Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS
1 day ago (twitter.com)
Related: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950 - Jan 2026 (810 comments)
1 day ago (twitter.com)
Related: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950 - Jan 2026 (810 comments)
https://xcancel.com/OfficialLoganK/status/200933926325156690...
This is good, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty that we talked about yesterday. You can sponsor Tailwind for as little as $6,000/year. 29 companies were already sponsoring Tailwind including 16 companies at the $60,000/year level. Maybe Google AI Studio has decided to shell out a lot more, but it could also be a relatively small sponsorship compared to the $1.1M in sponsorships that Tailwind is already getting. Google has deep pockets and could easily just say "f-it, we're betting on AI coding and this tool helps us make UIs and $2M/year is nothing compared to what we're spending on AI." It's also possible that the AI Studio team has a small discretionary budget and is giving Tailwind $6,000/year.
It's good, but it's important to read this as "they're offering some money" and not "Tailwind CSS now doesn't have financial issues because they have a major sponsor." This could just be a 1-5% change in Tailwind's budget. We don't know.
And that's not to take away from their sponsorship, but on the heels of the discussion yesterday it's important to note that Tailwind was already being sponsored by many companies and still struggling. This is a good thing, but it's hard to know if this moves the needle a bunch on Tailwind's problems. Maybe it'll be the start of more companies offering Tailwind money and that'd be great.
No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.
Let's say you're paying your devs $100k / year. All in costs on those devs are probably $150k or so. That means your $1m / year will fund 6 full time developers with a little left over. This podcast from the CEO[1] says their engineering team was 4 people and the remaining staff is the 3 owners, the 1 remaining engineer, and one part time customer support person. So assuming every full time person was costing $150k in salary and other costs, you're already over $1m / year before you pay for any other expenses.
$1M / year is a lot of runway when it's just you. It's a lot less runway once you're paying other people's livelihoods too.
[1]: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
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Having worked on design system teams before people can burn a lot of time and money doing overly nuanced stuff. I have been in meetings discussing removing/adding a property on a React component before.
That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient to build a css library, but you could 100% have a team of 20 and they would find stuff to do.
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Agree and compared to the Zig Software Foundation (more complex work and lower salaries/costs) https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/ , the amount of money required to run Tailwind CSS seems quite high (or Zig quite low, depending how you view it). IMHO it’s too high and mostly profits from popularity and right framework at the right time for LLMs, but as others mentioned shadcn probably also contributed to people using shadcn components causing less TW UI sales and less visits to their docs page. The CSS framework seems mostly done and supports most browser CSS features, so I’m wondering if it still requires that many devs? Also wondering what they are going to do now with all the new partnership money flowing in. I’d prefer the OSS money flow to be more balanced, but yeah I guess the market decides.
One could compare the main branch against its state from one year ago to find out if the core product justifies this scale. I would say that, more likely than not, it isn't.
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/compare/main%40%...
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What kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support?
That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.
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We are probably in a situation like the one of Firefox or wikipedia.
A (side) business is created to support the oss project, to make it commercially sustainable /profitable, and then it becomes the commercial offer the liability sunk-in the money, using the fame of the oss to feed the beast. Puting the oss project at risk in the end.
Whereas people would happily give money or pay for supporting the oss project, they are kind of forced to feed the commercial project that might not really wanted to keep the beast alive.
As other I don't really have the details, but I think that in most of the world, 1 million of recurring revenue should be quite enough to support a sane evolution of what the project is doing.
I thought this too. At the end of the day, it's CSS, this isn't a large project needing a ton of resources.
money from sponsorships AND money from the PRO version. must be nice
I'd imagine that infrastructure costs are rather significant for Tailwind, and that there are non-neglibible organizational costs as well.
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100% agree. If an open source project needs money to run, then isn't that defeating the purpose of being open source? Open source is a gift economy. If the owner can monetise it on the side then that is just a bonus.
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If the description for each tier is correct then it seems like Google AI Studio is an Ambassador only ($2,500 per month). This tier includes your company logo on the homepage. The Partner tier ($5,000 per month) includes placing your logo at the top of the sponsor list and Google AI Studio is at the end of the sponsor list.
Edit
Looking at the tailwind.css repo[1] they are a Partner. Not sure why they are at the end of the sponsor list in that case. Though now I look at the bottom of the sponsors page I see they repeat the Sponsors again at the bottom and directly indicate each companies support tier.
1. https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/commit/7a98b...
