by freedomben
12 subcomments
- Very sad to hear, I bought Tailwind UI years ago and although it was a lot more expensive than I wanted, I've appreciated the care and precision and highly recommend buying it (It's now called Tailwind Plus) even still (maybe even especially now).
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.
by srameshc
10 subcomments
- > 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.
Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
- The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things.
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.
- Key comment is this one: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
> [...] 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.
by satvikpendem
5 subcomments
- Sadly, selling pre-made components and templates was never a sound business model, especially in the wake of AI. One thing I learned being on HN for so long and launching my own products is that a product is not a business. Don't conflate the two, at your peril.
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.
- More details:
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/1467...
https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2008909129591443925
https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
- While I'm sure AI is partially to blame, I feel like the real problem is that (1) they don't have a sensible business model and (2) they have saturated their market.
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?
- Today, I wanted to add tailwind to a new project and realized I had purchased it back in 2022. So I went to the website and realized it had moved to tailwind plus. That’s how distracted I’ve been. To my surprise my access worked and I could still download the full UI kit.
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.
- As a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions.
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 can't get over the Author of the CR addi g his responses on TikTok.. What have we come to?
- The biggest miss from Tailwind is ignoring the rest of the ecosystem. Rightly or wrongly, everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components. Tailwind hasn't. Tailwind has excellent components available through Plus which are worth paying for but they're not available where people are, which pushes people towards other libraries built on top of Tailwind. I have paid for Tailwind Plus and I like their Catalyst UI and I have used it on a project but it's a pain to use compared to alternatives, so, I don't bother.
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.
- Wow. This is wild. I have a mix of empathy for the guy and also a feeling like he has no idea what he's doing running a business.
> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.
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).
by tylerchilds
2 subcomments
- I’ll be honest.
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.
- After we've completed the knowledge transfer from the public domain, across all potential sources of information, from books to open source code to private data banks and LLMs then what comes next? Destroying the said works so that nobody else can access them ? Privatize knowledge, hoard all the data, limit access, sell ads?
- Here is a link to their commercial offerings.
https://tailwindcss.com/plus?ref=top
- When I saw this on HN, I instantly felt terrible for Adam & the team. Happy to see that these comments are mostly supportive, they could have easily piled on the pain.
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.
by theturtletalks
2 subcomments
- Tailwind Plus was always tricky since most people would use it for commercial products and that seemed like a grey area based on their licensing. Then shadcn came along and all the Tailwind Plus alternatives (many times recreating the same UI elements that plus has) and then people just copied and used those components and polished further using AI.
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/
- Wow, this is a grim reality check: AI hyperscalers taking in billions of revenue, while at the same time putting honest business like Tailwind out of work, without any form of compensation. What happened to "you wouldn't steal a car" etc.? It's only illegal if you're not a trillion dollar company?
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.
by ambicapter
0 subcomment
- I love the poster with the AI-generated avatar admonishing him for not making the software "easy to use" and suggesting that this will hamper his business, completely papering over the fact that LLMs will never be "potential monetization candidates" (ew, wording).
- When I started working on one of my side projects a year or so ago, I realized I didn't have time to figure out how to style each and every component, so I paid for Tailwind Plus. It was pricey, and I definitely had to think about it for a few days, but I'm so glad I did. It saved me way more time than the dollar value of the product, and it has continued to get better.
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.
by solarkraft
2 subcomments
- It’s crazy to me that it was ever a business to begin with.
Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.
by legitster
5 subcomments
- It's insane how much AIs use Tailwind and yet the companies aren't contributing anything. It would be trivial for Anthropic or Cursor to pay something.
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.
- You can really feel the stress in Adam's comments. It must play absolute hell with your mental health, it's anxiogenic from the sidelines just thinking about it. Stay healthy and safe mate.
- As an early Tailwind Plus / Tailwind UI customer I don’t think it has anything to do with AI. The product and technicals are there but from a business and user perspective Tailwind the paid product was trash and still is. It tried to do everything and lacked direction.
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.
- The truth is, business opportunities are rarely eternal, usually they are just an opportunity to make money within a short window of time, such as a decade or two. Sometimes even shorter than that, perhaps even only a year or two.
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?
- This GitHub conversation is disgraceful. Lots of complaints and no support to the devs.
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
- although I've mentioned this in a subcomment, I want to highlight that the PR itself also seems to be an excuse to get the library he made to be used by TailwindCSS (https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx)
by danirogerc
0 subcomment
- Eventually AI agents will have to pay to access libraries.
by mattgreenrocks
8 subcomments
- Something’s wrong when a key piece of foundational web tech is staring down unsustainability. Tailwind is almost ubiquitous these days. It needs to continue to 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.
