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.
Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma and similar tools. I can think back to a couple different projects where the web developers wanted to use Tailwind [Plus] components but the company had a process that started in Figma. It's hard to sell the designers on using someone else's component library when they have to redraw it in Figma anyway.
This book taught me so much about modern UI design. If you've ever tried building a component and thought to yourself, "hmm something about this looks off," you might benefit from this book.
These days some of the examples might be a little bit dated (fashions come and go), but the principles it teaches you are rock solid.
This sucks to see but was pretty obvious when it became the go to framework for LLMs.
No discovery - no business.
And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly go out of business
Plenty of F/LOSS is in the same state: businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing. That’s mining The Commons. LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
It’s never gonna work in the long run. Let’s go back to writing everything in house then, since we’re 100x more productive and don’t have to pay a dime for other people’s work.
What is the signup link? I googled a bit but couldn't find it.
Are these components mostly just the HTML styling which would then be easily used in Angular as well, or would it be too much of a hassle to adopt to Angular?
It was never sustainable as a product/business, as this pricing model requires constant growth. What I've seen along the way was a heavy pivot towards React (which left me wanting: I mostly use the Vue components & the HTML/JS components with Astro.js in the projects I work in) and even in the case of React, they haven't managed to arrive at a full, mature component library offering (while others have!).
TL;DR: I'd be struggling to justify it as a purchase for a new user now, even before factoring AI in.
I grew up on this site, from 20 year old dropout waiter in Buffalo to 37 year old ex-Googler. One of the things I'm noticing me reacting to the last year or two is a "putting on a pedestal" effect that's unnecessary.
Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
Sucks that anytime you ask AI to generate a site for you Tailwind will have an impact on that.
I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.
oh, come the fuck on. it's "AI made us do it" drivel that companies began to justify layoffs with in 2023 (!!!).
Tailwind is just another FOTM frontend thing. I saw dozens of them come, gain some popularity, then abruptly disappear once the marketing budget ran out.
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.
EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "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 thing." is wrong. My hunch is that AI has the appearance of eliminating the need for such things.
Or more cynically that it eliminates the need to pay for such things. Claude and friends were no doubt trained on the commercial Tailwind components, so the question becomes whether those models could have done the job of Tailwind UI without piggybacking on the unpaid labour of the Tailwind UI developers. If not then we clearly have a sustainability problem here - someone still has to do the hard work to push things forward, but with the knowledge that any attempt to profit from that work will be instantly undercut by the copyright laundering Borg.
I think it's more shocking to everyone how quickly something like that happens.
(Or is it really more about traffic to the documentation site and thus eyeballs on the sales pitch?)
I'm making an app using ShadCN, which is pretty good and free -- maybe Tailwind Plus would be significantly better, I don't know, I had to consider the possibility that this project never makes any money so I wanted free for the first shot. And the LLMs turn out to know it pretty well.
Once I get it built using ShadCN, it's hard to imagine when I'd have time to go redo all the component hackery with another library, even if it were way better.
I guess my point is just that "paid UI components" is a really tough business when there are so many people willing to make components just for the fun/glory/practice. Same with a lot of UI stuff it seems -- I highly respect icon designers, but I'm probably just going to use Lucide.
This is the money quote for me - charging for a different thing than the one that brings the value is unsustainable, and AI is accelerating that realization.
Unfortunately, without free distribution, Tailwind would never gain anywhere close to its current mindshare, so there just might not be an opening there (save for a "this year is a year of Linux on desktop" dream of bots and pnpm install paying with micropayments for each download).
Unfortunately only the Chinese are really being serious about that
The reality is that you need to figure out is that if you want people to pay when they make a ton of money from your code, you should put that in the license.
> [...] 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.
Wall that's the problem, and it's tractable problem. Seems like tailwind needs a sales strategy beyond hoping people read the docs. And that it gives rise to a perverse incentive--making a less intuitive product to drive the need for documentation--is bound to affect the product.
If LLMs are really the problem, and it seems possible that they are, then you might need to lean in. Maybe selling access to mcps and skills. I'd still bet on hiring someone to chase down some contracts is going to be the easiest way out of the hole though.
1) Lower amount of impressions on the google search pages due to the AI answers
2) Lower amount of searches since people are using code generators
I wonder which one it is primarily.
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.
Seems like it was an insanely profitable product, but a risky business.
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.
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 still think he was correct. I myself bought tailwindUI as an aspirational purchase, and i doubt people would pay for it as a subscription.
But I think a lot has changed in the last few years. There arent probably as many new developers given the market, and among those there are probably even less that are willing to pay $100+ for a UI library, not when there are competitions like shadcn or radix or many others as free alternative, or when you could just ask an LLM to generate them for you.
Tailwind Labs definitely need to explore new revenue streams, but i dont think UI components is the way to go. Without knowing their internal data, this is just a guess, but I doubt traffic to docs or pipeline to premium products is much of a factor in the decline.
