Mad props to Adam for his honesty and transparency. Adam if you're reading, just know that the voices criticizing you are not the only voices out there. Thanks for all you've done to improve web development and I sincerely hope you can figure out a way to navigate the AI world, and all the best wishes.

Btw the Tailwind newsletter/email that goes out is genuinely useful as well, so I recommend signing up for that if you use Tailwind CSS at all.

Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.

While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years?

I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've long relied on value adds in the form of managed hosting, high-quality collections, and educational content. I think the unfortunate truth is that LLMs are making all of that far less valuable. I think the even more unfortunate truth is that value adds were never a good solution to begin with. The reality is that we need everyone to agree that open source software is valuable and worth supporting monetarily without any value beyond the continued maintenance of the code.

> [...] the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month. [...]

> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.

Lots of people make great products but actually turning that into a business is fundamentally a different skill. It seems like Tailwind grew too fast, having 2 million ARR a few years ago and almost 10 employees (200k each is probably the all-in cost anyway for an employee if they're full time with benefits, so I suppose there was barely any profit), whereas they'd probably have been fine with running a Patreon like Evan You did for Vue, and cutting down the number of devs drastically, which I suppose is what they're doing now.

https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/1467...

https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2008909129591443925

https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...

There are relatively few individuals and organizations out there with products that are worth spending vendor money on, especially for something like a CSS library. Companies that do have this need are ready to spend BIG.

Tailwind charges a one-time fee in the hundreds of dollars range and pledges lifetime support.

When they say revenue is down 80%, it's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence. And looking at their site there is nothing else to spend money on. So how are they planning to sustain their revenue?

I know they promised lifetime, but I did not expect updates forever. This looks like the first issue to fix. I would have no issues paying 20% of purchase price for an updated version, that gave me access to 12 months of free updates.

Also, what about paid access to skills or MCP server for design systems and components?

I know these may be things he already considered, so don’t want to presume I have an answer. But as a customer, totally willing to support a good product that has supported me.

I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.

However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.

I'd go as far as to guess that their revenue isn't down due to AI but because of their lifetime access model combined with shadcn's registry system being much easier to use.

Prediction: Tailwind acquired by Vercel.

> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.

So his idea is to make Tailwind less modern than competitors by throwing a wrench in this tool that makes it easier to write tailwind with AI, simply because he thinks the only way Tailwind can make money is if actual human beings come to read the docs site? If that's the case, your income is based on products that's are not high enough value to potential customers, or you're marketing it poorly, or both.

> And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.

I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now.". He's saying "AI is going to be the end of profits for tailwind and instead of coming up with an alternative income stream I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with tailwind. And also stop complaining about it."

It sucks to fire people, but that doesn't mean you have to spread the flames out to open source contributors trying to make tailwind better for everyone. Look for new income streams, ideally ones that can be sold to people that control the money in companies (that isn't often the devs that are in your docs).

I’m a contributor to this.

I’ve been CSS since the mid 2000s and I have a lot of it memorized by heart.

My team uses tailwind, therefore I use tailwind

But I don’t want to reconfigure my mental model to think in esoteric shorthand, when I already have vanilla web tech memorized.

So I just write some code to match the design and then I let an llm transform it into what my team expects.

I’m sharing in the hopes that the tailwind team can figure out a middle ground because I think a service that can take any valid styled content and output the same result in tailwind would be a niche small language model that solves the use case for why I don’t go to the docs.

https://tailwindcss.com/plus?ref=top

Listen to his podcast episode if you want his raw feelings on this - https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...

Very happy Tailwind Plus and Insiders customer here.

Before Tailwind got big, Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design. I even considered printing a personal physical book for my coffee table. If you want to support Adam and don't need Tailwind Plus, this ebook could be a good way.

[0]. https://www.refactoringui.com/

I have trouble expressing how terrible unjust it feels that AI companies are stealing money from the common people. I have no other way to put it.

Also: this will definitely limit the use of AI. People will stop publishing valuable content for free on the internet, if AI scrapers will steal and monetize it.

If you are using Tailwind, I highly recommend Tailwind Plus. You'll learn so much about what Tailwind can do using that library, and it is so easy to adapt into your own offerings. It is 100% worth it.

Hearing that they're struggling, I may have to also bite the bullet and pick up Refactoring UI.

Note: I am in no way connected to the Tailwind folks other than through my credit card.

Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.

Would it work to have a new free-use license that explicitly excludes LLMs? Make them pay royalties - you'd have to use something like public license keys. But if Spotify pays a trivial license payment for every stream - Claude could contribute something when it recommends a project.