...which is not even a developer's salary. Pathetic from a company that makes billions and has surpassed even Apple in terms of market cap (yes, I know market cap means very little, especially in a bubble, but still...)
As part of FAANG, they should be donating like 10x that amount at least.
Disclosure: I am relying on your word, and do not know if there are more tiers above partner or not.
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It seems to be in Google's interest to keep Tailwind CSS afloat.
Tailwind CSS is alive -> New / existing projects keep using Tailwind CSS -> more code for Gemini to train upon -> better and fancier UIs being created through Gemini -> popularity and usage of Gemini doesn't go down
Of course this applies to any other LLM provider too but I guess Google saw this opportunity first.
I think it'd be better for AI and web dev if AIs generated real CSS instead.
The supposed difficulty of tracking from elements to classes to rulesets is something that AIs can easily handle, and being able to change a ruleset once and have the update apply to all use sites is really good for AI-driven changes.
Plus, humans and AIs won't have to wait for Tailwind to adopt new CSS features as they are added. If the AI can read MDN, it can use the feature.
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I'm not really seeing or buying this connection. LLMs are capable of generating CSS which is untethered to finances. If tailwind went away it would be in Gemini's interest to not generate it.
another guess could be "gemini tends to write code using tailwind css, so if it goes down, gemini will be writing a lot of out of date code"
I think that keeping tailwind alive means that Gemini Studio:
* Likely gets preferential access to new features and changes in tailwind, keeping it cutting edge
* Keeps a framework alive that Gemini is already good at
If a new framework becomes popular then the amount of training material / material already trained into the model essentially starts from 0.
The mature Frameworks that had plenty of openly available data to train on before everything became locked away are the ones we'll be running with for the next few years. It makes sense to keep it alive.
For others, the page where this info comes from is https://tailwindcss.com/sponsor
Thanks. If I understand correctly, Google AI Studio is listed as a Partner, which means they provide (at least) 60000$/year.
The lesson here is to always offer a larger tier than what your largest subscribers have.
Yes, you should always have a "batshit insane" tier as someone, somewhere, has enough that it appears cheap.
This is why enterprise software is "call for pricing".
Not $6000/Year but $60,000/Year. Not sure if you missed a 0. Google AI is listed as a Partner sponsor which costs $5000/Month or $60,000/Year. Since Adam's audio and twitter post went viral, he has aded about 5 partner sponsors netting total of additional $300k/Year right there. And a few other smaller sponsors as well.
Overall, this has been a win for Adam and Tailwind.
I would think Tailwind could keep 3 engineers around if they are getting sponsorship of over $1m/yr.
I've seen wildly different takes assuming how many people worked at Tailwind and what they did because "3/4 of the engineering team" is confusing without more context, so I decided to go through the podcast episode about it https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six... to see what the full picture was.
Remaining:
- Adam (cofounder/owner/original author of tailwind)
- Jonathan (cofounder/owner/product/engineering/early co-author of tailwind)
- Steve (owner/design lead)
- Peter [part time] (partnerships/ops/support)
- Robin (engineer)
There were 3 other engineers who worked with Robin to make up the 4 person engineering team before being laid off. The ones laid off were claimed to be given a good severance. It did not seem to clarify if the 3 owners are collecting a full salary or not. Importantly, that there is only 1 person remaining on the engineering team doesn't mean they only have 1 person who can fill the role of an engineer on the product.
No guarantees this is 100% accurate or exhaustive (or names spelled correctly - apologies in advance!), but hopefully it should be a lot better a reference than guessing what the company structure looks like based on the percentage laid off alone.
Not necessarily. We don't know what all their costs are, but it's a lot more than just salaries. I'm sure there was a lot of uncertainty in how long those sponsorships would last. There are any number of factors. Adam also stated in a podcast [0] that he laid people of now in order to ensure they he could give them generous severance packages. I'm sure people will have thoughts on that but whatever, I think that makes sense.
[0] https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
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Obviously, yes. Even in the SV area. We all know engineers' capabilities triple or more if they work from there. /S
>Tailwind is out of the financial difficulty
Tailwind is not under financial difficulty, like, at all.
It clearly was if you look at forward trends. In his podcast mentioned revenue was going down by a fixed amount per month, meaning an increasing percentage per month, and they had crossed the line to six months of runway before layoffs.
With layoffs they can meet costs but that might be true if the revenue decline trend keeps going for 18 months or so.
