Comment by freedomben
2 days ago
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.
Tailwind did a great job of building a fanbase. Even without LLMs I always thought they were on a collision course with market saturation, though. They generously gave lifetime access for a one-time payment, which was bound to run into problems as free alternatives became better and their core fanbase didn't have any reason to spend more money.
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.
There’s no doubt that AI has had a significant impact on this type of business model - selling premium components. That said, in 2026 there are still plenty of premium kits generating substantial revenue despite AI.
I believe something else has had a much greater impact on Tailwind UI’s business than AI, and that is shadcn, which was released in September 2023. The fact that Adam didn’t recognize this shift and adapt Tailwind UI to align with the shadcn ecosystem is, in my view, the primary reason sales have declined, not AI.
I used Tailwind UI Plus extensively before shadcn, but after its release, I lost the motivation to copy, paste, and manually modify components when I can simply pull free components (or components from another kit) directly via shadcn.
I genuinely hope Adam updates Tailwind Plus and creates a shadcn compatible registry for their components. That alone could significantly boost sales.
The lack of Figma integration or a first-party plugin was a huge bummer for me. I still use Tailwind almost religiously because it just clicked for me and I have been on enough projects with terrible SCSS organization that I want to leave that as far behind me as I can.
I do appreciate that even without an integration, it’s fairly easy to set up vim on one screen and figma on the other and be able to translate the css to TW without any issues or having to constantly look things up.
alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy. had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down?
i wouldn't have bought a sub, but i did pay for tailwind premium (and, frankly, didn't use it like i'd've hoped). however, it was a bit of a Kickstarter investment for me. i like Adam's persona, and was happy to see continued investment down this path.
as many a business knows, you need to bring new initiatives to the table over, or accept that your one product carries all your risk.
thank you for Tailwind, Adam.
> alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy.
I'm not saying it wasn't a good choice at the time.
The problem with lifetime licensing only appears down the road if a company doesn't find a way to expand their offerings.
If you opened a local gym with reasonably priced lifetime memberships you'd probably have an explosion of new customers. You'd then hit a wall where you've saturated the market, can't sell any more memberships, but you have to keep paying employees and rent.
Adam presented his case for the lifetime pricing model in this podcast episode in 2023:
https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is...
I believe he succeeding in convincing Sam and Ryan to adopt lifetime pricing for their UI course at https://buildui.com/pricing. I've purchased Build UI, and it was an excellent product, but unfortunately it appears to be completely dead for at least a full year now.
Neither the unannounced death of Build UI nor this apparently financial catastrophe for Tailwind bode well for the prospects of lifetime pricing! Although the problem might be more related to the entire market segment (frontend programming and design courses) than to the particular pricing model.
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>had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down?
History says yes, and no. Much easier to retain periodic payment on a few engaged businesses than to continually look for people willing to make a one time payment. Especially in professional software.
The premium model just doesn't work unless you stay very lean. Workers need to be continually paid, even if you make your entire audience happy once.
As a small business that started with a one-time/upgrade based pricing policy, and moved to a recurring policy, I don't think it is too late for tailwind to do so for future upgrades/improvements. I am saddened that they laid people off before trying. I understand doing that is a leap of faith/risk, but that is what you need to do.
The key thing they need to recognize is that some percentage of their customers are serious businesses that want them to continue developing/maintaining the software, and that these businesses will be supportive as long as the deal is the same for everyone (you can't ask them to pay out of the goodness of their hearts, as then they feel they will be taken advantage of by people who don't pay).
When we switched to a recurring pricing model, I thought it was going to be a disaster. In fact, I got an angry call from exactly one customer (who then remained a customer despite threatening to leave). I got subtly expressed approval/relief from many more.
The book "How to Sell at Margins Higher than Your Competitors" was helpful to me, and might be helpful here as well. The key is to realize that you want to sell to people who really value your product and will pay for it. You don't want to maximize volume, you want to maximize revenue x margin.