There were originally snippets but it’s not reusable in a proper sense based on components like a design system. Each snippet may have overlaps but you can’t get it together properly.

Next there was catalyst, a react component library but it was barebones and doesn’t tie into the snippets.

And then there were templates, which again is another direction.

It would have been better if it was thought out. Design system. Component library. Snippets built on a solid base.

For Tailwind, time’s up.

If the engineering team could not be directed to build new products that bring in revenue, then there is no need for them anymore, the opportunity has been exhausted for its maximum yield. Are you going to squeeze blood from a stone?

The company I work for is going through the same. It is not a product for dev though. We ceased support for many countries now because people see no reason for paying, but after it was gone they said they would pay. If you wait too much for supporting good folks those projects will be gone and only greedy corps will exist

Small businesses being eaten by AI is a net negative, because they’re in a unique position whereby they need to actually have to listen to customers vs just optimizing for a rando middle manger’s promotion in BigTech.

I'm fairly convinced these are bot / LLM generated; the content is nonsensical garbage.

PS: If an LLM needs a whole seperate fork to understand your content, the LLM is failing at it's job.

PS PS: I want to highlight that the PR itself also seems to be an excuse to get the library quantizor made pulled in as a new dependency. Nasty.

We decided to go with a FOSS component library instead to avoid any potential issues down the road. After re-reading the license page now, I'm still not sure.

Does anyone have any backseat driver ideas for how tailwind could make enough money to hire a team to work on the framework?

Bootstrap is more than enough for 99.99% of the projects, and it is free.

Not a Tailwind user but I really appreciate the honesty. Is the brutal impact of AI as a cause established though? It appears creation of new web sites is down, but that doesn't mean the business has gone to LLMs like suggested; it could as well mean that there are simply no sites being created at all.

Especially as

> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.

and

> the docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products

ie. data is lacking.

They, and other companies, should rather depend on corporate users. Don't let multi-billion revenue companies use your tech for free.

Seems like many companies leaned it a bit late, we always have the same news every fewe years (docker, mongodb, terraform, elastic).

For example, creators behind libraries like Tailwind could sell Claude skills or MCP server solutions.

If I could pay $20 to make my AI agents significantly better at writing state-of-the-art Tailwind code — while knowing that my purchase directly supports the Tailwind community and its long-term sustainability — I would happily do so.

They could sell training data too. Though, UIs are relatively solved. But great UIs and criticizing UIs aren't.

Learned a lot from Refactoring UI, and I know (from trying) that it's impossible to make a code review bot based on out of the box sota models today. Vision capabilities are lacking here, and I can see demand for more data here. And Adam's taste likely fits well here.

This tells me the problem wasn't AI but the overall business wasn't healthy. Docs don't drive sales.

@adam: this is just an idea. Have you tried reaching out to OpenAI, Anthropic et al to become sponsors of tailwind? Could that be a viable revenue path?

Maybe you could offer LLM friendly docs to them, or access to something valuable for them? Or maybe they’re just happy to sponsor.

Tailwind and its popularity make LLM’s more valuable, so I’m sure the model makers want Tailwind to thrive.

Any other monetization ideas to help Adam?

Oh my days, how cringeworthy.

- The value they created (mindshare, shared “standards” for naming properties, and design atoms) and what they charged for (templates that AI can replace) are two different things — and AI has shortened the time it takes for this discrepancy to show up.

- Isn’t almost all of Tailwind’s value actually in that shared semantics (“mt-2” = a small top margin) — not only in users’ heads, but now also in LLM training data? Isn’t it more of a standards organization (like ISO) than a product company (yes, sure, standards are also a product/service)?

- They criticize AI for extracting value, but I wonder if Tailwind's business model is also value extraction from the standards they established.

- And isn’t it almost a miracle that a token library and the idea of “let’s name five margin sizes” (which they weren’t even the first to do - I started with Basscss) could sustain an ~7-person company for so long?

I tried this LLM prompt for deep research: "Tailwind is laying off people. I consider their business much more of a standards body (like ISO) — their main value is the mindshare and shared semantics and design atoms. What business models could they adopt from standard bodies’ business models?"

However, after reviewing the suggestions, I believe tailwind movement is probably not large/important enough to make money in a similar way (sell certification, membership with governance privileges, training ..).

Two interesting ideas: "Keep human docs free, but put machine-optimized “spec corpora” behind licensing (because AI is the channel disrupting them)."