Last year they claimed they had $800k in ARR from sponsors alone[1]. Add to that whatever they made by selling Tailwind Plus ($299 individual / $979 teams one time payment)
How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library? I understand everyone wants a really fancy office in an expensive city, lots of employees with very high salaries and generous perks, and so on. But all that is not needed to maintain a CSS library (that is kind of feature complete already).
I think Tailwind was making a lot of money (surely over a million), expanded and got bloated unnecessarily just because they had all that money, and now that their income dropped to what still is a lot of money for a CSS library, they're angry that they have to cut expenses to a more reasonable level.
I guess it worked out for them because now they have even more sponsoring.
And they used the AI bad get out of jail free card when a lot of their drop in sales probably comes from shadcn/ui and others which offer something similar for free.
[1] https://petersuhm.com/posts/2025/
How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library?
If you want to continue to develop new versions, you need enough to pay as many engineers as you need to do that. If you're not developing new versions then the money from sponsors will eventually stop.
And they used the AI bad get out of jail free card when a lot of their drop in sales probably comes from shadcn/ui and others which offer something similar for free.
shadcn is built on top of Tailwind. If Tailwind dies, so does shadcn.
> shadcn is built on top of Tailwind. If Tailwind dies, so does shadcn.
They can fork tailwind into openwind and keep using the stable version for a looong time with minor fixes.
And that would probably benefit shadcn somewhat since they would have more control.
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This seems kinda circular: they need to release new versions to pay developers. They need to pay developers to create new versions.
I hope they have better reasons to release new versions? Not releasing new versions also has its charm: less churn.
> How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library?
Seems to me like Tailwind is a relatively complex beast covering a lot of ground, not to mention that web browsers are living/evergreen projects that are costantly moving forward, and so the lib needs frequent updates. I don't think you can avoid this (just by the nature of the project). You also need to be a css expert who follows the browser and feature development closely on top of having an excellent grasp of js/ts and the build (lightining css, vite...) ecosystem. I mean ... A few excellent engineers and a designer is probably just the bare minimum to keep Tailwind maintained.
If browsers are breaking old CSS, making new releases necessary, then that seems like a bad situation. I thought browsers were good at maintaining backward compatibility? Not so for Tailwind?
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Vercel is also now sponsoring Tailwind CSS: https://x.com/rauchg/status/2009336725043335338
I was honestly surprised they weren't already, given how heavily they use and promote it! Good to see they are helping out now too, though.
Looks like Vercel has been sponsoring Tailwind's hosting for a while - but glad to see Vercel starting to officially sponsor Tailwind! https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2009298745398018468
companies are suddenly sponsoring tailwind just for marketing
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There are a lot of comments to the tune of "why does a CSS library need 1m+ (or any money at all) to survive?". I'm no expert on this kind of thing, but Tailwind 0.1.0 first released on November 2017. Since then, there's been continual improvements up until last month with 4.1.18, totalling 8 years of dev work. A simple CSS library wouldn't have much need to go past 0.1.0, certainly not 1.0.0. Clearly tailwind did, which would imply there's more than meets the eye.
But you can't have it both ways, it can't be just a simple CSS library that doesn't need that much money, but also expect a decade of work+ on it. After all, this originally stems from the fact that a PR attempting to improve something didn't get merged in; a technically finished project would have the same problem, but that would be the rule rather than the exception.
I'm more of a backend guy but afaik most popular backend frameworks like Django, Rails, Laravel etc have 10+ years of top-level work and run on much smaller annual budgets.
Not saying that it's right, and there's a whole philosophical debate about open source being financially sustainable, but in terms of "You can't expect a decade of work for free" - I think you can and many people do.
> "You can't expect a decade of work for free" - I think you can and many people do.
You can't. People can give a decade of work away for free and thats a very nice thing to do, but its not an obligation and never should be. You are right, people are now expecting it, and that's why the push against that expectation is so important.
I had a similar thought. If a project like Vue or Nuxt can stay afloat with consistent development and updates, without suffering financial difficulties, then it's worth asking why Tailwind hasn't been able to do the same. Yes it is a huge project, with incredible support across all browsers, and needs a lot of care. That's for sure. But I think the business decisions taken by the Tailwind team can be put in the spotlight in this case.
I could dig and fill in holes in my backyard for 8 years but that doesn't mean I created value or justified the time spent. The library has been good enough for widespread adoption since like 2020 at the latest - did it really need a team of 9 people working on it the last six years? What is there to show for that?