You already have an installed base of people who value your product enough to pay for it once, you just have to create a system that enables them to sustain the technology they value in order to get ongoing support/upgrades/fixes/etc. The people who are going to complain on hacker news about recurring pricing aren't the people you want as customers anyway.
If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked. But you may as well find that out directly. If people really don't want to pay for the software, don't waste time creating it for them.
We made the switch about 20 years ago. Since that time, about 70% of our lifetime revenue has come from recurring payments. Had I not had the courage to make the switch, I would be writing now that the business has been an unsustainable mistake, but that would have been false.
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> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.
This is from Adam but I also suspect the same. LLMs has a bias toward tailwind css. I had Claude/GLM multiple times try to add tailwind css classes even though the project doesn't have any tailwind packages/setup.
This is a business model issue rather than tailwind becoming irrelevant.
I'll piggyback on this to highlight Refactoring UI as well. It's an ebook by Adam and Steve, though I'm not sure if it's technically part of Tailwind Labs or not.
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.
FWIW I found Practical UI [1] a more actionable book than Refactoring UI. Both are similar but I found it covered the material in a more accessible way.
1. https://www.practical-ui.com/
i've read it and retained nothing. I always wonder what people get out of these hyped things that i'm unable to see.
Did you read it cover to cover in one-(ish) sitting? I would argue it's more of a reference book that over time you can internalize into your own design language.
I think think tailwind ui was one of the better purchases I’ve made (web tech wise). Up there with the lifetime acf pro license.
This sucks to see but was pretty obvious when it became the go to framework for LLMs.
What most don’t realize is that this will happen to most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery.
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
> No discovery - no business.
I do SEO as a side gig to my 9-5 as a developer. All four of my freelance companies I work with have seen their traffic drop up to 40% since LLM's have effectively taken over and people are using search engines less and less.
We've had to pivot to short form social media advertising which seems to be closing the gap whereas before the majority of our leads were coming from organic search and being ranked high in their respective industries. It certainly takes more effort to craft a script, film it, edit it to add text overlays, animations and catchy effects, but its showing me its being effective in the leads we're generating.
I'm not sure if this is a sort of generational thing back when my parents were so engrained to use the yellow pages and then that stopped once the internet got into the advertising business - but it feels like a similar transition is taking place again.
As many have already told me, "Ignore AI at your peril"
Same where I work for 30% on some regions and for those where they put money only saw a minimum increase.
I honestly think the company is run by some good folks that are really trying to do some positive impact. They refuse so all sorts of bs ad-tracking gray area stuff, yet, people don't give a dime.
We caught over and over anthropic and others using shade tactics to bypass bot protection. They get the content, plagiarise it and contribute absolute nothing back. For weeks, openai was crawling our resources on DDOS levels of traffic.
F them. They just are just stealing and making businesses fail. This will be a catastrophe for many but yet, people think there is no relation.
The real question is, have your actual qualified leads decreased?
So much traffic is bogus or looking for something adjacent to what they land on that I'm not entirely convinced AI is at fault here.
It very well could be, but I'd love to see a real deep dive rather than potential coincidence.
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I'm not sure if this is comparable to the yellow pages vs the internet.
Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.
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Perhaps SEO will become a business to churn out large amount of digestable text with friendly robot.txt and hoping the next AI model learns it? This seem to be the solution, just having a slightly longer turn around time.
> as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery
In my limited web dev experience with these tools, they suggest and push Tailwind CSS very often when asked for advice.
The Tailwind company wasn't selling that, though. They were selling premium packages of components, templates, and themes. The demand for that type of material has dropped off significantly now that you can get an LLM to do a moderately good job of making common layouts and components. Then you can adjust them yourself until they're exactly what you want.
Underscoring the parent comment and adding to it: watching technologists on a site called Hacker News cheer on the centralization of power is really something.
