Comment by Aurornis
2 days ago
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.
If Build UI was still making content, they would keep getting sales. There are also other ways to implement a "pay once" model that is sustainable, but it involves designing a much more thought out product roadmap and gatekeeping features behind new major versions where you need to pay for an upgraded license.
Jetbrains has done this for decades now with great success and is the standard sales model for most freemium WordPress plugins. Heck, even Adobe had a similar model until they were convinced they could squeeze out even more profit by charging monthly and trapping customers into subscriptions with high cancellation fees (my words, not theirs).
>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.
>If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked.
cries in gamedev
Sadly my options are to either sell a few thousand copies on pc and deal with complaints on how my game isn't an 80 hour long timesink, or go into mobile and employ all the dark patterns I hate about marketing.
> 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.