for. There’s no reason to introduce high-level abstractions (your “real” CSS, I imagine) that make the code more complicated, unless you have some clever methodology.
AI is great at any styling solution via system prompt + established patterns in codebase. Tailwind is just slightly more convenient since it's consistent and very popular.
Totally agree with this, and I think it's what will likely happen. IMO Tailwind got to the point where you are adding dozens of classes to the tag and it gets a little unwieldy. There are some options to get around it but if AI just does't need it it's even better.
There's nothing stopping you from requesting the AI write bare CSS. They're pretty decent at that too. And feed back screencaps, ask it to fix anything that's wrong, and five iterations later you have what you want. Just like a developer.
Bonus point: It'll appreciate one of those "CSS is awesome" mugs, too.
I don't really like Tailwind, but it's a really good fit for LLM tools because there's basically no context needed like you get with normal CSS inheritance, etc. What you see is what you get.
You could prompt the LLM to define styling using inline `style` attributes; and then, once you've got a page that looks good, prompt it to go back and factor those out into a stylesheet with semantic styles, trading the style attributes for sets of class attributes.
Or you could tell the LLM that while prototyping, it should define the CSS "just in time" before/after each part of the HTML, by generating inline <script>s that embed CSS stanzas as string literals, and which immediately inject those into the document using CSSStyleSheet.insertRule(). (This can, again, be cleaned up afterward.)
Or, you can keep your CSS and your HTML separate, but also keep an internal documentation file (a "style guide") that describes how and when to use the CSS classes defined in the stylesheet. This is your in-context equivalent to the knowledge the LLM already has burned-in from training on the Tailwind docs site. Then, in your coding agent's instructions, you can tell it that when writing HTML, it should refer to the "style guide", rather than trying to reverse-engineer the usage of the styles from their implementation in CSS.
Counter-argument: the cascade in CSS was a massive design mistake and it shows even more in this particular case.
With LLM-assisted development you spend more time reading and reviewing the generated code. The cascade in styles is nowhere near as readily apparent as something like Tailwind.
I haven't seen cascades be a problem since the days of monolithic, app-wide stylesheets, and no project I personally know of works that way anymore.
Just about everyone uses component-specific styles with a limited set of selectors where there are very few collisions per property, and pretty clear specificity winners when there are.
If the alternative to the cascade is that you have to repeat granular style choices on every single element, I'll take the cascade every time.
If you're arguing down that route, LLMs can bulk-apply style attributes exactly where they're needed. Every element precisely described, no need for CSS and style-sheets at all.
And then you'd wind up with a needlessly noisy approach, and then you will reach for Tailwind to do basically the same thing but in a more terse manner. ;P
I'm not really seeing or buying this connection. LLMs are capable of generating CSS which is untethered to finances. If tailwind went away it would be in Gemini's interest to not generate it.
I think that keeping tailwind alive means that Gemini Studio:
* Likely gets preferential access to new features and changes in tailwind, keeping it cutting edge
* Keeps a framework alive that Gemini is already good at
If a new framework becomes popular then the amount of training material / material already trained into the model essentially starts from 0.
The mature Frameworks that had plenty of openly available data to train on before everything became locked away are the ones we'll be running with for the next few years. It makes sense to keep it alive.
Not $6000/Year but $60,000/Year. Not sure if you missed a 0. Google AI is listed as a Partner sponsor which costs $5000/Month or $60,000/Year. Since Adam's audio and twitter post went viral, he has aded about 5 partner sponsors netting total of additional $300k/Year right there. And a few other smaller sponsors as well.
Overall, this has been a win for Adam and Tailwind.
I've seen wildly different takes assuming how many people worked at Tailwind and what they did because "3/4 of the engineering team" is confusing without more context, so I decided to go through the podcast episode about it https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six... to see what the full picture was.
Remaining:
- Adam (cofounder/owner/original author of tailwind)
- Jonathan (cofounder/owner/product/engineering/early co-author of tailwind)
- Steve (owner/design lead)
- Peter [part time] (partnerships/ops/support)
- Robin (engineer)
There were 3 other engineers who worked with Robin to make up the 4 person engineering team before being laid off. The ones laid off were claimed to be given a good severance. It did not seem to clarify if the 3 owners are collecting a full salary or not. Importantly, that there is only 1 person remaining on the engineering team doesn't mean they only have 1 person who can fill the role of an engineer on the product.
No guarantees this is 100% accurate or exhaustive (or names spelled correctly - apologies in advance!), but hopefully it should be a lot better a reference than guessing what the company structure looks like based on the percentage laid off alone.
Not necessarily. We don't know what all their costs are, but it's a lot more than just salaries. I'm sure there was a lot of uncertainty in how long those sponsorships would last. There are any number of factors. Adam also stated in a podcast [0] that he laid people of now in order to ensure they he could give them generous severance packages. I'm sure people will have thoughts on that but whatever, I think that makes sense.
Hosting, marketing, other promotional stuff (conferences, maybe other?), there are still three people on the payroll and otherwise I don't know (which was part of my point) as I've never run a business like this before myself. Oh, subscriptions to AI services... that's pricey I hear ;)
Hosting for their documentation would only be a noteworthy amount if they chose to host on Vercel. Other than that it's a Hetzner box at $100 per month tops.
It clearly was if you look at forward trends. In his podcast mentioned revenue was going down by a fixed amount per month, meaning an increasing percentage per month, and they had crossed the line to six months of runway before layoffs.
With layoffs they can meet costs but that might be true if the revenue decline trend keeps going for 18 months or so.