- Adam goes into depth on this in an episode of his podcast: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
- They have a right to decide what their product is. Just because someone sent a PR doesn't mean they have to consider it whatsoever!
- I recently had a similar junk PR on my 1,700 star repository: https://github.com/gnat/surreal/pull/56
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.
- Only an anecdote, but I was working on a side project with another dev who wanted to use Tailwind Plus components. It wasn't immediately obvious whether this was allowed under his personal license or if we'd have to get a team license instead, though.
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.
by prodigycorp
2 subcomments
- It's just too ironic and such a shame that LLMs have railroaded the business model of Tailwind when LLMs have made it so much more popular.
Does anyone have any backseat driver ideas for how tailwind could make enough money to hire a team to work on the framework?
by kayo_20211030
0 subcomment
- This is miserable all 'round. I don't know Adam from, well, Adam, but he seems a decent skin in the podcast. Nor, do I know much about Tailwind. However, I do feel for him, and his team, and his ex-team. Just miserable all 'round.
- Why would a CSS library turn into a company? How do they even make money while there are hundreds of alternatives?
Bootstrap is more than enough for 99.99% of the projects, and it is free.
by tannhaeuser
1 subcomments
- > 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.
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.
- Seems like their whole business model was based on the fact that tailwind was difficult to use, and now with llm we have a simple way to use it in a good-enough way.
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).
- Can someone explain to me the advantage of writing class="bg-blue" instead of style="background-color: blue;" and why anyone ever thought they could make meaningful money from enabling the former?
- Taking their sponsors page at face value and doing the math, they're bringing in close to $100k/month with corporate sponsorships alone... how much money could maintaining a framework possibly cost?
- What about exploring new, AI-native ways to monetize?
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.
by lawrencechen
0 subcomment
- They were perfectly positioned to build a Lovable/Bolt/Replit back in the day... might not be too late now either.
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.
by 1970-01-01
3 subcomments
- >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.
This tells me the problem wasn't AI but the overall business wasn't healthy. Docs don't drive sales.
- It seems like every (coding) AI model out there is generating html with TailwindCSS styling.
@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?
- I wonder if this is all due to AI, or whether shadcn/ui's popularity (and blocks, and themes, and registry of paid component libraries) has also impacted them. That's my personal go to, and not Tailwind UI paid, and that's not because of LLMs.
- No way the author of the PR created a TikTok to moan and mentioned it in 2 separate comments and accused Tailwind devs of "throwing a tantrum" ahaha.
Oh my days, how cringeworthy.
by tomaskafka
0 subcomment
- A really interesting moment:
- 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.)
by multisport
1 subcomments
- Didn't he (half) jokingly ask Anthropic to buy Tailwind a few weeks ago, right when Bun was acquired? Makes a lot more sense now.
by stephenheron
1 subcomments
- We bought Tailwind UI and it was very good and I learned a lot of nice tricks from it.
Real shame, and I fear it is just the start of the impacts of AI on our industry.
by MrFurious
1 subcomments
- My surprise is that the tailwind creator could have a engineering team based in a css framework that basically was used for people that didn't knew real css. Is normal that this people now use other products more effective how AI for this task.
- Google now sponsors Tailwind:
"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
- I bought Tailwind Plus when it was still Tailwind UI years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it in hobbyist projects and some professional projects. Would have pushed for company license if my current company isn’t exclusively native apps.
by ukprogrammer
0 subcomment
- This is what you get when you sell a lifetime product
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
by arewethereyeta
1 subcomments
- Create a license that prevents AI companies that generate html based on tailwind from doing it without being in a commercial package. Let them know of the license change and give them 3 months to adjust. Keep tailwind accessible and allow that llm instruction to make it's way into the codebase so it gets picked up by multiple "AI" businesses that output code. This is your new business model.
Open source was not ready for this type of businesses that don't give a dam about rights or copyrights.
- It was probably inevitable. Building a commercial offering (mostly templates) around code which could be considered as "commodity" is extremely hard to do. I'm glad Adam and his team have had a lot of success already with this, but for sure it was not sustainable on the long run. If you are reading this, thanks Adam for having created Tailwind. It's not for everyone, but it's for some people, and that's good enough for me. We need options, and you were a solid one of them.