"Stop relying on docs-as-marketing if AI is eating that funnel, and instead monetize the privileges and assurance around the standard (governance, certification, conformance, canonical distribution)."

(Don't get me wrong, I love using Tailwind, but I believe they need to see their business realistically.)

Real shame, and I fear it is just the start of the impacts of AI on our industry.

"I am happy to share that we (the @GoogleAIStudio team) are now a sponsor of the @tailwindcss project! Honored to support and find ways to do more together to help the ecosystem of builders."

https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2009339263251566902

Tailwind UI is a phenomenal product, but, there's a simple mathematical reason you cannot sell code like in this way to create a sustainable business

Open source was not ready for this type of businesses that don't give a dam about rights or copyrights.

please refer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45729809

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThLjg284/

> And making it easier for LLMs to read our docs just means less traffic to our docs which means less people learning about our paid products and the business being even less sustainable.

> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business.

NYT and other Billion dollar media house can sue the AI companies for copyright violations and get into cozy deals. But the individuals and small companies are left in lurch.

Instead of ganging up on developers for not making their product LLM friendly, they should force the AI companies to ensure that a part of their $20 or $200 goes to the sources of the data used in the LLM responses.

Something like Ad words, where people whose content is used by LLMs can register as a publisher and get compensated.

Oh it wouldn't be sustainable AI companies? Whose fault is that?

The happy (in a bad way) part is seeing very successful projects like Tailwind get financially fucked by AI. It means it's not just me.

I am a small tech course creator who was able to make a living for 10 years but over the last 3 years it has tanked to where I make practically zero. Almost all due to less traffic hitting my blog which was the source of paid course purchases. I literally had to shift my entire life around after 25 years of being a successful contractor because of this.

I hope the world understands how impactful (both good and bad ways) having an unchecked AI scrape the world's content and funnel everything directly through their monetized platform while content creators get nothing in return is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc-WZRIWc38

Despite any of my preferences, it was real work that deserved a chance. It cannot be denied that AI slurping their content contributed to less paying customers.

IMHO, this is content draught starting to appear. To an extreme, it should lead to no one having any real incentive (possible business, possible recognition, etc) to do new and original stuff.

I don't see a way of changing this. I think jobs will be fine, but content of all kinds (especially code) won't.

Frontend output from LLMs is (in my experience) subpar when compared to human-built components. However, I am not primarily a frontend dev. I would definitely pay for something that let me easily build frontends using vetted components, in ways they were designed to work together.

This seems like something that would sit solidly in the bailiwick of framework designers like Tailwind Labs. But it seems they primarily target frontend developers, so their focus is elsewhere.

If I was considering that purchase in today's landscape, I would surely not buy it. At $299 USD I can have a decent model do the job of writing custom tailored components for me and iterate extensively on them.

Hard sell with a "UI Kit" versus a "UI Brain".

If I were Adam I would drop to $29.99 and accept the status quo, but not make it lifetime access to try and not piss off existing owners, and I would pivot to building a Frontend AI Agent and a Tailwind Labs Model.

It's really hard to run a company, especially when your product is mostly OSS... Tailwind has helped thousands of companies save (or make) millions of dollars, and AI almost by default uses it to generate beautiful websites. This is such a hard position to be in... to watch your product take off, but your financials plummet. It really sucks how affected the team is after all the good work they've done.

I think the solution is one of the big companies with lots of money to acquire tailwind. Specifically Vercel. They use it, their v0 thing uses tailwind allover, they have bought a bunch of open source companies in the past, and they should have deep enough pockets. Last year they acquired tremor blocks, which is a UI library, that uses tailwind!

Makes perfect sense, lets get it done.

OSS without founders having it's own managed software company is always a difficult position. (e.g. database vendors open source but also have their own company providing managed service and support allowing sustainable development). Hope of getting strong support from companies is unsustainable.

Curious what should be the business model for a library something like tailwind?

They could add a premium features but entry users not allowed to use certain features is a bad experience

Something simple and obvious, like sticking a license file that has certain expected fields in /.well-known. I wouldn't be surprised if this is already being discussed because it would easily allow agents to check for special license requirements that only apply to them, directing them how to share content while remaining in compliance.

However, the whole conversation is worth reading (but it's sort of heartbreaking).

Sounds like fairly decent folks, all around.

I think that the OP should update link to this comment

Tailwind should not be free, its good.

I do wonder though if the llms.txt could actually be used for their benefit? Why not literally recommend the paid upgrades within it?

I did buy some of this books. Not the Tailwind UI though.