Sure, but if you stop digging and filling in those holes nobody is gonna care. People clearly do care if Tailwind stops development, thats where this whole thing stemmed from; someone opened a PR and it wasn't getting merged in
If there is no value in newer Tailwind versions, then why would anybody upgrade past 1.0? Clearly there is value that you don't recognize.
I mean, I'm not a Tailwind user so I don't either. But it's incredibly easy to take open source value for granted. That's why so many maintainers burn out.
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This is probably related to this [1] if anyone is wondering.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950
Most likely, as Adam directly "credited" their revenue issues to AI (which makes sense, tailwind was making money by selling pre-made components, but now the AI can generate those for you).
The AI issue was that their docs advertise their paid offerings. When AI plagiarizes the docs it doesn't include the ads.
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For every Tailwind, there will be 1000x other projects affected by AI's use of OSS that will not get sponsored.
yep, companies tweeting "We are now sponsoring tailwind" is just marketing, if they were honest they would be sponsoring all OSS they use
I suppose this an attempt to try and head off the stories about "AI" killing open source
Google has poured untold millions into open source over the last couple of decades, not just by sponsorships, but also by employing contributors, etc.
I don't think that'll change with AI. They just needed to be reminded about the financials of Tailwind and I'm sure it was an easy conversation internally.
Yes, but someone managed to get funding for an external sponsorship in a single day? I'm happily surprised.
> Google has poured untold millions into open source over the last couple of decades, not just by sponsorships, but also by employing contributors, etc.
And Google has profited untold hundreds of billions of open source over the last couple of decades. They just need to be reminded of it.
Edit: Haha, getting downvoted! Never underestimate the power of tens of thousands of Googlers on HN... Look, I use Gmail, Google maps, Chrome and Android and occasionally Google search but without Linux, Java and webkit it wouldn't exist.
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Well that and the fact that LLMs love using Tailwind, which puts the vendors in an awkward spot if the Tailwind project implodes.
Makes you wonder how much ossification is going to happen because AI models are entrenched in 2023's tooling du jour.
Maybe there are also engineers at Google who saw the thread yesterday and wanted to help out? I agree that companies are self-serving, but (for now) they’re made of people who are not.
If your business can easily get destroyed by AI, then the problem is your business model.
Perhaps, but training AIs relies on the existence of libraries like Tailwind, sites like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, etc. If people stop using all those businesses and services and projects and they eventually disappear, we're stuck relying on asking LLMs whose knowledge is based on a dated snapshot of an internet that no longer exists.
Which business is 100% not at risk in the next 10 years?
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How did a CSS library make any money at all? How did a CSS library have employees?
The business is this: Tailwind is free. Everyone uses it. People visit their docs and eventually buy some of the things they actually sell (like books, support, etc).
With LLMs, almost nobody visits their docs anymore just like folks barely visit Stackoverflow anymore (SOs traffic is down +80%). Fewer people see things they may want to buy from team Tailwind so they make less money so they implode. Plus LLMs just directly compete with their support offering.
Doesn't make much sense to me. It's literally a conversion of CSS rules to classes. Bootstrap already had a few of these as utility classes. I know it does a bit of magic in the background.
They made money off selling preset components and documentation etc, but as others have said, AI has pretty much ripped this off.
One of those things trying to monetise out of nothing because it became popular.
If Tailwind wasn't making that much money, they wouldn't have been able to keep developing Tailwind up to this level of sophistication.
To be specific, they had 4 staff engineers and had to fire 3 of them[1].
[1]https://socket.dev/blog/tailwind-css-announces-layoffs#:~:te...
You imply that'd be a bad thing, but I'd beg to differ.
they had over 2M in revenue in 2024... then AI happened and it likely dried up, they staffed up during the boomtime and now are rightsizing based on the change of landscape.
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/commits/main...
They've just added 26 sponsor companies in the last two days, 7 of them partners!
Will this change the situation of the 75% of engineers who just got laid off, or is this just to fund the framework, rather than the Tailwind Plus team?
Hopefully! Turns out 75% was of four total developers. Ideally Google would be giving them enough to re-hire three people.
Source: https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...
man what a rollercoaster for them, i hope they can rejoin quick
If they have 3 left, that's 9 engineers. I doubt it'll bring them back unless this is a huge package. a few million only delays the inevitable by a year or 2.
From what I understand, 3 left and they had 4 total. Not 3 are there and they had 9 total
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It's just a temporary PR move
This is the real question
Kudos to the high velocity action. Given it has to at least go through decision makers, finance and legal, I bet they made the decision almost immediately.