Last year they claimed they had $800k in ARR from sponsors alone[1]. Add to that whatever they made by selling Tailwind Plus ($299 individual / $979 teams one time payment)
How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library? I understand everyone wants a really fancy office in an expensive city, lots of employees with very high salaries and generous perks, and so on. But all that is not needed to maintain a CSS library (that is kind of feature complete already).
I think Tailwind was making a lot of money (surely over a million), expanded and got bloated unnecessarily just because they had all that money, and now that their income dropped to what still is a lot of money for a CSS library, they're angry that they have to cut expenses to a more reasonable level.
I guess it worked out for them because now they have even more sponsoring.
And they used the AI bad get out of jail free card when a lot of their drop in sales probably comes from shadcn/ui and others which offer something similar for free.
> How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library?
Seems to me like Tailwind is a relatively complex beast covering a lot of ground, not to mention that web browsers are living/evergreen projects that are costantly moving forward, and so the lib needs frequent updates. I don't think you can avoid this (just by the nature of the project). You also need to be a css expert who follows the browser and feature development closely on top of having an excellent grasp of js/ts and the build (lightining css, vite...) ecosystem. I mean ... A few excellent engineers and a designer is probably just the bare minimum to keep Tailwind maintained.
If browsers are breaking old CSS, making new releases necessary, then that seems like a bad situation. I thought browsers were good at maintaining backward compatibility? Not so for Tailwind?
How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library?
If you want to continue to develop new versions, you need enough to pay as many engineers as you need to do that. If you're not developing new versions then the money from sponsors will eventually stop.
And they used the AI bad get out of jail free card when a lot of their drop in sales probably comes from shadcn/ui and others which offer something similar for free.
shadcn is built on top of Tailwind. If Tailwind dies, so does shadcn.
And how would you adjust Shadcn salaries to account for this additional work? Do we expect open source labour to be subsidised by maintainers while the rest of us find work at FAANG?
There are a lot of comments to the tune of "why does a CSS library need 1m+ (or any money at all) to survive?". I'm no expert on this kind of thing, but Tailwind 0.1.0 first released on November 2017. Since then, there's been continual improvements up until last month with 4.1.18, totalling 8 years of dev work. A simple CSS library wouldn't have much need to go past 0.1.0, certainly not 1.0.0. Clearly tailwind did, which would imply there's more than meets the eye.
But you can't have it both ways, it can't be just a simple CSS library that doesn't need that much money, but also expect a decade of work+ on it. After all, this originally stems from the fact that a PR attempting to improve something didn't get merged in; a technically finished project would have the same problem, but that would be the rule rather than the exception.
I'm more of a backend guy but afaik most popular backend frameworks like Django, Rails, Laravel etc have 10+ years of top-level work and run on much smaller annual budgets.
Not saying that it's right, and there's a whole philosophical debate about open source being financially sustainable, but in terms of "You can't expect a decade of work for free" - I think you can and many people do.
I had a similar thought. If a project like Vue or Nuxt can stay afloat with consistent development and updates, without suffering financial difficulties, then it's worth asking why Tailwind hasn't been able to do the same. Yes it is a huge project, with incredible support across all browsers, and needs a lot of care. That's for sure. But I think the business decisions taken by the Tailwind team can be put in the spotlight in this case.
I could dig and fill in holes in my backyard for 8 years but that doesn't mean I created value or justified the time spent. The library has been good enough for widespread adoption since like 2020 at the latest - did it really need a team of 9 people working on it the last six years? What is there to show for that?
If there is no value in newer Tailwind versions, then why would anybody upgrade past 1.0? Clearly there is value that you don't recognize.
I mean, I'm not a Tailwind user so I don't either. But it's incredibly easy to take open source value for granted. That's why so many maintainers burn out.
Most likely, as Adam directly "credited" their revenue issues to AI (which makes sense, tailwind was making money by selling pre-made components, but now the AI can generate those for you).
It was a problem with their revenue stream, which was documentation website -> banner for lifetime payment.
All customers already had lifetime access and couldn't pay more. Plus noone was reading the docs on the webpage anymore.
Recurring subscriptions, ads in AI products (think Tailwind MCP server telling you about subscription features.) Those were just two things I pulled out of the hat in a minute.
I can understand recurring subscriptions and ads in MCP being a bright line that the team doesn't want to cross. You will probably say it's a bad business model to not make everything a recurring charge and packed full of ads.
I've experienced this in my own life - I ran my own business and I had to choose between doing a worse job and enshittifying the product to make more money, or doing a good job but risking bankruptcy. I choose bankruptcy, because I believed strongly in doing a good job and not enshittifying the product. I don't regret it.
When you say plagiarizes, do you mean they are publishing their own docs without ads? Or you mean when the AI is reading the docs instead of a person they ignore the ads?
People don't just ask AI to produce a Tailwind app, they also ask AI specific questions that are answered in the docs. When the AI regurgitates the answers from the docs they don't visit the actual docs. Like the Google answer box in search results stealing clicks from the pages that produce the content.
Google has poured untold millions into open source over the last couple of decades, not just by sponsorships, but also by employing contributors, etc.
I don't think that'll change with AI. They just needed to be reminded about the financials of Tailwind and I'm sure it was an easy conversation internally.
> Google has poured untold millions into open source over the last couple of decades, not just by sponsorships, but also by employing contributors, etc.
And Google has profited untold hundreds of billions of open source over the last couple of decades. They just need to be reminded of it.
Edit: Haha, getting downvoted! Never underestimate the power of tens of thousands of Googlers on HN... Look, I use Gmail, Google maps, Chrome and Android and occasionally Google search but without Linux, Java and webkit it wouldn't exist.
So if you subtract linux and LLVM and Webkit and Java, what is left of Google? Absolutely nothing. Well, a mostly empty, dysfunctional mono repo lacking the main dependencies.