LLMs are clearly to “blame” here. You can make any component with LLMs from scratch or it will expertly use one of the many existing UI frameworks.
Not every business should need hyperscaling mega-exit unicorn enshittification.
Lifestyle and small businesses are good and of course these are being crushed by our new oligarchs.
> It's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence
Literally everyone? No new developers being trained? No new tailwind users?
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.
The idea is that subscription businesses have churn, and if you can capture the lifetime value of a customer with your one time price, there isn't any difference (other than people feeling grateful when you add new content for "free").
The one time fee should have been for personal licenses, and a annual subscription for businesses.
Maybe. One data point isn't all that useful, but I never would have bought it if it weren't for the model he chose. I will never, ever do a subscription for something like that.
I definitely wont even consider it if its a subscription.
Selling UI components is a hard sell to begin with - i think they made the right decision with a one-time point payment at that higher price point. If it were a subscription, i probably would've cancelled it within 2 or 3 months.
e.g. Tech changes all the time, that isn't an excuse to be a dick. e.g. ok dude, don't expect any future free work from me in the future on any of your projects going forward. Rude AF.)
also, I just realised, that PR is an excuse to get the library he made (https://github.com/quantizor/markdown-to-jsx) used within TailwindCSS :p
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.
This may be an exaggeration.
I played around with shadcn for a new project a year or so ago, decided I really didn't like their fundamental approach of copying code (that now I have to maintain) into my code base. So I ended up using something else (DaisyUI), which has been reasonably nice so far.
I'm just one person (and one not super plugged into the frontend scene), but "everyone" feels like a gross overestimation. I would guess it's not even a majority.
This is the first time I've seen anyone ever mention it.
shadcn only works in react, tailwind works everywhere
Just trowing a flex-box and a few good ol' css rules does 99.999% of the job usually.
$300 for UI blocks? For what? A div with flex, gap, and padding?
Everyone in your bubble on X maybe.
Shadcn has definitely taken a big chunk, the premium ecosystem around Shadcn is absolutely exploding. I know. I run https://www.shadcnblocks.com and we saw huge month on month growth in revenue for the entire year.
Even with strong headwinds from AI, I expect our revenue to continue increasing throughout 2026.
> 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 don't really understand how you can find a difference between your sentence with what he wrote:
> I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it.
> 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. 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.
Pretty sure those are the same picture
Exactly, when the Renaissance was happening, the printing machine(s) were spreading across the Europe rapidly, priest(s) were trying to prevent the spread of machines because they were copying the books, by hand, which was their income stream.
So they were against it, in the end, they learned their lesson the hard way. It was inevitable, it's the same thing with the LLM(s).
> 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.
Yeah, that is a quite depressing situation, but saying "trying to do fun free things for the community..." is quite contradictory.
Isn't that how that community is created in the first place?
I also don't understand the logical thinking that made them think that, if we make it harder to gather information with LLM(s) or if we do not improve it, people will keep coming to our website, NO!
They would just simply grab something similar, or ask an LLM to use something else, there are hundreds of alternatives, no one, literally no one has moat in the today(s) world.
I believe that if they focused solely on open source, improving the developer experience, creating more libraries, abstraction(s) over the abstraction(s), open source component libraries like shadcn/ui, DaisyUI, Radix etc, their income today would have been much higher than from what they currently have I believe.
There are many, like so many action items that Adam could do, instead of throwing tantrums at people, easiest could have been the sponsor-first business model, which would have scaled out much better I mean, they don't have recurring revenue, OSS sponsorships are mostly recurring, unlike the current model.
1. The contribution actually made something useful
2. He actually said anything to the note of "I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with ai."
3. The contributor was not adding an external library that he authored without mentioning it in the comments
I defer 100% to maintainers of a project if an external contributor drops a pr that they are now in charge of maintaining with no evidence that it is useful, or that the author of the change will maintain.
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.
Inline style is the thing. That's what tailwind is enabling in a readable way. And inlined style is what makes style more maintainable and less susceptible to override rot.
The separation between form and function is always a bit illusionary, but particularly so with CSS. Almost all markup is written to look a specific way, not a configurable way.
i dont see how any business model can compete with free. maybe they can focus on branding like Pepsi or Coke and see if developers will make their decisions based on that.
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.
If it wasn't usable in commercial products, I don't think anyone would pay for it.
In the age of AI, if you have Table of Contents. ChatGPT can write the book for you.
Only books I buy these days are in fiction genre. Everything else is derived from facts that already exist some where and AI can derive and write the whole book.
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.
Like play out AI, it sucks for everybody except the ones holding the steering wheel, unless we hold them accountable for the changing landscape of stake-in-civilization distribution. Spoiler: haha, we sure fucking aren’t in the US.
the car comparison is honestly embarassing for this community to even bring up lol. its not theft to recognize a pattern and its definately not illegal for a company to do what every junior dev has been doing for years which is reading the docs and then not buying the paid stuff. adam built a business that relied on human inefficiency and now that inefficiency is gone. its not a tragedy its just a market correction. if your moat is so shallow that a llm can drain it in one pass then you didnt really have a product you just had a temporary advantage. honestly tailwind should of seen this coming a mile away but i guess its easier to blame "scrapers" than admit the ui kit gravy train is over. move on and build something that actually provides value.