Adam, you gotta pay bills too. I understand that. And I respect that.

The day a product of mine starts making money, I'll come knocking your door.

Thank you.

Man, you can really feel the anxiety and desperation in Adam's reply.

Part of me wants to say "look what evil VC money does to devs", but that's only a harsh critism of a bystander.

Monetization is a normal path that the successful OSS projects would take. Tailwind went big on the startup route, took a bunch of VC cash a couple of years back, but despite the massive impact on the dev world, they clearly didn't hit the revenue numbers investors expected. Now the valuation bubble popped, and they're forced into massive layoffs. Though to be fair, maintaining a CSS library probably doesn't require that many people anyway.

I really feel for Adam here. He didn't really do anything wrong. Eagering to build a startup after your project blows up is a totally natural ambition. But funding brings risks. Taking other people's money makes you go from being the owner to just another employee real quick. And once you hop on that VC train, you don't really call the shots anymore. Sometimes you can't stop raising or scaling as your own will.

If you find a solid business model, that's great. But if not, well, honestly, a 75% layoff is getting off lightly. At least they still have a chance to keep on.

But he obviously didn't foresee this coming. He’s getting torn between being an OSS maintainer and a CEO who have to be responsible for stackholders and employees. That internal conflict must be brutal. It’s pretty obvious he didn't reject the PR for technical reasons. It's just because the reality hit him hard, and he has to respond to it, even if it goes against his mind as a developer.

Really hope Tailwind pulls through this. Also, this is a lesson worth noting for the rest of us. As indie devs, if you ever get the chance to take VC money, you really gotta think hard about whether you're truly ready for the strings that come attached.

I know nothing about marketing, but why would you rely on one single source? Or interpreted differently (as a statement of fact): allow that situation to occur?

> Here's a friendly tip for the Tailwind team that you should already know, but I will repeat anyways: If your goal is monetizing your software, then making your software as easy to use for people's workflows, is paramount.

I made the horrible life mistake of starting a company around developer tools, and I would never, ever repeat the experience because of “friendly” stuff like this. I don’t know why software developers are so entitled, but it’s a serious culture problem.

[1] https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...

Well that was an understatement. That issue devolved completely.

Wow that is just, really tragic... AI continues to just decimate this industry. Everyday I'm happy that I am, and have been since about day 3, an AI-hater.

What do we actually know?

1. People are inherently selfish. If you give me this shit for free, I'm gonna use it for free. Obviously everyone is doing this. Spare me the "but I go to this conference or that conference".

2. Code is cheap. Why would I ever pay for something that is not gated behind a service with API limits and costs?

3. Coding as we know it is getting commoditized. That's correct. We are all going to lose our jobs as we know it today. Clearly that's the future. Wake up!

But when making these points, open source devs (and honestly a lot of people on hacker news) whine and complain. I don't really know why I'm leaving this comment - I just feel like I'm at an annoyance breaking point. This guy is obviously struggling to pivot and all the grandstanding and virtue signaling just feels like additional noise and wanting to feel good with very little action.

Damn

We'll have to adapt mates. Sadly (i dont say this happily) this is a new reality we cant decide on.

All the more reason to go closed source. Except for few really vital components that have national security implications (OS/Kernel, drivers, programming languages), which can be funded and supported by universities, Governments etc, I am of the strong opinion that everything else should go closed source.

Enough with this BS. Stop feeding the slop.

Frankly, I haven't visited the tailwind page in over six months as well. The AI just does things. Clearly the upsell path for the company is not sustainable.

What would the solution be?

Dude thought he is smart but ended up being an entitled brat.

It’s hard to run a software business.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439059

But I'm merely telling the truth. The fact that people don't like it doesn't change the fact that software engineers are largely replaceable with AI now.

We are seeing the second order effects now that people using AI are not buying software products anymore, leading to layoff of software engineers.

Today, LLMs make the first type of business much harder.

"Information should be free", sure, but lets not kid ourselves, these massive new AI companies are making themselves new gatekeepers with new artificial moats for themselves. Information is not federated / distributed anymore.

We need "GPL for AI" that restricts AI scrapers from performing content theft/repackaging.

Then step aside as the maintainer of the project then and better yet, make something like Tailwind-foundation etc. which is truly open source. Go spend your time building your business, but you can't become the bottleneck and not do anything for something that has become so foundational for Web Dev.

I can empathize with the founder too because I was kind of in their shoes last year. Had been laid off and nearly exhausted my savings but I was more worried about having to let go of folks I employed.