I think you are getting downvoted because your claim that “without Linux, Java and webkit it wouldn't exist” doesn’t pass the smell test. If Linux didn’t exist, maybe Google will just use one of the BSDs. If Java didn’t exist perhaps Google would just write more code in C++ instead; I’m pretty sure it still has more lines of C++ than Java. Or maybe Go would get invented a few years earlier. And if WebKit didn’t exist maybe Google would just fork KHTML themselves rather than forking a fork of KHTML. A lot of open source software appeared at the right time to be dominant, but without them other different open source software might dominate. But your argument isn’t about what if the entire OSS movement didn’t exist. It’s about what if specific OSS didn’t exist.
And what's your point? When interests align, what's there to complain about?
I'm not, nor have I ever been, a googler, btw. I did apply for a job there in 2006 but didn't make it past the first round (they were asking me obscure TCP/IP questions for a Java developer).
They created V8, kickstarted the modern browser wars with Chrome. They've sponsored tons of Open Source projects via Google Summer of Code. They've done more than their fair share. Half the devops stuff like Kubernetes, probably a lot of the early work related to linux containers, who knows what else.
There is always going to be someone who thinks they can do more. But they didn't have to do _any_ of it. Yet they did a ton.
Maybe there are also engineers at Google who saw the thread yesterday and wanted to help out? I agree that companies are self-serving, but (for now) they’re made of people who are not.
Perhaps, but training AIs relies on the existence of libraries like Tailwind, sites like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, etc. If people stop using all those businesses and services and projects and they eventually disappear, we're stuck relying on asking LLMs whose knowledge is based on a dated snapshot of an internet that no longer exists.
Farming, livestock, arms, school/nursery, medicine, construction, real estate, finance. Basically anything rooted in the physical world and elemental services.
I'd agree with medicine, school/nursery, real estate, and finance but mostly because in those industries the ability to connect with clients at a human level is often more valuable than sheer talent.
With farming/livestock, pretty much all of that can become automated. And even in the previous human-centric sectors, there are definitely roles that will be replaced by AI, even if the sector as a whole continues to employ a lot of people.
Take law, for instance. Due to the prevalence of bar associations (which will likely prevent AI from doing lawyers' jobs), AI will never be a lawyer. However, many lawyers have and continue to replace paralegals with AI.
Hmm, for real estate and car dealers we may see a market segmentation effect.
Past a certain price point, both for real estate and cars, a buyer is paying almost as much for the "feeling"/experience of buying the house/car as they're paying for the actual thing itself. Humans are generally better at conveying these things than machines.
According to Peter Thiel, taking care of children. Gotta make sure the housewife is happy in the AI uprising after all.
Very myopic thinking. Fallout New Vegas had its plutocrat of interest make sure to scan the brains of his biggest fancies before the Great War. A true visionary.
The business is this: Tailwind is free. Everyone uses it. People visit their docs and eventually buy some of the things they actually sell (like books, support, etc).
With LLMs, almost nobody visits their docs anymore just like folks barely visit Stackoverflow anymore (SOs traffic is down +80%). Fewer people see things they may want to buy from team Tailwind so they make less money so they implode. Plus LLMs just directly compete with their support offering.
Doesn't make much sense to me. It's literally a conversion of CSS rules to classes. Bootstrap already had a few of these as utility classes. I know it does a bit of magic in the background.
They made money off selling preset components and documentation etc, but as others have said, AI has pretty much ripped this off.
One of those things trying to monetise out of nothing because it became popular.
they had over 2M in revenue in 2024... then AI happened and it likely dried up, they staffed up during the boomtime and now are rightsizing based on the change of landscape.
Will this change the situation of the 75% of engineers who just got laid off, or is this just to fund the framework, rather than the Tailwind Plus team?
If they have 3 left, that's 9 engineers. I doubt it'll bring them back unless this is a huge package. a few million only delays the inevitable by a year or 2.
They had 8 people total: 3 founders (who is still there), 1 businessy/partner program person (who is still there) and 4 devs, 3 of which were laid off.
They now have 5 people total - 3 founders, the business person, and 1 other dev, which according to Adam’s podcast was the first dev they hired.
Kudos to the high velocity action. Given it has to at least go through decision makers, finance and legal, I bet they made the decision almost immediately.
Curious how we would solve this class of wealth distribution problem in the future. All these critical libraries supply chain hit the bottom line of tech companies directly, but to extrapolate, all knowledge / work creators who used to live a comfortable living now have all their hard work scrapped by aggregators. Yeah I understand the genie is out of the bottle, all that and there will be (is?) systemic change to viable businesses. But people still have to live during the transition. It's also in the best interest of these aggregators, who's there to feed them new free works if it's no longer viable?
This is just a half-baked thought, partially because I have no clue how major LLM providers track output metrics for tokens returned (in the context of, "Claude used Tailwind for this solution instead of XYZ"), but it seems to me like it would be a mutually-beneficial scenario for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc, to actively engage with large OSS project maintainers and sponsor/pay for "licensed"/"official" "expert" agents/sub-models that the main models can engage for higher-quality results when the tools are chosen.
Easier said than done obviously, and probably would become more expensive than it's worth, but imagine if the output was demonstrably better and exclusive deals were in place ("Claude Code has the expert Tailwind agent that's trained and maintained by Tailwind, Codex doesn't") -- it would create certain kinds of paying-subscriber mini-moats for specific LLMs.
I dunno. By the time I was done typing that I started to become skeptical of the idea but gonna hit "add comment" anyways lol
Google (and Vercel) are great for doing this! I would like to see Anthropic and OpenAI do something similar, since they too greatly benefit from Tailwind CSS.