- It's time to think about seriously "Could we create a license to make AI companies pay for your content?" or "Create a technology to ban AI bots effectively",
please refer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45729809
- The PR author posted a TikTok link [1] the thread later explaining their position. Their behaviour seems very unprofessional to me. Mayve the just want to increase engagement to their accounts. Tailwind definetly made the right call here.
[1] https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThLjg284/
- AI taking jobs by users avoiding ads. It makes me wonder how widespread this is and what other "not so obvious" job-taking effects it has.
by Abishek_Muthian
0 subcomment
- Quoting Adam,
> 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?
- How does something like Tailwind lead to a company big enough that you can layoff 75% of the engineering team?
- We should have Telethons for all the companies on whose products we build our products but whose livelihood depends on the goodwill of others lest can't keep the lights on OR they get sold to some soulless corp and turned to crap.
- I never appreciated tailwind until AI models revealed it as such a token-efficient way transport styles between models and other use-cases. AI aruably hurts demand for their premium offering the same way it hurts demand for junior devs.
- I'm happy to see this, not because I wish Adam failure. I am a Tailwind user myself and use it in all of my projects. Generally am a fan of Adam and respect his business.
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.
by pixelpulsate
0 subcomment
- This pretty much accurately covers what's really happening: "Tailwind CSS Lays off 75% of Engineers Due to Brutal AI - or... 3 People Fired Because CEO Sucks..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc-WZRIWc38
- I don't like tailwind. However, I don't wish that to anyone.
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.
- Sincerely hope the Tailwind team can navigate this rough patch.
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.
by hmokiguess
1 subcomments
- I bought their Plus thing a while back and not I can't find myself a reason to use it.
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.
- I love Tailwind, and I am really sorry Adam and co are going through this. They've built a great product, and it's brought joy back building again for me.
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.
by codeptualize
0 subcomment
- Never been a fan of tailwind, but this is kinda sad. Given it's popularity what a sad situation that they aren't getting able to get properly funded.
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.
- As a avid user of Tailwind and one who purchased Tailwind CSS Plus, it's very sad to hear.
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
- Licensing hasn't caught up yet. It probably wouldn't be the worst idea to have a simple content copyright license protocol or standard that works for LLMs?
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.
by MangoCoffee
0 subcomment
- If your business can easily be replaced or lose revenue because of AI, it doesn't sound like a good business model to begin with
by thedangler
0 subcomment
- Tailwind is nice and all be it’s crazy verbose, I still am a fan of bootstrap. In the days of AI and tokens. Tailwind classes and styling cure through tokens. lol
by another_twist
0 subcomment
- The issue seems to be that LLMs already consumed large parts of the templatized code somewhere. Not directly from TW but from some other project. Codex / Claude are also exceptionally good at whipping out a UI quickly even when given flimsy requirements. Its hard running this business and competing against a several billion dollar machine. Wonder how Material UI is doing as they have a similar business model.
- not the most important point here, but llms.txt won't have any impact on anything anyway.
- It's important to remember this is just the commercial arm. The OSS side has as many maintainers as Adam allows and the community is quite active with PRs and volunteer work. Tailwind the project will be ok. Someone will fork it if stales thanks to its popularity. That being said, many more companies should sponsor considering its ubiquitous adoption.
- I'm a Tailwind Plus customer in spite of not being the world's biggest Tailwind fan. Even though it really grinds my gears how unreadable markup can be when littered with Tailwind classes, I appreciate the quality and variety of the templates and components available in Tailwind Plus and the constant (free!) updates. So this is a bummer to hear. Many thanks to Adam and the team.
- Ever feel like creating and nurturing an opensource project? Some of those responses make me second guess doing anything with opensource.
- Tailwind UI could be the missing piece for AI generated frontend to have consistency, but it seems that shadcn took that place in the last 3-5 years.
- Companies like Vercel, Lovable, and Stackblitz should pay salaries to each of these engineers. Their business succeeded only because Tailwind exists.
by ChrisMarshallNY
0 subcomment
- This is the actual comment that it's mentioned: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
However, the whole conversation is worth reading (but it's sort of heartbreaking).
Sounds like fairly decent folks, all around.
- My takeaway from this: If LLM can eat your lunch, you should remove your cash cow from crawler avenues and gatekeep it to humans only
- Refactoring UI is a great book that i've had a ton of value from. Tailwind plus also, and i've been so surprised/impressed to see that my one time purchase kept granting me new stuff. Thanks a lot to Adam and the Tailwind team.
by ElijahLynn
0 subcomment
- Specific link to actual comment: https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
I think that the OP should update link to this comment
by hiccuphippo
0 subcomment
- So are they laying off 75% (3 people) because using AI 1 person can do the work of 4?
by hakanensari
0 subcomment
- I bought Tailwind UI, now Plus a couple of years ago. I've also dabbled with a Claude skill that scrapes a "UI block" source from the site and transforms it into a Rails view component. Maybe there's a way to make Plus and LLMs work together rather than compete?