There's nothing cheerful in that comment, it describes a danger that inexorably draws nearer and nearer.
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I don't think any power is as centralized as Google is to search about 10 years ago? Or Facebook is to social media in the same time frame? What has changed other than the players?
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Last 3 years of discourse in a nutshell. Sinclair's quote rings true once again... Just a shame people don't think of the long term cost to this trend chasing.
But then again, it wouldn't be a trend if people thought long term, would it?
I think this phase of centralising power is part of the never-ending cycle of centralisation and distribution - mainframes -> PCs -> websites -> apps, and so on round we go. We will get a "data centres -> Personal LLMs" phase of the cycle which distributes it again.
So my hope is that LLMs become local in a few years.
We've been sitting around 16Gb of RAM on a laptop for 10-15 years now, not because RAM is too expensive or difficult to make, but because there's been no need for more than that for the average user. We could get "normal" laptop RAM up to 16Tb in a few years if there was commercial demand for it.
We have processor architectures that are suitable for running LLMS better/faster/efficiently. We could include those in a standard laptop if there was commercial demand for it.
Tokens are getting cheaper, dramatically, and will continue to do so. But we have an upper limit on LLM training complexity (we only have so much Internet data to train them on). Eventually the race between LLM complexity and processing speed will run out, and probably with processing speed as the winner.
So my hope is that our laptops change, that they include a personally-adapted very capable LLM, run locally, and that we start to see a huge variety of LLMs available. I guess the closest analogy would be the OS's from "Her"; less typing, more talking, and something that is personalised, appearing to actually know the user, and run locally (which is important).
I don't see anything stopping Linux from doing this too (but I'm not working in this area so I can't say for sure).
Obviously we'll face the usual data thieves and surveillance capitalism along the way, but that's part of the process.
> most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery
What about restaurants, transportation, construction, healthcare, or manufacturing?
Will those go out of business too?
The better question is how well they do in a world where you have to pay OpenAI to be included. A local restaurant can likely survive on local advertising, neighborhood traffic, etc. but I’d bet a lot of categories further consolidate to favor larger companies who can negotiate LLM placement deals.
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As a user and customer, I see that as a good thing.
Tailwind Plus is great - I love the lifetime access, but I always wondered how sustainable that model was. Even without AI, how many of those memberships could they sell?
I thought the same, and yet on the other hand, how could they have done it differently? People don't want to pay a subscription just to write a DSL of CSS. Perhaps they could've done it per project like some companies, but I don't think it'd be as popular as their lifetime model. Ironic.
We can go back to how software was sold decades ago: you pay for version 1.0, and get bugfixes for the 1.x series. Then 2.0 is released, and if you want it, you pay again for the 2.x series. And so on.
I agree on not wanting a subscription for something like this. But I also acknowledge that if people are still doing work on something post-sale (beyond bugfixes for a pre-defined support period), I should maybe expect to have to pay for that continuing work.
MUI sells paid components paid monthly. Definitely doable for the paid product.
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I could never afford Tailwind UI but then again I don’t really use Tailwind. That said, as an open-source styling solution, they could be supported in other ways. A lot — and I really mean a lot — of websites are built with Tailwind, yet very few consider donating or buying what they have to offer.
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.
My current take is that if you start an open-source project now, you should go full AGPL (or similar copyleft license), and require a CLA for contributors.
If your thing ends up actually good you now have a defence against exploitation, and a way to generate income reliably (by selling the code under a different license). afaik, organisations like the FSF even endorse this.
AGPL is my first choice of license, but its efficacy does not necessarily come from its teeth, but from the aversion legal departments have towards the license. It's similar to how the GPL used to be, or still is, treated. Along with compatibility with other AGPL projects, that's the reason I use the license.
There are situations that the AGPL does not cover that could be considered leeching from the commons.
I think we need stronger licensing, and binding contracts that forfeit code recipients' right to fair use in order to hinder LLM laundering, along with development platforms that leverage both to limit exploitation of the commons.