If one of the most widely used UI libraries in the world cannot sustain a small team of developers, why would anybody attempt to start a company around an open source library?
Does not speak well of the open source business model. At least for software libraries.
My perspective on this is that maybe Tailwind Labs shouldn't have been a for-profit business, or at least not one of the size that it grew to be.
I was reading a writeup on this history of Tailwind[1] made by Adam Wathan (who created Tailwind).
It seems like he was working on a variety of different business ideas including "Reddit meets Pinterest meets Twitter" and "a developer-focused, webhook-driven checkout platform". He created the basis of Tailwind just to help him build these projects, but it kept getting attention when he would post about his progress building them online.
Here's an important quote from the doc:
"Now at this point I had zero intention of maintaining any sort of open-source CSS framework. It didn’t even occur to me that what I had been building would even be interesting to anyone. But stream after stream, people were always asking about the CSS"
It seems like Adam's main goal was to start a software business, and Tailwind just happened to get popular and became what he pivoted his efforts into. There's obviously nothing wrong with wanting to start a business, but trying to take an open-source CSS framework and turn it into a multi-million dollar business feels unnatural and very difficult to maintain long-term.
To his credit, he did pull it off. He built a seemingly quite successful business and hired a sizable team, and apparently made a decent amount of revenue along the way.
But now, for AI reasons or otherwise, that business is struggling and failing to sustain the scale it was before. To me, it seems like the business is more or less completely separate from the open-source Tailwind project itself. It's, as far as I can understand, a business that sells templates and components built with Tailwind, and it uses Tailwind's popularity to bootstrap customers and sales.
If it were me who ended up building Tailwind, there's no way I would have pursued turning it into a big business. Maybe I would have tried some kind of consulting style, where I'd offer my time to companies evaluating or integrating Tailwind.
Now that Tailwind is getting hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars a year in sponsorships, it feels weird to have this for-profit business on the side at the same time.
Maybe it's just my own sensibilities and worldview, but I feel like Tailwind should just be what it is: an extremely popular and successful open-source CSS framework.
I don’t understand this conclusion. Why shouldn’t it be a business? Doesn’t it create value? Hasn’t the nature of being a business led to far more maturity and growth in a FOSS offering than if it had been a side project? Just because it can’t afford 8 full time salaries now doesn’t declare it a failure. Your conclusion is that value should be created without any capture.
It wasn’t venture scale and never intended to be venture scale. By any metric you have, it’s a very successful business and has made its creators independent and wealthy as you pointed out.
I agree this is your worldview warping your perception. But I’d argue we need far more tailwinds and far less whatever else is going on. It captured millions in value - but it generated tens, or hundreds of millions, or more. And essentially gave it away for free.
I think a better conclusion is that it’s a flawed business model. In which case, I’d agree - this didn’t come out of nowhere. The product created (TailwindUI) was divorced from the value created (tailwindcss). Perhaps there was a better way to align the two. But they should be celebrated for not squeezing the ecosystem, not vilified. Our society has somewhat perverse incentives.
Ok but the original Github issue involved a community contributor complaining that the core devs have no bandwidth to review/accept PRs. If it's not a business, then the core devs have to rely on spare time, which is scarcer than paid-by-business time. You can't have it both ways. If it's not a business, PRs being left to rot becomes the norm.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Loveable, Figma and others meaningfully sponsoring Tailwind seems like a no-brainer. They want it to thrive because it makes their generated code much better.
I love to see Google & Vercel start sponsoring Tailwind. But the larger question is why did it take the company laying off 75% of their staff for these major tech companies to realize they needed to sponsor? What processes are they doing to evaluate other things to sponsor before AI kills it?
I love tailwind, but I think it’s disingenuous for Adam to claim that “AI” killed the tailwind UI kit business.
Ultimately it was Radix/Shadcn (which uses tailwind for styling of course) that killed the need to buy Tailwind’s UI kits by offering all these primitives with good default styling for free.
Also, the tailwind UI stuff feels pretty dated at this point in comparison to what’s offered in other free UI libraries these days.
Yea I agree that free UI kits like ShadCN basically blew everyone else away. I mean ShadCN has over 100k Stars on Github which is more than even Tailwind. So you can imagine the popularity. Having said that, I do think that AI is a factor as well because most of these components can now be coded by AI as well.
For example, I now routinely use AI to create UI components and my prompt usually includes "use ShadCN like component here" and even give them specific shadcn component names. The result is usually 90% good enough to start with.
Agreed. Also if they had really been trying to drive ARR, they would have made Tailwind UI a subscription/yearly licensing thing instead of a one-time purchase.
There's a reason companies like Adobe/Microsoft switched away from one-time purchase software, and that reason is that it is exhausting and eventually impossible to sustain a business where you have to hunt for brand new customers every single month just to keep the lights on.
Look, Google is getting recognized as a leadership role in AI space, as it is a leader and Tailwind gets more time to figure things out. Doing a Firefox would not be good, just to coast and spend money on random projects.
It would be nice for Adam to figure things out and find ways to make things happen.
Well by the time they eat the trillionaire I'll be dead. So be it. I don't think some site hosting microblogs is gonna be the downfall of such wealth, though.
I hope things work out for Tailwind. I think it is very decent of Google to do this. Obviously Google takes some heat for their business model but when I was invited to work at Google in 2013 I thought the company had a definite vibe of trying to do the right thing in several dimensions (e.g., renewable energy for data centers).
It's good, but it's important to read this as "they're offering some money" and not "Tailwind CSS now doesn't have financial issues because they have a major sponsor." This could just be a 1-5% change in Tailwind's budget. We don't know.