Curious how we would solve this class of wealth distribution problem in the future. All these critical libraries supply chain hit the bottom line of tech companies directly, but to extrapolate, all knowledge / work creators who used to live a comfortable living now have all their hard work scrapped by aggregators. Yeah I understand the genie is out of the bottle, all that and there will be (is?) systemic change to viable businesses. But people still have to live during the transition. It's also in the best interest of these aggregators, who's there to feed them new free works if it's no longer viable?
This is just a half-baked thought, partially because I have no clue how major LLM providers track output metrics for tokens returned (in the context of, "Claude used Tailwind for this solution instead of XYZ"), but it seems to me like it would be a mutually-beneficial scenario for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc, to actively engage with large OSS project maintainers and sponsor/pay for "licensed"/"official" "expert" agents/sub-models that the main models can engage for higher-quality results when the tools are chosen.
Easier said than done obviously, and probably would become more expensive than it's worth, but imagine if the output was demonstrably better and exclusive deals were in place ("Claude Code has the expert Tailwind agent that's trained and maintained by Tailwind, Codex doesn't") -- it would create certain kinds of paying-subscriber mini-moats for specific LLMs.
I dunno. By the time I was done typing that I started to become skeptical of the idea but gonna hit "add comment" anyways lol
This should be standard industry practice. Any company above a certain size should contribute financially to all software it depends on.
Which for AI companies would be every public GitHub page to start.
Not to mention GitHub/Microsoft itself.
that's a great point. and make it proportional to how much they make off it. looking at you aws for all the great oss software you sell.
if this was industry practice, licenses like GPL wouldn't have needed to be created.
Tell that to the FOSS zealots....
We used to call this “buying an enterprise license”.
Google (and Vercel) are great for doing this! I would like to see Anthropic and OpenAI do something similar, since they too greatly benefit from Tailwind CSS.
My perspective on this is that maybe Tailwind Labs shouldn't have been a for-profit business, or at least not one of the size that it grew to be.
I was reading a writeup on this history of Tailwind[1] made by Adam Wathan (who created Tailwind).
It seems like he was working on a variety of different business ideas including "Reddit meets Pinterest meets Twitter" and "a developer-focused, webhook-driven checkout platform". He created the basis of Tailwind just to help him build these projects, but it kept getting attention when he would post about his progress building them online.
Here's an important quote from the doc:
"Now at this point I had zero intention of maintaining any sort of open-source CSS framework. It didn’t even occur to me that what I had been building would even be interesting to anyone. But stream after stream, people were always asking about the CSS"
It seems like Adam's main goal was to start a software business, and Tailwind just happened to get popular and became what he pivoted his efforts into. There's obviously nothing wrong with wanting to start a business, but trying to take an open-source CSS framework and turn it into a multi-million dollar business feels unnatural and very difficult to maintain long-term.
To his credit, he did pull it off. He built a seemingly quite successful business and hired a sizable team, and apparently made a decent amount of revenue along the way.
But now, for AI reasons or otherwise, that business is struggling and failing to sustain the scale it was before. To me, it seems like the business is more or less completely separate from the open-source Tailwind project itself. It's, as far as I can understand, a business that sells templates and components built with Tailwind, and it uses Tailwind's popularity to bootstrap customers and sales.
If it were me who ended up building Tailwind, there's no way I would have pursued turning it into a big business. Maybe I would have tried some kind of consulting style, where I'd offer my time to companies evaluating or integrating Tailwind.
Now that Tailwind is getting hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars a year in sponsorships, it feels weird to have this for-profit business on the side at the same time.
Maybe it's just my own sensibilities and worldview, but I feel like Tailwind should just be what it is: an extremely popular and successful open-source CSS framework.
[1] https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...
I don’t understand this conclusion. Why shouldn’t it be a business? Doesn’t it create value? Hasn’t the nature of being a business led to far more maturity and growth in a FOSS offering than if it had been a side project? Just because it can’t afford 8 full time salaries now doesn’t declare it a failure. Your conclusion is that value should be created without any capture.
It wasn’t venture scale and never intended to be venture scale. By any metric you have, it’s a very successful business and has made its creators independent and wealthy as you pointed out.
I agree this is your worldview warping your perception. But I’d argue we need far more tailwinds and far less whatever else is going on. It captured millions in value - but it generated tens, or hundreds of millions, or more. And essentially gave it away for free.