- Sad to hear. I have a Tailwind Plus license (when it was previously Tailwind UI). They are fantastic components and to be honest they keep me writing React even though I would rather not. Catalyst UI is too good.
by CafeRacer
1 subcomments
- Just charge a bucks for every deployment or something. Most of will easily pay a dollar.
Tailwind should not be free, its good.
- This has been a long time coming I think. I remember listening to an interview with the creator maybe over a year ago now and him saying revenue is way down, presumably because of AI
I do wonder though if the llms.txt could actually be used for their benefit? Why not literally recommend the paid upgrades within it?
by maxbaines
1 subcomments
- I nearly always use Tailwind, had no idea there was even a Plus offering. Checking the site I see it now but it’s a subtle link. Also wonder if shad/cn had something to do with the reduced usage of plus.
- They have the UI Blocks, Templates and UI Kit in https://tailwindcss.com/plus.
I think they are in a good position to build an AI website builder similar to lovable.dev if they wanted to.
- I would also say that the tailwind ui library is facing stiff competition from free offerings like shadcn.
- If the business model had evolved together with artificial intelligence,
we wouldn’t be talking about a 75% layoff today
we might be talking about a 75% hiring spree instead.
by ZeroConcerns
2 subcomments
- That's sad to hear, if true, and I'd have gladly paid for Tailwind if they'd had a "OK, so you use our CSS indirectly" program in place. I'm aware of "Tailwind Plus", but that seems to be React-only, and thus the opposite of where I want to be.
- While I'm a shameless freeloader with mostly backend skills - Adam has my utmost respect for out of the box innovation.
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.
- Nothing but love to Adam and the Tailwind team (including now-former team members) today. They’ve made huge contributions to web development and it just sucks, sucks, sucks that things have turned out this way. I know he’ll find a way forward, though.
- I've seen that the team had 4 members. 3 being laid off.
by waynesonfire
1 subcomments
- Maybe you don't need a massive engineer team developing Tailwind and "monetizing it" You, Tailwind, don't get to collect ALL the rent. You were made "successful" because you created something that was OPEN SOURCE and the community chose to adopt your technology because of that. You wouldn't even exist had you not had the foundation, made the implicit statement that, I am willing to share rent by open-sourcing. You wouldn't even have ONE engineer!! You're now crying because you over-sold your success and improperly scaled your business. Your fault. IF all you need is two engineers that's fine. That's your piece of the rent. Other business are hiring far more than the 75% you laid off and building and creating value on top this open source technology. No jobs lost, just your ego and the empty promises you made to investors.
- So, is it AI or a problematic business model that caused this?
by another_twist
5 subcomments
- Where's the 75% layoff number from ? This thread is about making docs llm friendly.
- > 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.
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.
by hexbin010
1 subcomments
- > The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products
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?
- I bought Tailwind UI/Plus just for my side projects several years ago because it was so useful. I'm very sad to see this.
- There is an industry wide biting the hand that feeds them going on. It would be nice for people to realise that's what's happening.
- I never personally wanted Tailwind as a product, but really feel for them when I see comments like this one [1]:
> 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...
by alangibson
0 subcomment
- Anyone selling software components is going to get cooked by LLMs. People have been talking about that since ChatGPT 3 landed. It's just sad to see it actually playing out.
- Multiple tiktok self-promotions in github comments is nuts
- LLMs are mostly trained on jsweb stuff. Are very good for it. The need for web developers will GREATLY decrease. Thats how it is.
- I feel very sad. The way AI is delivering, I suspect 90% will laid off within 2-3 years. I don't know myself what should I do in future.
by DMiradakis
0 subcomment
- I absolutely love Tailwind CSS, big fan of Adam, too, just watching his journey over the past several years. I'm a bootstrapped solopreneur, too, doing an open core business for my dotnet job orchestrator Didact. It's so difficult running a business, I feel for him and his engineers he had to let go. Maybe they can build some sort of app to go along with Tailwind. Heck, even if they made the base library itself paid one day, I'd probably pay for it. Using Tailwind is just that good for me.
by johnpaulkiser
0 subcomment
- Tailwind should have bought shadcn and started pushing a better subscription model. Shadcn & vercel ate tailwind's lunch imo.