And that's not to take away from their sponsorship, but on the heels of the discussion yesterday it's important to note that Tailwind was already being sponsored by many companies and still struggling. This is a good thing, but it's hard to know if this moves the needle a bunch on Tailwind's problems. Maybe it'll be the start of more companies offering Tailwind money and that'd be great.
$1M / year is a lot of runway when it's just you. It's a lot less runway once you're paying other people's livelihoods too.
[1]: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model?
Think of the immense value that Tailwind is bringing to all the companies and developers using it. Surely there should be a way for the creators to capture a small slice of that in our economic system.
Like others earlier in the thread I'm symphatetic to this company/project, but your code/project being referenced often in AI output in itself doesn't imply that the thing needs to be a business.
bash, curl, awk, Python code with numpy imports, C++, all sorts of code is constantly being generated by AI, doesn't mean curl or numpy should be its own company, or that the AI Labs need to fund them.
As other fave written, making $1M+ already feels like a lot, maybe this shouldn't be a company, just 1-2 people who have a great time supporting this thing. I wonder if curl or awk have that kind of funding even..
you'd be surprised
https://numpy.org/about/#sponsors https://curl.se/sponsors.html
As CSS is limited in scope, ultra-well defined, testable and declarative, this should be a home run for LLMs.
Are we talking about the same CSS?
There are still a lot of developers who loathe using Tailwind and avoid touching it like the plague. Handwritten CSS still offers more opportunities for optimization and keeps your markup much cleaner than spamming utility classes everywhere (I understand the appeal of rapidly iterating with it, though).
I spent a decent amount of time working in marketing and ad agencies, and there are absolutely still needs for custom CSS in that area, so I agree.
I was more pushing back against the idea that Tailwind will be replaced by vanilla CSS because of LLMs.
Or at least in my experience this is where they need most human guidance. They can take screenshots and study those, but I’m not sure how well they can spot when things are a bit off.
Models work in contexts. If my context is "my entire app's styling", then it's going to be really difficult to write styles in line unless it's already pretty perfect.
Tailwind doesn't have that problem. It's local. I can define a single theme and KNOW FOR A FACT how something will look before it even touches my code. That's the beauty of utility-like libraries.
I stopped working in marketing and advertising (which DID need custom styles), and went to strictly app dev where my needs completely changed.
This is more a question about the business model of open source, which has always had some challenges. I don't think you can support OSS with premium templates, training, and support once the knowledge is baked into LLMs.
If LLMs didn't exist but shadcn still did, do you think people would pay and use Tailwind+ or shadcn?
The problem is that Tailwind is extremely portable (thats why it's so popular) and since LLMs have been fed all TailwindUI code... people using LLMs don't even have to know that TailwindUI exists they just get some Tailwind styled components. They would probably look pretty confused if you told them you used to buy these templates.
> Because every project is different and the way independently authored pieces of code interact can be complex and time-consuming to understand, we do not offer technical support or consulting.
https://tailwindcss.com/plus
That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient to build a css library, but you could 100% have a team of 20 and they would find stuff to do.
Curious how much cash folks think it takes to cover this headcount. I have a feeling people are wildly underestimating the cost of a team this size.
Times that by 12...
I’m sure some lucky people are raking in 1.2M p.a., but doubt the tailwind devs were.
That's how they worked (they had 4 employees and recently fired 3 of them). Four employees is still a huge cost, for a CSS library with lifetime subscription plans.
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/compare/main%40%...
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/commit/1e949af9a...
That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.
Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers. Most startups are paying $90k-$140k for senior devs, for example (I haven't done the math, but from my own experience, $100-$120k is the general sweet spot). Larger companies pay a bit more, but move beyond that and you are talking management.
As someone who has hired hundreds of SWEs over the last 12 years from 20+ states, I have to disagree.
$150k is on the lower end for base for a Sr. SWE, and well below the total comp someone would expect. You can make the argument that $150k base is reasonable, but even Sr. SWE in the middle of the country are looking for closer to $180k -$200k OTE.
A Design Engineer and Staff Software Engineer both for $275k
So 2 million per year barely gets you two people.
[1] https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...
You do realize not every company pays well right?
Not every software company is busy writing software to target you with ads.
I'm having a very hard time to believe you need one third of that to maintain a library that does "shorter names for standard CSS." Of course I might be underestimating Tailwind a lot.
[0] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... [1] But given the unit is euro in this report, I guess the solution is to not hire developers in the US.
Sure the main thing was originally 'just' mapping `.p-4` to `padding: 1rem`. But it's also about grepping the code to see if `p-4` is used so it only builds needed classes. It also needs to work with things like their responsive and state classes so `md:p-4` or `hover:p-4` add the padding only on medium or larger screens, or when hovered etc.
All of which increased to support more and more css features and arbitrary values so `not-supports-[display:grid]:p-[5px]` generates the required code to check if grid is supported and add 5px padding or whatever other values you put in the [].
You can question if that's really a sensible idea, but it is undeniably a pretty complex challenge. Not sure it compares to blender, I imagine that has a lot more maths involved - put probably less edge cases and weird displays odd in X browser bugs.
As a side note, what the heck is with all the griping about costs in this discussion? So what if it's "just a big CSS library". Don't we want people to be paid good salaries? I swear software developers are one of the only groups of people I've ever met who actively complain about being paid too much money.
[1]: https://careers.usnews.com/best-jobs/software-developer/sala...
I wish every engineer were paid FAANG money.
Problem is that doing "boring" parts of open source project maintenance is not very exciting for many top tier developers so it should pay at least competetively for experience or people will just burn out.
And while you can obviously fund a team of 20 on $1M/year outside of US whatever said team will manage to keep up to the level of quality is another question.
Maybe we could even have a neat website with a leaderboard of sorts where we honor top contributors like some kind of gamification.