I think a better conclusion is that it’s a flawed business model. In which case, I’d agree - this didn’t come out of nowhere. The product created (TailwindUI) was divorced from the value created (tailwindcss). Perhaps there was a better way to align the two. But they should be celebrated for not squeezing the ecosystem, not vilified. Our society has somewhat perverse incentives.
Sounds like your conclusion is: work hard to create something and just give it away for free.
Ok but the original Github issue involved a community contributor complaining that the core devs have no bandwidth to review/accept PRs. If it's not a business, then the core devs have to rely on spare time, which is scarcer than paid-by-business time. You can't have it both ways. If it's not a business, PRs being left to rot becomes the norm.
Great, so this terror framework keeps existing and I keep pulling my hairs when I want to userstyle unusable sites using it.
On one hand, this is great as Tailwind can continue as a going concern. On the other, how long until Tailwind AI?
It's not clear how much Google is kicking in, it might not actually be enough to keep Tailwind going.
Well now that it's on the HN front page, it had better be a lot :). If it's 6k this will be a bit of a PR kerfuffle.
If one of the most widely used UI libraries in the world cannot sustain a small team of developers, why would anybody attempt to start a company around an open source library? Does not speak well of the open source business model. At least for software libraries.
It is probably cheaper than update the models to use something else instead of tailwind
too little too late, the open source is already littered with corpses of starved developers.
unless there's companies like google actively going out of their way supporting open source projects, this is just optics.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Loveable, Figma and others meaningfully sponsoring Tailwind seems like a no-brainer. They want it to thrive because it makes their generated code much better.
I love to see Google & Vercel start sponsoring Tailwind. But the larger question is why did it take the company laying off 75% of their staff for these major tech companies to realize they needed to sponsor? What processes are they doing to evaluate other things to sponsor before AI kills it?
Damn that was fast. Github comments flamewar delivers.
https://hn-discussions.top/google-ai-tailwind-sponsorship/
Perhaps an acquisition is in the works, and the happenings from yesterday were part of/the start of it?
I love tailwind, but I think it’s disingenuous for Adam to claim that “AI” killed the tailwind UI kit business.
Ultimately it was Radix/Shadcn (which uses tailwind for styling of course) that killed the need to buy Tailwind’s UI kits by offering all these primitives with good default styling for free.
Also, the tailwind UI stuff feels pretty dated at this point in comparison to what’s offered in other free UI libraries these days.
Yea I agree that free UI kits like ShadCN basically blew everyone else away. I mean ShadCN has over 100k Stars on Github which is more than even Tailwind. So you can imagine the popularity. Having said that, I do think that AI is a factor as well because most of these components can now be coded by AI as well.
For example, I now routinely use AI to create UI components and my prompt usually includes "use ShadCN like component here" and even give them specific shadcn component names. The result is usually 90% good enough to start with.
Agreed. Also if they had really been trying to drive ARR, they would have made Tailwind UI a subscription/yearly licensing thing instead of a one-time purchase.
There's a reason companies like Adobe/Microsoft switched away from one-time purchase software, and that reason is that it is exhausting and eventually impossible to sustain a business where you have to hunt for brand new customers every single month just to keep the lights on.
Paying a yearly subscription for UI templates/components/kits is beyond a crazy idea.
You can't compare it with software licensing subscriptions.
If we can get to just AI reading websites, we don't even need stylesheets!
They should sponsor all OSS libraries they use not just tailwind for cheap marketing
Look, Google is getting recognized as a leadership role in AI space, as it is a leader and Tailwind gets more time to figure things out. Doing a Firefox would not be good, just to coast and spend money on random projects.
It would be nice for Adam to figure things out and find ways to make things happen.
Stockholm syndrome
Trump with greenland, and then obsession with tailwindcss. World needs a shakeup :D.
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Ironic that you are posting a site that does exactly what Tailwind is complaining about lol
I wouldn’t use xcancel if Twitter was usable for guests
I don't think I'm worried about defunding a trillionaire.
First they came for the trillionaires, and I did not speak out, because good.
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545442.
[flagged]
Where and whom can I email my complain about AI affecting my livelyhood so they sponsor me as well?
I hope things work out for Tailwind. I think it is very decent of Google to do this. Obviously Google takes some heat for their business model but when I was invited to work at Google in 2013 I thought the company had a definite vibe of trying to do the right thing in several dimensions (e.g., renewable energy for data centers).
Doesn't matter to me, as I stopped using Google AI a few months ago because of their lack of respect for my time when creating a freaking API...
what do you mean?
https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388