I agree, I'm quite curious on what feelings are about still putting it in a public GitHub repo?
AI models will train on your codebase, unethical actors will still take it and not pay. Others can give the .zip to Claude and ask it to reimplement it in a way that isn't license infringement. I think it really turns open source upside down. Is this a risk worth taking or best to just make getting the source something that's a .zip on a website which the models realistically won't train on.
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> businesses extract all value they can from open-source, but put back nothing
This has always been the case. Sometimes they give back by opening one or more of their components. Other times they don't. I don't see it as a problem. It doesn't usually detract from what's already published.
In cases where it would detract, simply use an appropriate license to curb the behavior.
> LLMs are just accelerating this trend.
LLMs might not prove sufficiently capable to meaningfully impact this dynamic.
Alternatively, if they achieve that level then I think they will accomplish the long stated goal of FOSS by enabling anyone to translate constraints from natural language into code. If I could simply list off behaviors of existing software and get a reliable reproduction I think that would largely obsolete worrying about software licenses.
I realize we're nowhere near that point yet, and also that reality is more complex than I'm accounting for there. But my point is that I figure either LLMs disrupt the status quo and we see benefits from it or alternatively that business as usual continues with some shiny new tools.
>In cases where it would detract, simply use an appropriate license to curb the behavior.
I think it's a bit too late for Tailwind to do that.
>But my point is that I figure either LLMs disrupt the status quo and we see benefits from it
Who's "we"? The only we here will be tech billionaires. We get shiny tools and no job. Is that a good trade-off?
>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.
As incentivized by temporarily-free licenses.
Are you referring to signing up for the blog[1] email or something else? It was last updated July 25, 2025.
[1]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog
Referring to TFA (couple of comments on the issue).
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
I think they mean where does one sign up to this newsletter.
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As a question regarding Tailwind Plus, we / I exclusively use Angular but the templates are all React / Vue / plain HTML.
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?
> 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.
What is the signup link? I googled a bit but couldn't find it.
I think it's https://tailwindcss.com/blog
yeah this is so sad, I'm an early supporter of Tailwind since v1 and I also bought the tailwind UI as well to support them. I hope this era doesn't discourage the tailwind team or put them out of business
Early customer here too. Tailwind UI was one of my best purchases in the sense that it helped me learn and use Tailwind in the best way possible, by showing me, not telling me.
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.
Smells like unnecessary sycophancy: I grep'd Adam in every comment and every single. one. is positive and phrased like this.
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.
I think context matters here. People are being kind to someone who just had to lay off most of their team because, despite their project’s popularity and success (maybe even because of it), a massive change in the ecosystem completely destroyed their business model.
I’ve never been a huge fan of using Tailwind personally, but I deeply appreciated that they were making a (mostly) non-enterprise FOSS model work in an interesting way. It’s a shame that it seems that’s likely dead in the water now.
Perhaps if you’d simply read the thread you would have also seen these comments, which don’t name Adam but are addressed to him:
> We can't make it easier to use our product because then fewer people will visit our website" is certainly a business strategy.
> You are telling your customers that getting money from them, is more important than providing a service to help them.
This is madness. Some stories actually have good guys. I don't know Adam directly, but we have plenty of second degree connections. I've benefited immensely from his work, have never heard anyone say a single negative thing about him, and I genuinely believe he's done more to push the web forward with Tailwind than the larger players have done (certainly more than Facebook did with React and Google has done with Angular/AMP/etc).
Reflexively assuming that unanimous positive sentiment towards someone is itself an indication of a problem is exactly the reason people are writing posts as recently as (double checks) _yesterday_ titled "65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and They Outperform" https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/
No one said he isn’t a good guy. Just that it was weird to have 15 comments saying “ignore the haters you’re a good guy!”
The “madness” here was you replying as if I said he wasn’t.
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