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.
Honestly, while I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs the news aren't exactly surprising. Overhiring is a game for VC funded OSS like bun, not usually a good idea for bootstrapped companies.
[0]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...
[1]: https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...
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 don't get rich by paying people what they deserve.
These might sound like snide rhetorical questions, but when you start demanding payment, they're very real.
Paying someone fairly for its contribution to society? This won't pass here in the free world as it sounds like a dangerous communist idea. How are we supposed to become richer than our neighbor that way?
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?
Agreed, and Adam and Steve made a life-changing amount of money from Refactoring UI and then Tailwind UI. That's a great outcome on its own.
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 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.
Most folks use frameworks because it's easier than learning how to build it all yourself - things are done for you instead. This niche is now getting eroded by AI and low-code substantially.
Couple that with my experience maintaining frontends that are far too complex for their use cases - e.g. do we really need SPA's, state sync, and reusable components for our admin tool that doesn't reuse components?
This leads me to think there's been bloat here for at least a decade. So, while vibe coding will also lead to bloat, it's easier to work with, and arguably higher value than paying for a specific framework.
It's a tragedy in life that things that are useful don't always get valued, instead being used as a stepping stone for progress, but I'm not sure that has a solution.
This must be satire. CSS is what's actually foundational; literally, a foundation upon which Tailwind was built.
There's plenty of alternative CSS frameworks.
I can absolutely see why it's difficult to monetize.
Tailwind is not.
AI is disruptive technology - like other tech innovations before it, there will be casualties to incumbents. If anything, this just shows how small businesses with need to be more creative when establishing moats and sustainability in this new landscape.
That said if someone wants a business model, figure out a way to get paid to get AI to make UIs using newer CSS features, because right now it's quite terrible at it.
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.
I want to use it in an OSS project, does that mean every drive by contributor needs a license?
Does anyone have any backseat driver ideas for how tailwind could make enough money to hire a team to work on the framework?
(Open to any suggestions to feed existing ui components from Tailwind into my projects/llm).
Corporate sponsorships.
In-person training focused on big corps.
Acquisition.
Bootstrap is more than enough for 99.99% of the projects, and it is free.
I agree that it's not obvious to me how or why Tailwind should turn a profit as a business, but there are examples of other similar companies turning profits, no?
I think of Motion (formerly framer motion) for example, which is primarily an animation library: https://motion.dev/
Now LLMs have removed the problem, so there's declining interest in solutions.
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.
This is happening across a lot of web verticals that previously relied on excellent SEO ranking and click through performance to drive ad revenue/conversions/sales. I have direct knowledge of some fairly catastrophic metrics coming out of knowledge base businesses; it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that something like Tailwind is suffering a similar fate.
This tells me the problem wasn't AI but the overall business wasn't healthy. Docs don't drive sales.
It’s unfortunate that google helped kickstart the world wide web but now they’re extracting everything while polluting search results with ads
Why pay for a template when AI's can shit out your entire design system and multiple templates in 5 minutes, not to mention competition from other template systems like shadcn that are completely free.
And yes they might not be the best quality but you just prompt it until you like it and then use it as a reference.
LLMs, or Tailwind. Pick one!
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.
@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.
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).
Uhhh no... People already struggle with CSS. No one would use Tailwind if it made it even more difficult. I've used and loved Tailwind for 5 years and some without ever having any components written for me. At worst it's as difficult as CSS (centering a div is not any easier, you just write it in a different place), and in some areas like responsiveness (media queries like screen size breakpoints) the syntax is way easier to read and write.
The problem their business model was solving is first that good design is hard, and second that even if you can design something that looks good, you might not be good at implementing it in CSS. They did those things for you, and you can copy-paste it straight into your app with a single block of code thanks to Tailwind.
You're right that LLMs essentially solved this same issue in a more flexible way that most people would prefer, and it's just one feature of many.
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.
- 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 was going to write a longer response, but instead I keep reading your last sentence:
> Is normal that this people now use other products more effective how AI for this task.
I think it's too early to tell on that.
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.
They can’t retroactively pull the license, and most people would just start using a OSS fork of tailwind if they did.
"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."
Put another way: Adam said traffic to their docs was down 40% and revenue was down 80%. I don't think it's purely traffic-driven revenue.
> 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?
In this comment, he says that he had to lay off 3 people.
Not sure if this means it was him+4engs and now it’s just him+1eng or if he’s including himself and he’s working alone now.
But either way, can’t be fun
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
please refer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45729809
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
I do wonder though if the llms.txt could actually be used for their benefit? Why not literally recommend the paid upgrades within it?
Tailwind should not be free, its good.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