I think we would really need about five highly opinionated people with good technical and people skills to volunteer as paid maintainers for tailwind or any oss project to succeed.
I’m struggling to figure out which letter in FAANG represents Tailwind. Not sure why they need to be paying FAANG salaries.
A (side) business is created to support the oss project, to make it commercially sustainable /profitable, and then it becomes the commercial offer the liability sunk-in the money, using the fame of the oss to feed the beast. Puting the oss project at risk in the end.
Whereas people would happily give money or pay for supporting the oss project, they are kind of forced to feed the commercial project that might not really wanted to keep the beast alive.
As other I don't really have the details, but I think that in most of the world, 1 million of recurring revenue should be quite enough to support a sane evolution of what the project is doing.
Even if Tailwind were a shared hosted system like the common bootstrap CDNs of old… CDNs are dirt cheap for a small text file, even if it were loaded billions of times a month.
Some back of the napkin math suggests that it would cost about $300 per billion downloads for the current bootstrap.min.css file (gzip compressed, naturally) at North American network prices on one CDN I’ve used before. Or just $150 per billion globally if you're willing to use fewer PoPs. With browser caching, even split per domain, a billion downloads covers a very large number of users for a very large number of page loads.
> Vercel sponsors all of our hosting for all of our sites (which is expensive with our traffic!) for free and has for years
https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2009298745398018468
As Stallman said: Think free as in free speech, not free beer.
Just remember, when clothed, it can go on youtube, and when your nipples are visible, it’s definitely OF.
It is a sharing economy, and that requires mutual participation.
Edit
Looking at the tailwind.css repo[1] they are a Partner. Not sure why they are at the end of the sponsor list in that case. Though now I look at the bottom of the sponsors page I see they repeat the Sponsors again at the bottom and directly indicate each companies support tier.
1. https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/commit/7a98b...
As part of FAANG, they should be donating like 10x that amount at least.
Disclosure: I am relying on your word, and do not know if there are more tiers above partner or not.
Tailwind CSS is alive -> New / existing projects keep using Tailwind CSS -> more code for Gemini to train upon -> better and fancier UIs being created through Gemini -> popularity and usage of Gemini doesn't go down
Of course this applies to any other LLM provider too but I guess Google saw this opportunity first.
The supposed difficulty of tracking from elements to classes to rulesets is something that AIs can easily handle, and being able to change a ruleset once and have the update apply to all use sites is really good for AI-driven changes.
Plus, humans and AIs won't have to wait for Tailwind to adopt new CSS features as they are added. If the AI can read MDN, it can use the feature.
I generally ask for the following, from scratch for each project:
- A theme file full of variables (if you squint this actually looks a bit like Tailwind)
- A file containing global styles, mostly semantic, rather than just piles of classes
- Specific, per component styles (I often use Svelte so this is easy as they live in the component files and are automatically scoped to the component)
IMO there’s even less need for Tailwind with AI than there was before.
When I see people talking about how good AI is with Tailwind it just feels like they’re lazily copying each other without even trying to avoid unnecessary complexity.
Good modular design of software and separation of concern are still important for debugging and lifecycle. For (instructing) the llm it will also be easier if it uses frameworks as the resulting code of the project itself will remain smaller, reducing the context for both llm and human.
Tailwind is a lot of overhead conceptually and tooling wise to just not have to write classnames, and it's actually anti-modular.
If you're a senior CSS developer you will invariably reach a point of using "object oriented CSS" which is where you combine classes to an effect.
At that point you're not far off Tailwind. TW just took it all the way.
If you've rejected structural CSS to begin with, I sort of get the point that it saves a lot of typing; otherwise I don't see how it helps all that much over SASS or just modern plain CSS.
Front devs got lazy, and started writing for each element, position: absolute; left:3px, top:6px, color:red;...
You could write <font color="red">Hello</font> this would be similar "cleanliness"
Bonus point: It'll appreciate one of those "CSS is awesome" mugs, too.
Or you could tell the LLM that while prototyping, it should define the CSS "just in time" before/after each part of the HTML, by generating inline <script>s that embed CSS stanzas as string literals, and which immediately inject those into the document using CSSStyleSheet.insertRule(). (This can, again, be cleaned up afterward.)
Or, you can keep your CSS and your HTML separate, but also keep an internal documentation file (a "style guide") that describes how and when to use the CSS classes defined in the stylesheet. This is your in-context equivalent to the knowledge the LLM already has burned-in from training on the Tailwind docs site. Then, in your coding agent's instructions, you can tell it that when writing HTML, it should refer to the "style guide", rather than trying to reverse-engineer the usage of the styles from their implementation in CSS.
With LLM-assisted development you spend more time reading and reviewing the generated code. The cascade in styles is nowhere near as readily apparent as something like Tailwind.
Just about everyone uses component-specific styles with a limited set of selectors where there are very few collisions per property, and pretty clear specificity winners when there are.
If the alternative to the cascade is that you have to repeat granular style choices on every single element, I'll take the cascade every time.
Yeah.
At which point you can simply use e.g Tailwind.
class="menu-item"
Styles-in-HTML (Tailwind):
class="m-4 mb-2 p-2 border border-radius-sm border gray-200 hover:border-gray-300 font-sm sm:font-xs [...]"
You can be completely insensitive to or unbothered by the difference, but that doesn't mean they're equivalent.
With plain CSS components can easily share styles and use them by adding the correct class name to elements.
With Tailwind you have to copy your list of super fine-grained classes to each component, and try to keep them in sync over time
* Likely gets preferential access to new features and changes in tailwind, keeping it cutting edge
* Keeps a framework alive that Gemini is already good at
If a new framework becomes popular then the amount of training material / material already trained into the model essentially starts from 0.