- > Going to lock this one as it's spiraling a bit.
Well that was an understatement. That issue devolved completely.
by sreekanth850
1 subcomments
- Very sad. Any OSS project that depend fully on consulting will be on high risk. Platforms like deepwiki shrinks the knowledge gap massively.
- Shoutout to Adam Wathan and team. I rarely shell out any money, but Tailwind was an exception. They actually made front end development fun for me and added tons of value with their UI kit etc. Even though I rarely use it, I bought the lifetime to support their mission. Hope they can continue supporting the framework. It was the best thing to happen to front end in a long time imo.
by letmetweakit
0 subcomment
- It’s tragic that a good product, with a lot of users is not able to generate decent revenue.
- 75% it’s 3/4, and plural “we have let go” means 6 people was let go. Or three if that’s a royal “we”.
- I bought the Refactoring UI book years ago and it taught me so much about simplicity and good design!
- >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.
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.
by vhiremath4
1 subcomments
- I will be honest. I love open source. But something that really annoys me about the open source community is that the developers take this holier-than-thou approach to backing up maintainers in circumstances like this, but obviously they are not paying with their own money. They are just complaining, and it feels a lot like virtue signaling at worst and pure naivety at best. It feels extremely disengenous at this point, and it's annoying.
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.
- Is 75% 3/4 engineers, 30/40 or something else?
- > our revenue is down close to 80%.
Damn
- looking at their partner list, which is 5000$ a month, and theres 16 partners, thats minimun 80k$ a month. just an insight.
by twolf910616
0 subcomment
- The web is too open. Sad day to read these comments.
by okokwhatever
0 subcomment
- How many of us understood the scale of the problem when music creators were ranting because the piracy was destroying their business?
We'll have to adapt mates. Sadly (i dont say this happily) this is a new reality we cant decide on.
- Sad to hear such from creator of tailwind
by molaaoonao
0 subcomment
- That’s rough. Respects to the honesty.
- Really sucks to see this happen! Been using Tailwind for past few years now.
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.
by cultofmetatron
0 subcomment
- really surprised tailwind didn't get ahead of this by providing some sort of mcp interface and custom agent for designing design systems and autogenerating ui code directly based on the user's project. if it worked out of the box or with a few clicks via en extension, it would be a killer feature.
- How does Tailwind make money?
by ivanjermakov
2 subcomments
- 75% is how many people?
by thrownaway561
0 subcomment
- Honestly I think that they should be putting Tailwinds Plus and consulting services first. Sucks that AI is making the web itself obsolete now.
by sergiotapia
0 subcomment
- Before you shame the creator over this, read the thread thoroughly. I don't know what the solution here is tbh.
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?
by thisismydesign
0 subcomment
- Now would be a good time for AI companies to sponsor open source
by almostlikemagic
0 subcomment
- really sorry to hear this, been a big fan of tailwind. hopefully they can turn it around. good luck to adam and the team.
- If I were mtsears4 - after such reply I would dig a deep hole, hide there and cry for a week.
Dude thought he is smart but ended up being an entitled brat.
by bschmidt240
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by andrewmcwatters
0 subcomment
- That sucks. I’m not a big fan of Tailwind, but at least it helps non-designers make somewhat decent user-interfaces.
It’s hard to run a software business.
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by sieabahlpark
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by moralestapia
2 subcomments
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by usernamed7
5 subcomments
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by OGEnthusiast
4 subcomments
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by cynicalsecurity
0 subcomment
- Pretending like this is some Google-level apocalypse when it's a garage band downsizing? Spare me.
- I was downvoted to oblivion for posting this comment.
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.
by throwaway2026-2
2 subcomments
- I feel like you don't need engineers anymore. Bad news for all of us, but its just a fact of life.
- In my mind, there are two types of businesses in the world: one is not particularly challenging but rather trivial, and the other is very high-tech.
Today, LLMs make the first type of business much harder.
- Tailwind was far ahead of its time in having an OSS business model overall friendly to users while still being able to fund development (Note: OSS projects like Minio, ScyllaDB and CockroachDB do a far more insidious "open core only", or "crazy licensing fees after x processes/users" , etc). It was great to see OSS succeed financially without ads or punishing users.
"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.
by asattarmd
2 subcomments
- > 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.
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.
by farhanhubble
5 subcomments
- I use Tailwind for connecting dev machines across two continents and as a free user I think it's an amazing product. It breaks my heart to see people losing their jobs because there isn't enough revenue.
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.
by simlevesque
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