The mature Frameworks that had plenty of openly available data to train on before everything became locked away are the ones we'll be running with for the next few years. It makes sense to keep it alive.
This is why enterprise software is "call for pricing".
Overall, this has been a win for Adam and Tailwind.
Remaining:
- Adam (cofounder/owner/original author of tailwind)
- Jonathan (cofounder/owner/product/engineering/early co-author of tailwind)
- Steve (owner/design lead)
- Peter [part time] (partnerships/ops/support)
- Robin (engineer)
There were 3 other engineers who worked with Robin to make up the 4 person engineering team before being laid off. The ones laid off were claimed to be given a good severance. It did not seem to clarify if the 3 owners are collecting a full salary or not. Importantly, that there is only 1 person remaining on the engineering team doesn't mean they only have 1 person who can fill the role of an engineer on the product.
No guarantees this is 100% accurate or exhaustive (or names spelled correctly - apologies in advance!), but hopefully it should be a lot better a reference than guessing what the company structure looks like based on the percentage laid off alone.
[0] https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
Tailwind is not under financial difficulty, like, at all.
With layoffs they can meet costs but that might be true if the revenue decline trend keeps going for 18 months or so.
How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library? I understand everyone wants a really fancy office in an expensive city, lots of employees with very high salaries and generous perks, and so on. But all that is not needed to maintain a CSS library (that is kind of feature complete already).
I think Tailwind was making a lot of money (surely over a million), expanded and got bloated unnecessarily just because they had all that money, and now that their income dropped to what still is a lot of money for a CSS library, they're angry that they have to cut expenses to a more reasonable level.
I guess it worked out for them because now they have even more sponsoring.
And they used the AI bad get out of jail free card when a lot of their drop in sales probably comes from shadcn/ui and others which offer something similar for free.
[1] https://petersuhm.com/posts/2025/
Seems to me like Tailwind is a relatively complex beast covering a lot of ground, not to mention that web browsers are living/evergreen projects that are costantly moving forward, and so the lib needs frequent updates. I don't think you can avoid this (just by the nature of the project). You also need to be a css expert who follows the browser and feature development closely on top of having an excellent grasp of js/ts and the build (lightining css, vite...) ecosystem. I mean ... A few excellent engineers and a designer is probably just the bare minimum to keep Tailwind maintained.
If you want to continue to develop new versions, you need enough to pay as many engineers as you need to do that. If you're not developing new versions then the money from sponsors will eventually stop.
And they used the AI bad get out of jail free card when a lot of their drop in sales probably comes from shadcn/ui and others which offer something similar for free.
shadcn is built on top of Tailwind. If Tailwind dies, so does shadcn.
They can fork tailwind into openwind and keep using the stable version for a looong time with minor fixes.
And that would probably benefit shadcn somewhat since they would have more control.
It would be in their best interest to keep "openwind" stable since changes to the CSS lib would require extra work in their component.
Different incentives.
I hope they have better reasons to release new versions? Not releasing new versions also has its charm: less churn.
But you can't have it both ways, it can't be just a simple CSS library that doesn't need that much money, but also expect a decade of work+ on it. After all, this originally stems from the fact that a PR attempting to improve something didn't get merged in; a technically finished project would have the same problem, but that would be the rule rather than the exception.
Not saying that it's right, and there's a whole philosophical debate about open source being financially sustainable, but in terms of "You can't expect a decade of work for free" - I think you can and many people do.
I mean, I'm not a Tailwind user so I don't either. But it's incredibly easy to take open source value for granted. That's why so many maintainers burn out.
I don't know what a Tailwind V5 could add that is "breaking" and be worth the migration headache again.
unless there's companies like google actively going out of their way supporting open source projects, this is just optics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950
All customers already had lifetime access and couldn't pay more. Plus noone was reading the docs on the webpage anymore.
Recurring subscriptions, ads in AI products (think Tailwind MCP server telling you about subscription features.) Those were just two things I pulled out of the hat in a minute.
I've experienced this in my own life - I ran my own business and I had to choose between doing a worse job and enshittifying the product to make more money, or doing a good job but risking bankruptcy. I choose bankruptcy, because I believed strongly in doing a good job and not enshittifying the product. I don't regret it.
Well you always could just read the docs instead of using the paid offer. Took longer. Not anymore.
They've just added 26 sponsor companies in the last two days, 7 of them partners!
I don't think that'll change with AI. They just needed to be reminded about the financials of Tailwind and I'm sure it was an easy conversation internally.
And Google has profited untold hundreds of billions of open source over the last couple of decades. They just need to be reminded of it.
Edit: Haha, getting downvoted! Never underestimate the power of tens of thousands of Googlers on HN... Look, I use Gmail, Google maps, Chrome and Android and occasionally Google search but without Linux, Java and webkit it wouldn't exist.
The list of things I can think of is:
* Linux
* LLVM
* Webkit/Chrome (which they have done the majority of contributions to for a long time)
* Java & a little bit of Python
(disclaimer, used to work at google a long time ago)
My personal experience was I never used any OSS code (that wasn't Google Open Sourcing its own code) except Linux & LLVM.
It definitely didn't feel meaningful to the company besides the ones I called out.
The people meaningfully benefiting from open source are the people and companies on the margin, not the biggest tech companies in the world.
Lots of Linux contributions for Rust drivers
I'm not, nor have I ever been, a googler, btw. I did apply for a job there in 2006 but didn't make it past the first round (they were asking me obscure TCP/IP questions for a Java developer).
They created V8, kickstarted the modern browser wars with Chrome. They've sponsored tons of Open Source projects via Google Summer of Code. They've done more than their fair share. Half the devops stuff like Kubernetes, probably a lot of the early work related to linux containers, who knows what else.
There is always going to be someone who thinks they can do more. But they didn't have to do _any_ of it. Yet they did a ton.
Makes you wonder how much ossification is going to happen because AI models are entrenched in 2023's tooling du jour.
With farming/livestock, pretty much all of that can become automated. And even in the previous human-centric sectors, there are definitely roles that will be replaced by AI, even if the sector as a whole continues to employ a lot of people.
Take law, for instance. Due to the prevalence of bar associations (which will likely prevent AI from doing lawyers' jobs), AI will never be a lawyer. However, many lawyers have and continue to replace paralegals with AI.
Past a certain price point, both for real estate and cars, a buyer is paying almost as much for the "feeling"/experience of buying the house/car as they're paying for the actual thing itself. Humans are generally better at conveying these things than machines.
Very myopic thinking. Fallout New Vegas had its plutocrat of interest make sure to scan the brains of his biggest fancies before the Great War. A true visionary.
With LLMs, almost nobody visits their docs anymore just like folks barely visit Stackoverflow anymore (SOs traffic is down +80%). Fewer people see things they may want to buy from team Tailwind so they make less money so they implode. Plus LLMs just directly compete with their support offering.
They made money off selling preset components and documentation etc, but as others have said, AI has pretty much ripped this off.
One of those things trying to monetise out of nothing because it became popular.
To be specific, they had 4 staff engineers and had to fire 3 of them[1].
[1]https://socket.dev/blog/tailwind-css-announces-layoffs#:~:te...
Source: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
They now have 5 people total - 3 founders, the business person, and 1 other dev, which according to Adam’s podcast was the first dev they hired.
Curious how we would solve this class of wealth distribution problem in the future. All these critical libraries supply chain hit the bottom line of tech companies directly, but to extrapolate, all knowledge / work creators who used to live a comfortable living now have all their hard work scrapped by aggregators. Yeah I understand the genie is out of the bottle, all that and there will be (is?) systemic change to viable businesses. But people still have to live during the transition. It's also in the best interest of these aggregators, who's there to feed them new free works if it's no longer viable?
Easier said than done obviously, and probably would become more expensive than it's worth, but imagine if the output was demonstrably better and exclusive deals were in place ("Claude Code has the expert Tailwind agent that's trained and maintained by Tailwind, Codex doesn't") -- it would create certain kinds of paying-subscriber mini-moats for specific LLMs.
I dunno. By the time I was done typing that I started to become skeptical of the idea but gonna hit "add comment" anyways lol
I was reading a writeup on this history of Tailwind[1] made by Adam Wathan (who created Tailwind).
It seems like he was working on a variety of different business ideas including "Reddit meets Pinterest meets Twitter" and "a developer-focused, webhook-driven checkout platform". He created the basis of Tailwind just to help him build these projects, but it kept getting attention when he would post about his progress building them online.
Here's an important quote from the doc:
"Now at this point I had zero intention of maintaining any sort of open-source CSS framework. It didn’t even occur to me that what I had been building would even be interesting to anyone. But stream after stream, people were always asking about the CSS"
It seems like Adam's main goal was to start a software business, and Tailwind just happened to get popular and became what he pivoted his efforts into. There's obviously nothing wrong with wanting to start a business, but trying to take an open-source CSS framework and turn it into a multi-million dollar business feels unnatural and very difficult to maintain long-term.
To his credit, he did pull it off. He built a seemingly quite successful business and hired a sizable team, and apparently made a decent amount of revenue along the way.
But now, for AI reasons or otherwise, that business is struggling and failing to sustain the scale it was before. To me, it seems like the business is more or less completely separate from the open-source Tailwind project itself. It's, as far as I can understand, a business that sells templates and components built with Tailwind, and it uses Tailwind's popularity to bootstrap customers and sales.
If it were me who ended up building Tailwind, there's no way I would have pursued turning it into a big business. Maybe I would have tried some kind of consulting style, where I'd offer my time to companies evaluating or integrating Tailwind.
Now that Tailwind is getting hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars a year in sponsorships, it feels weird to have this for-profit business on the side at the same time.
Maybe it's just my own sensibilities and worldview, but I feel like Tailwind should just be what it is: an extremely popular and successful open-source CSS framework.
[1] https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...
It wasn’t venture scale and never intended to be venture scale. By any metric you have, it’s a very successful business and has made its creators independent and wealthy as you pointed out.
I agree this is your worldview warping your perception. But I’d argue we need far more tailwinds and far less whatever else is going on. It captured millions in value - but it generated tens, or hundreds of millions, or more. And essentially gave it away for free.
I think a better conclusion is that it’s a flawed business model. In which case, I’d agree - this didn’t come out of nowhere. The product created (TailwindUI) was divorced from the value created (tailwindcss). Perhaps there was a better way to align the two. But they should be celebrated for not squeezing the ecosystem, not vilified. Our society has somewhat perverse incentives.
Ultimately it was Radix/Shadcn (which uses tailwind for styling of course) that killed the need to buy Tailwind’s UI kits by offering all these primitives with good default styling for free.
Also, the tailwind UI stuff feels pretty dated at this point in comparison to what’s offered in other free UI libraries these days.
For example, I now routinely use AI to create UI components and my prompt usually includes "use ShadCN like component here" and even give them specific shadcn component names. The result is usually 90% good enough to start with.
There's a reason companies like Adobe/Microsoft switched away from one-time purchase software, and that reason is that it is exhausting and eventually impossible to sustain a business where you have to hunt for brand new customers every single month just to keep the lights on.
You can't compare it with software licensing subscriptions.
It would be nice for Adam to figure things out and find ways to make things happen.